What makes nitroglycerin

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Load more articles. No comments yet. You're not signed in. To link your comment to your profile, sign in now. It is soluble in alcohols but insoluble in water. Nitroglycerine is extremely sensitive to shock and in the early days, when impure nitroglycerine was used, it was very difficult to predict under which conditions nitroglycerine would explode.

Alfred Nobel studied these problems in detail, and was the first to produce nitroglycerine on an industrial scale. His first major invention was a blasting cap igniter , a wooden plug filled with black gunpowder, which could be detonated by lighting a fuse.

Clearly, nitroglycerin is far too dangerous for this, and many people lost their lives in the last century trying to use nitroglycerin for peaceful purposes like quarrying. The man that solved this problem, was the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel. For several years Nobel had been working in Stockholm on developing nitroglycerine as an explosive.

He manufactured it by carefully mixing glycerol with nitric and sulphuric acids. But several explosions in his laboratory, including one in in which his brother Emil and several other persons were killed, convinced the authorities that nitroglycerine production was exceedingly dangerous.

Alfred was not discouraged and in he was able to start mass production of nitroglycerine. To make the handling of nitroglycerine safer, Nobel experimented with different additives. He soon found that mixing nitroglycerine with a type of clay called kieselguhr , would turn the liquid into a paste which could be shaped into rods of a size and form suitable for insertion into drilling holes. In he patented this material under the name of dynamite.