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00:00Most people don't know the real story of Alfred Nobel.
00:04One morning in 1888, Alfred Nobel sat down to read the newspaper in his conservatory.
00:10He scanned the pages casually, but then he froze.
00:15The merchant of death is dead.
00:18Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.
00:25It was his own obituary.
00:27The newspaper had made a mistake.
00:30Alfred's older brother Ludwig had died in France, and the journalists had confused the two.
00:36But in that moment, he saw exactly how the world would remember him.
00:41Not as an inventor, but as a butcher.
00:46Now, the wording in the obituary, the merchant of death and all that, well, it's likely been exaggerated over the years.
00:52We could only find an obituary that described him as a man who can hardly be passed off as a benefactor of humanity.
00:59But reading this allowed Alfred to see what others truly thought of him.
01:03And it wasn't good.
01:05He had earned his reputation building an empire on one substance.
01:10Nitroglycerin.
01:11It's one of the most powerful explosives in the world.
01:15Its blast pressure is over a hundred times greater than gunpowder.
01:19Oh, my God.
01:23Oh, that's so sick.
01:25But that power comes at a price.
01:28Nitroglycerin is so sensitive that if it's dropped, shaken, or even just bumped, it can detonate.
01:35And as a result, hundreds of workers died trying to handle it.
01:39So Alfred made it his mission to tame this beast.
01:43But in doing so, he created powerful new explosives used in everything from blasting tunnels to making bombs.
01:49Tools that transformed the modern world, but also contributed to deaths of tens of thousands of people.
01:55Unleashing a level of destruction that would come to define him.
01:59Alfred's father, Emanuel, was also an inventor.
02:09He opened the first ever rubber factory in Sweden and invented the rotary lathe, which made modern plywood possible.
02:15But Emanuel struggled with business.
02:19He went bankrupt shortly after Alfred was born.
02:21So Emanuel set off to Russia to start over, leaving his family behind.
02:27Some of Alfred's earliest memories were of watching his brothers sell matches on the street corners of Stockholm just to afford food.
02:35He was often sick, bedridden with colds, stomach problems, and bouts of depression.
02:40He would later say,
02:42Mine was a pitiful half-life, which ought to have been extinguished by some compassionate doctor as I yelled my way into the world.
02:51But soon after Alfred turned nine, a letter arrived from his father, asking the family to join him in St. Petersburg.
02:57See, in the early 1850s, the great powers of Europe were gearing up for war, and Emanuel spotted an opportunity.
03:05He realized Russia's capital was vulnerable to attack from the sea.
03:08So he approached Tsar Nicholas I with plans for a new kind of explosive device,
03:13one that would float in the harbor and detonate on contact with enemy ships.
03:17A sea mine.
03:19Within months of his proposal, in the Black Sea just off Sinup,
03:23the Russian navy sank an Ottoman fleet, and the Crimean War began.
03:28Emanuel's invention was suddenly in high demand,
03:31and the newly established Nobel Armaments Factory quickly grew from a few dozen employees to over a thousand,
03:37producing mines, torpedoes, and other explosives for the Russian military.
03:43With money now pouring in, Emanuel decided to invest in Alfred's education.
03:48At the age of 17, Alfred found himself in a lab in Paris studying under the world's greatest chemists.
03:55And it's here that he met an Italian doctor named Ascanio Sobrero,
03:59who had a peculiar demonstration.
04:01Ascanio Sobrero would take an ordinary-looking piece of cotton and lay it on an anvil.
04:07He would raise his hammer and...
04:10It's like a bird ran into a window.
04:20Yeah, that was a good one, right?
04:22Yeah, that was a great one.
04:23Soaked into that cotton was a new explosive material, nitroglycerin.
04:29And it was unlike anything the world had ever seen before.
04:32See, until then, the most commonly used explosive was gunpowder.
04:36But it had a major drawback.
04:38It's fast, but it's not that fast.
04:40When we were doing it, it was much slower than the speed of sound.
04:43That's because all the ingredients you need,
04:48the carbon for fuel, the potassium nitrate for oxygen,
04:51and the sulfur to speed up the reaction,
04:53they are all in separate grains.
04:56And if they're spread far apart, their reaction is just too slow.
04:59Come on, you can do it!
05:01Go!
05:02But if you contain gunpowder,
05:04that forces these reactants closer together,
05:07and it also traps in heat, which accelerates the reaction.
05:10And this allows the pressure from the hot gases to build up until...
05:17You see the explosion, and then the powder burst out,
05:20and then it catches flames.
05:21Yeah, you can see the whole bottom comes out,
05:23and it just catches up to it.
05:25All these particles have to be in close proximity,
05:28and they also have to be small enough,
05:30and they have to be mixed well enough to get this reaction.
05:32So it kind of feels a little bit clunky.
05:35Like, it's not the ideal way you'd want to do this,
05:38where it's like all the molecules are actually right next to each other.
05:42That's a great instinct, putting all the molecules beside each other
05:45so that you'd have them all available to react as quickly as possible.
05:47But I think I can one-up that,
05:49and that is, can you put everything you need in the same molecule?
05:53Okay.
05:53And that's what nitroglycerin does.
05:54No way.
05:55Yeah, yeah.
05:55Okay.
05:56Right? Pretty cool.
05:57That is way cooler.
05:58And because of that, it's way more powerful.
06:02We've loaded 15 grams of gunpowder
06:04and 15 grams of nitroglycerin into test tubes,
06:07and then set them in clay blocks
06:09so we can compare their destructive power.
06:12This is a bikini gauge for measuring blast overpressure.
06:16And it's called the bikini gauge in reference to the Bikini Atoll
06:20because an analog blast overpressure measurement device
06:23was used in the nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll.
06:27It has a number of different diameter holes and a film inside.
06:32The larger circles have more area,
06:35and so under the same pressure,
06:36they will experience more force and so burst first.
06:40The smaller circles take more pressure to break
06:43because they've got smaller area.
06:45The smaller the circle that gets punctured
06:47means the higher the blast overpressure.
06:51Okay, black powder into clay.
06:54Higher in the hole!
06:56Three.
06:57Two.
06:58One.
07:04Yeah, it launched the block a bit.
07:06Popped the top right off.
07:08Let's look at the bikini gauge,
07:09which looks totally intact.
07:11Looks totally intact.
07:13Yeah.
07:14I mean, I'm getting nothing.
07:15Yeah.
07:16All right.
07:16All right, so we'll leave that for the nitro.
07:19When the nitroglycerin goes off,
07:21it's going to be like someone shooting a 50 jolt.
07:23So I don't know if you've been to the range,
07:25but that's going to be a big blast.
07:26So I don't know if it's going to be a big hit.
07:29No, I don't know if it's going to be a big hit.
07:31Oh my God.
07:32Oh my God.
07:36the hole! Five, four, three, two, one! Oh! Oh my god!
07:51So first thing I noticed is there bits of clay that have just rained down on me.
07:55I got bits of blue all over me. That's crazy. Right there. Is there anything left?
08:03Yeah, there is a bunch of clay on this window, on that window, on this window, on the bikini
08:10gauge. It's like a Jackson Pollock painting. There's no way we've got a frame there. There's
08:21just instant light. When it's fast on the Phantom, then it's fast.
08:32Nitroglycerin is incredibly powerful, and it gets this power from its molecular structure.
08:38See, nitroglycerin is a highly unstable molecule. It consists of a chain of three carbon atoms
08:42with three oxygens, and then three nitro groups attached to those, which are just nitrogen atoms
08:47bonded to two oxygen atoms. These nitro groups are what makes nitroglycerin so unstable.
08:53Oxygen is more electronegative than nitrogen, so these two oxygen atoms pull on the electrons
08:57from the nitrogen, which shifts the electron density away from this third oxygen. But now,
09:02there's little shared electron density between these two atoms, which results in a much weaker
09:05bond between the nitro groups and the main chain. So you get these weak spots, and all
09:10it takes is a little bit of energy, like from the shock created by a hammer strike, and then
09:14those bonds snap apart. So now you've got all these atoms that are swapping partners, and
09:18they form much more stable products, like nitrogen gas, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. And this
09:23process releases a huge amount of energy and heat, and it shoots off the products at high
09:26velocities. So then these go on to hit other nitroglycerin molecules, which causes their
09:30bonds to break. And if this happens for enough molecules at once, well, it sets off a chain
09:35reaction.
09:35Now you've got a shockwave, and now it's going to propagate. And as it propagates through,
09:39it's going to break bonds here, here, here, here, here.
09:42Its blast pressure is over a hundred times greater than the peak pressures that are produced
09:46by gunpowder.
09:47Lots of things will explode, even, you know, you pop a balloon and that's an explosion.
09:52Yes.
09:52But the specific kind of explosion we're interested in with nitroglycerin is a detonation. And the
09:58detonation is that chemical decomposition that happens faster than the speed of sound
10:03in the material.
10:04What we see in our experiments with nitroglycerin is all these things happen really fast, like
10:10less than 100 femtoseconds fast.
10:12I don't operate in femtoseconds very frequently. How fast is that?
10:16Well, femtoseconds tend to the negative 15 seconds.
10:19That's crazy.
10:21So a molecule of nitroglycerin will decompose three trillion times faster than the blink
10:26of an eye.
10:27And it's this speed that is one of the defining characteristics of high explosives.
10:32Yet Sobrero never set out to discover an explosive. He was searching for a medicine
10:38to improve blood flow.
10:40During one test, he mixed glycerol with nitric and sulfuric acid, when suddenly it exploded.
10:46Sobrero survived, but shards of glass left permanent scars on his face. Deeply shaken,
10:52he concluded this new substance, nitroglycerin, was just too dangerous. He later wrote, I am
10:58almost ashamed to admit to be its discoverer.
11:03But Alfred disagreed. To him, the hammer strike was like a pistol shot. It was like somebody
11:09had kicked open the door to his mind.
11:12It's a real shift in his character, because he's been this frail, sickly boy, kind of has
11:16trouble with people. And then he discovers explosives and chemistry and changes. You know,
11:21it's like whenever he's working, he finally isn't depressed. You know, he can kind of escape
11:25through his work.
11:26And you know, at that age, you're probably not thinking about all the possible consequences
11:29of this. You're just sort of excited about what it can do.
11:33Far from fearing its power, he believed he'd be the one to unlock it and solve one of nitroglycerin's
11:41greatest problems.
11:42If I had a jar sitting right here and I wanted to detonate it, how do I do that?
11:48Need a long fuse.
11:50But what's crazy about nitroglycerin is that a regular flame won't cause it to ignite.
11:55So even if I ran a fuse into that vial, it's not going to explode. See, while a fuse can
12:01heat nitroglycerin, which makes its molecules vibrate faster, and it might even break a few
12:05NO bonds, it usually doesn't break enough of them at the same time to detonate the rest
12:09of the liquid. So it doesn't explode. However, if you drop it...
12:13...but even that effect isn't consistent.
12:22We tried putting a vial loose in the back of this RC truck, expecting the bumpy ride to
12:26trigger it...
12:32...and nothing.
12:35It always seems to be blowing up when you don't want it to, and you can't really get it
12:39to blow up when you want it to. That's very paradoxical.
12:48You know, my browser used to look like a blast site too. I had windows and tabs scattered like debris.
12:52I had YouTube, Wikipedia, random research articles...
12:56...some things that I swear I never opened.
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13:57Thanks to Opera for sponsoring this video, and now, back to some explosions.
14:02In 1852, when Alfred returned to Russia, he moved into a cramped apartment with his brother Robert,
14:08and he turned their kitchen into a makeshift lab.
14:11He was searching for a reliable way to detonate nitroglycerin, dreaming it could one day power his father's sea mines.
14:18But when the Crimean War ended in 1856, the Russian government refused to honor the contracts they'd signed during the war.
14:25So, the Nobel factory was forced to shut down, and Emmanuel went bankrupt for the second time.
14:32Alfred later wrote that his father was, quote, a man of genius, but a failure all the same.
14:38And so, Alfred goes back to Sweden, and he decides, he's like, I'm not going to make the mistakes of my father.
14:44Where does his mind go? Sticking with nitroglycerin.
14:47He's like, if I can make this, you know, I'll be successful on my own terms.
14:53By the summer of 1862, a 28-year-old Alfred thought he was onto something.
14:58Excited, he gathered his brothers by the banks of Lake Melorin, just behind his workshop in Stockholm,
15:04and he pulled out a metal tube with a fuse extending from the top.
15:08He ignited it and tossed it into the water.
15:19That's crazy.
15:20He had finally found a way to reliably detonate nitroglycerin.
15:23In its finished form, it worked something like this.
15:26Alfred took a container of nitroglycerin and inserted a wooden plug and packed it with gunpowder.
15:31Then, when the fuse was lit, the gunpowder inside would explode, blasting down into the container.
15:36And it was that sudden impact that delivered the shock needed to detonate the nitroglycerin.
15:40It was just like the hammer striking the anvil.
15:46We need a blasting cap for this.
15:48Alright, so now Jesse's going to add a blasting cap, Alfred Nobel's first major invention.
15:52I can just, like, my heart is just racing more than usual.
15:57And I know that it's safe, but, yeah, I actually didn't really expect to feel this nervous about it.
16:01Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!
16:05Fire in the hole!
16:08Five, four, three, two, one!
16:12Oh my god!
16:14Jeez!
16:17Stay down.
16:18Oh yeah, yeah, okay.
16:19Gotta stay down.
16:20Okay, gotta clear the range.
16:21All clear!
16:23Oh my god!
16:24Alright, Henry!
16:25How did you like that?
16:26Yeah, jeez, man!
16:34Is that what you came for?
16:36Yeah, yeah, for sure.
16:37That was insane.
16:38Look at how it carved out the exact imprint of the bottle.
16:42A foot and a half below.
16:44Okay, look.
16:45We even have puncture on the second to last hole.
16:48The smallest is not punctured.
16:49Yeah, wow.
16:50So, I mean, that's the entire range of our measurement capability.
16:56I'm gonna get you through there.
16:58That's awesome.
17:01His invention, the blasting cap, was refined to use an even more consistent explosive than gunpowder,
17:07mercury fulminate.
17:08It became the first reliable way to detonate nitroglycerin on command.
17:13The design was so effective, it remained virtually unchanged for decades.
17:17I think it'd be hard to argue that this advancement doesn't find its place into every other explosive device that comes after it, basically.
17:23Probably the most significant development since the invention of gunpowder.
17:26The same idea, using a small explosion to trigger a much larger one, would later be used in atomic bombs to set off nuclear chain reactions.
17:35With the invention of the blasting cap, the use of nitroglycerin finally became practical.
17:41It can break rock and make tunnels much more effectively.
17:46Nitroglycerin sped up industrial excavation dramatically.
17:49In one mine, the rate of tunneling almost doubled, from 0.76 to 1.34 meters per day.
17:55And in Mexico, crews reported that 15 men using nitroglycerin could do the work of 25 with gunpowder.
18:01So, orders started pouring in from mining companies, engineers and railway builders from around the world.
18:08To meet the sudden demand, Alfred began producing nitroglycerin in Sweden, enlisting the help of his younger brother Emil.
18:15But on the 3rd of September 1864, an intern asked Emil for help moving a heavy crate.
18:22The two began to lift, when suddenly, the factory was ripped apart.
18:31A witness wrote this of the explosion.
18:36Most ghastly was the sight of the mutilated corpses strewn on the ground.
18:40Not only had their clothes been torn off, but on some, the head was missing and the flesh ripped off the bones.
18:47These formless masses of flesh and bone bore little or no resemblance to a human body.
18:53Emil, just 21 years old, and four others, the intern, a janitor, a young laborer, and a passing carpenter, all died in the explosion.
19:05Alfred blamed himself, and he swore,
19:08The city of Stockholm declared nitroglycerin too dangerous, and banned its production within city limits.
19:22Alfred, however, refused to give up.
19:24So this is a moment where he's actually a pretty savvy entrepreneur.
19:27He says, okay, if I'm not going to do it on land, I'm going to do it on the water.
19:31So, he set up a laboratory on a floating barge on Lake Mellerin.
19:35But as he was experimenting, another one of his factories in Germany exploded.
19:39Alfred was fighting a ticking clock.
19:42With every day that passed, more lives were lost.
19:46Workers were terrified.
19:48No sane agent would use it, a mining publication reported.
19:52We confidently expect, within 30 days, to announce another serious accident.
19:58See, he had addressed the problem of detonation, but not nitroglycerin's fundamental sensitivity.
20:04Because nitroglycerin is so viscous, tiny bubbles of air and water vapor easily get trapped inside.
20:10As we zoom in, you'll notice there are even more.
20:12These gases are a problem.
20:14When a shockwave reaches a bubble, it squeezes it, compressing the gas and heating it up.
20:19And it happens so fast that the heat can't escape.
20:22And so the temperature inside can increase by thousands of degrees Celsius in an instant.
20:27It creates a hotspot.
20:29The gas molecules in these hotspots carry so much energy that they break the weak NO bonds in the nitroglycerin molecules nearby.
20:36And so these molecules then decompose, releasing even more hot gases.
20:40But nitroglycerin doesn't just have one of these bubbles.
20:42No, it's filled with them.
20:44So that's what makes it so sensitive to shock.
20:46A single impact can collapse many bubbles at once, which releases enough energy to trigger the chain reaction that detonates the entire liquid.
20:53Now, you might think to make nitroglycerin safe, Alfred just has to get rid of those bubbles, right?
21:01Well, it's not that easy.
21:02You have an air bubble tractor that it's like really hard to get that out without like starting to bang on it and then you don't want to do that because you don't want it to go off.
21:13But even if you could remove every single bubble, you would still have a problem.
21:17That's because nitroglycerin is a lot like the liquid in this beer bottle.
21:21I replaced it with water and you can see, you know, there aren't many bubbles.
21:24But if I give it a smack, the impact drives the bottom of the beer bottle down faster than the liquid can fall, which creates this sudden pressure drop.
21:35And that drop vaporizes the liquid and creates bubbles.
21:40When the liquid rushes back in, those bubbles then collapse violently.
21:44And those implosions sometimes release enough energy to crack the glass.
21:48Now, a similar thing can happen in nitroglycerin.
21:50A strong impact can create new bubbles inside the liquid in a process called cavitation.
21:55And their collapse again triggers the same chain reaction.
22:00So, Alfred realized that the only way around the bubble problem was to change the state of nitroglycerin from a liquid to a solid.
22:10Working on his barge in Germany, he tried mixing in powdered charcoal, sand, wood shavings, brick dust, and cement.
22:18But nothing really worked.
22:23Dejected, he looked down and noticed something strange.
22:26A fine powder whispering around his feet.
22:29So, he looked up and saw the same pale threads drifting over the banks of the Elbe.
22:34Millions of years earlier, that dust had actually been living organisms.
22:40Diatoms.
22:42Single-celled algae that once floated in ancient seas.
22:46But now, in the dunes above the river, all that remained were their fossilized exoskeletons.
22:51That made for a fine silica powder that carried on the wind.
22:55This material, diatomaceous earth, or kiselgur, had been appreciated by Darwin.
23:01He wrote,
23:02Few objects are more beautiful than the minute, silicious cases of the diatomacea.
23:08But Alfred saw beyond their beauty to the microscopic holes in their exoskeletons.
23:16On the granular level, it's got lots of little pores and places to absorb the liquid into.
23:23We're looking for what kind of consistency?
23:25Oh, it's gonna be like thick and solid.
23:27It will make the nitroglycerin less sensitive, so the same hammer impact that you would try with straight nitroglycerin would take more force because that absorbent material will take some of that energy from the impact.
23:41That just kind of feels like we're baking.
23:44Right?
23:45In fact, kiselgur can soak up more than three times its weight in liquid nitroglycerin.
23:50And so if it's porous, now if you mix it with the nitroglycerin, the nitroglycerin can kind of go into the pores.
23:55What that helps do is separate the nitroglycerin molecules from each other.
23:59And within any individual pore, there just isn't enough nitroglycerin to propagate the detonation.
24:04So now when it's bumped or shaken, the mixture won't detonate.
24:08And if we drop it in the exact same way that set off the nitroglycerin, drop...
24:13It didn't go.
24:16No.
24:17So this new material won't explode when you drop it.
24:20So can you still detonate it?
24:22Well, if you combine it with Alfred's other invention, the blasting cap, the resulting shockwave is powerful enough to compress many pockets of nitroglycerin at the same time, which triggers the detonation.
24:35The biggest explosion we've seen up to now is 100 grams of nitroglycerin.
24:38Yeah.
24:39That'll be the biggest one we've done so far.
24:43Three, two, one.
24:50Oh, that's so sick!
24:52To all whom it may concern, be it known that I, Alfred Nobel, have invented a new and useful composition of matter.
24:59To wit, an explosive powder.
25:03To name it, he took the Greek word dynamis, meaning power, and he made it dynamite.
25:14Alfred was determined to capitalize on his new invention, and he believed that he could make the most money in England.
25:21England is a jewel worth the rest of the world, he said.
25:24A dynamite company there would have the entire empire as its market.
25:29So in the spring of 1868, he set foot on British soil, carrying with him a suitcase overflowing with dynamite.
25:37Because he's going around and he's inviting journalists to come to these demonstrations where he would bring sticks of dynamite in his backpack and a stand.
25:44He would set up these huge boulders, basically, and put a stick of dynamite in there and, like, watch as they, like, cleft it, too.
25:50Alfred was a clever salesman.
25:53So when Alfred created dynamite, nitroglycerin still had a terrible reputation.
25:58And so his initial thought was to name it, Nobel's safety powder.
26:03Ooh.
26:04I like that.
26:05Come on down and get your Nobel safety powder and blow the hell out of this rock.
26:11You know?
26:12Whatever the name, his invention came at the perfect time.
26:16Around when Alfred introduced dynamite, there were two other major breakthroughs.
26:20The pneumatic drill and the diamond drilling crown, which now made it easy to bore holes in solid rock.
26:27Perfect for a stick of dynamite.
26:29These tools revolutionized construction.
26:33Many of the iconic engineering feats of the era, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Panama Canal, depended on dynamite.
26:42One thing that I think is really interesting to think about is Russia, at the time, isn't the Russia that we think of now.
26:47It was effectively a mid-sized European country, because they had this vast wealth of resources, but it was cut off by these mountains.
26:54And so without dynamite, you actually wouldn't have the Russia we have today, because you would have never been able to make the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
27:00It's worth saying that dynamite is different than TNT.
27:06Yeah, I was going to ask about that actually.
27:08Trinitroglycerin.
27:09Trinitrotoluene.
27:10Trinitrotoluene.
27:11Trinitrotoluene.
27:12Yep.
27:13Trinitrotoluene.
27:14Those nitrogens are bound to carbons, not to oxygens.
27:19And so that makes it much more stable, so you don't have that really weak oxygen-nitrogen bond.
27:26Because of that, it is much, much, much less sensitive than nitroglycerin.
27:32So that actually wouldn't be discovered for another couple decades after dynamite.
27:36The TNT labels on the dynamite sticks in the Looney Tunes cartoons never bothered me when I watched them as a kid.
27:41But now I'm just like, wait, that's not right. They're not TNT in there.
27:45But the main point is that dynamite happened first, and no matter what ACDC says, it is not TNT.
27:52It's a good line.
27:53Yeah.
27:54I mean, it's a good track, too.
27:56So dynamite was changing the world.
27:58But the old dangers of nitroglycerin were hard to escape.
28:01In 1869, near Brentford, England, a barge carrying dynamite exploded on the River Thames, killing three people and damaging buildings 800 meters away.
28:12Investigators traced the cause to dynamite that had been sweating beads of nitroglycerin.
28:18See, wet Kieselger from the riverbed has to first be dried to remove moisture.
28:23And that leaves empty pores ready to absorb nitroglycerin.
28:26But the Kieselger never loses that strong attraction to water.
28:30So if your dynamite is later exposed to moisture, even just humidity in the air, well, water seeps back into those pores.
28:37And the invading water molecules then encounter nitroglycerin, which gets pushed outwards.
28:42Now, moisture wasn't the only culprit.
28:44Time and temperature could also cause this separation.
28:47But moisture just made the problem a lot worse.
28:49Though it actually wasn't Alfred's only concern.
28:52See, Kieselger is inert.
28:54And since dynamite was about 25% Kieselger, that meant it would always absorb a large fraction of the explosive energy.
29:00And that power was wasted.
29:02It reduced the strength of Alfred's explosive, and ultimately it hurt his bottom line.
29:07So he kept experimenting with new formulations and new absorbance.
29:11Again and again he failed, but he was undeterred, saying,
29:15If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.
29:21Then one day, while working in his home lab in Paris, he cut his hand.
29:26It was a pretty deep cut, and blood started to pour out.
29:29So he grabbed a bandage, pressed it to the wound, and watched it soak up the mess.
29:34That night, the pain woke him.
29:38But as he was lying there in the dark, annoyed at his earlier carelessness, his mind drifted back to the bandage.
29:44How clean it was. How fast it absorbed the blood.
29:48He bolted upright and rushed down to the lab.
29:51He thought, if cotton is so good at absorbing blood, maybe it'll be just as good at absorbing nitroglycerin.
29:58So inside that bandage is this.
30:00And it looks like regular cotton, but you'll see it's not when I light it up.
30:05I remember, yeah, watching this YouTube video where they just light it on fire and the whole thing's just gone.
30:15And it is so counterintuitive and so just crazy to see.
30:21It's like magic. I'm sure it's used in like magic shows too.
30:26It's called gun cotton, or nitrocellulose.
30:29And nitrocellulose is made by taking cellulose polymers, say from cotton or wood pulp,
30:34and then replacing the OH groups with oxygen atoms bonded to nitro groups.
30:39Which are the same unstable groups that made nitroglycerin so explosive.
30:43So now when you ignite it, these groups rapidly break down into products like nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water.
30:49All of which are gases, so there's no particulate to scatter light.
30:52That's why the whole thing seems to just disappear into thin air.
30:56But what Alfred was interested in was what happened when you combined it with nitroglycerin.
31:01See, nitrocellulose has these chains that are very similar to nitroglycerin chemically because of the nitro groups.
31:07So because of that, they mix easily.
31:09Now you have two things that are soluble. They like each other.
31:12This is very different from, you know, Kiesel-Gore water and nitroglycerin.
31:16And now when you mix them, the smaller nitroglycerin molecules slip between these long nitrocellulose chains,
31:22trapping the nitroglycerin molecules and keeping them apart.
31:25Just like in the dynamite.
31:27If you mix in just a small amount of nitrocellulose, you get a stable, moldable gel that resists sweating.
31:33We'll take a little bit of the nitrocellulose.
31:35A gun cotton, like this much.
31:37Yeah.
31:38Okay, we're gonna start with a little bit.
31:40Ready to drop it in there.
31:41You see that it soaks right in.
31:43Yeah, yeah.
31:44Keep on adding bits until...
31:45Until it soaks all up and then we'll stir it around to make sure there's no dry spots.
31:48But that's not all. This mixture also solves Alfred's problem with yield.
31:52The matrix, like the structure that it's being held in, is itself explosive.
31:57So now you get perfect yield, no sweating, bing bang boom.
32:02And because the material is a gel, it can be molded into different shapes.
32:06Perfect for precise, controlled mining blasts.
32:09While it's soft like this, we can put it into a shape and then when it sets, it'll stay that shape.
32:15Do we have enough to do a VE?
32:16Oh yeah, yeah.
32:17Let's make a VE.
32:27Alfred named it gelignite, the world's first moldable explosive.
32:31With gelignite, dynamite, and the blasting cap in hand, Alfred had fulfilled his oath.
32:37He had made explosives safer for everyone.
32:40He opened factories across the world, in Scotland, France, the United States, and beyond.
32:45By the early 1870s, he was running more than 90 sites in 20 countries.
32:50But not everyone was happy.
32:53His father never recovered from Emil's death.
32:56And just weeks after the explosion in Stockholm, Emmanuel suffered a stroke.
33:01He survived, but was never the same.
33:04Emmanuel became obsessed with death, often rambling to Alfred about strange inventions, including a scheme to build a network of underground tubes that would carry corpses directly from people's homes to giant incinerators.
33:18His dad never had the success that Alfred's having financially, and he's being lauded as this great inventor.
33:25His dad, I think, is just jealous, essentially.
33:27But he claims that Alfred had stolen the idea for dynamite from him.
33:32So, he says to his dad,
33:34Rather than regarding this idea as your own, far from it.
33:37You laughed at it.
33:39Your fatherly love seems to run aground on complacency or vanity.
33:43It should not seem strange that I, at the age of 30, will not allow myself to be treated as a schoolboy.
33:49It pains me, but when it comes to serious matters, I've adopted the rule of acting seriously.
33:55Despite the confident front he put up for his father, the truth was that his wealth hadn't made him any happier.
34:02He says,
34:04By 1876, he couldn't take it anymore.
34:22Overwhelmed by the loneliness, he placed an ad.
34:25Wealthy, highly educated elderly gentleman seeks lady of mature age, versed in languages as secretary and supervisor of household.
34:34And into his life entered Bertha Kinski.
34:37She was an idealistic woman, part of the budding peace movement.
34:41Together, they took long carriage rides where they discussed the role of science and society,
34:48and whether it could serve a purpose greater than war.
34:51For a moment, Alfred was happy.
34:54Hopeful, he asked if her heart was free.
34:57But, while Alfred was away on business, she left to be with another man in Austria.
35:02So, Alfred was back to being alone.
35:05Alfred was heartbroken.
35:08He responded by throwing himself even deeper into his work.
35:12Alfred attempted to sell his explosives to the French military, but they weren't interested.
35:17Then, a year later, when war broke out between France and Prussia, German troops hurled dynamite at the French positions.
35:24Now, Alfred received a message.
35:27The French wanted to place an order.
35:29One thing that I think is important to, like, think about in this moment is that people have been stabbed, bruised, shot with gunpowder and all this other stuff.
35:38But, up till then, it would have been totally foreign to see that level of destruction on a human body.
35:45It would have been unmatched in kind of human history.
35:48As he starts thinking more about war and becoming involved with, like, the French military, the German military, the Italian military,
35:53they come to him with a problem that's been plaguing them for hundreds of years since the invention of gunpowder.
35:59Which is that on a battlefield with black powder, when you shoot, it obscures visibility so you don't really know how to shoot again.
36:06Like, you can't aim very well.
36:08Yeah, one thing you're seeing with the black powder is that every time it explodes, there's just this huge plume of smoke that enemy fighters would be able to see your location.
36:17So, it's just this big problem where there's, like, a literal fog of war.
36:21Alfred starts contemplating that problem.
36:23What he thinks back to is, gun cotton, you know, it doesn't create smoke.
36:27Can I use gun cotton to replace powder?
36:30But the problem with using gun cotton, or any high explosive mass, in small arms is that it detonates all at once, releasing its energy in a split second.
36:39And the pressure inside the barrel spikes faster than the bullet can accelerate.
36:43So much of the energy is wasted as heat.
36:46Instead of propelling the projectile, it can even destroy the barrel.
36:50What Alfred wanted was a propellant that built pressure gradually, so the force rose smoothly as the bullet traveled down the barrel.
36:57So, he began experimenting with a new nitroglycerin-nitrocellulose mixture.
37:01By adding 10 to 20 times more nitrocellulose than in gelignite, he transformed it from a jelly into a tougher substance, one that could be rolled into pasta-thin sheets.
37:11In Italy, they even used pasta makers to do this.
37:14These sheets were then stamped into countless tiny little grains.
37:17When these grains were packed into a cartridge, they wouldn't fit tightly.
37:21Small gaps of air remained between them.
37:23But that was actually a good thing.
37:25Now, when one grain ignited, the shockwave couldn't just race through the entire charge at once.
37:30Instead, each grain had to ignite its neighbor, and the one beside it, and the next one in sequence.
37:35This slowed down the burn rate and allowed the pressure to build gradually.
37:38So, they were able to replicate the effect of gunpowder.
37:41And because the fuel was a combination of nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose, both of which broke down into clear stable gases, it burned with little smoke.
37:50So, Alfred had solved a problem that had plagued armies for centuries.
37:54And to this day, the propellant in much of the world's ammunition is still a combination of nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose, just like Alfred's invention.
38:03He called it ballistite, the world's first smokeless, high-energy propellant.
38:08Alfred quickly received an order for 300,000 kilograms of ballistite from the Italian army.
38:15So, he opened a massive armaments factory in Italy, and began to fall deeper into the world of warfare.
38:22He developed landmines, early gun silencers, and even experimented with one of the first rocket-powered missiles.
38:29It flew over four kilometers downrange and allegedly captured this image.
38:34The whole time he's in contact with Bertha, like the woman who kind of jilted him, and she's become pretty important in the peace movement at the time.
38:45She wrote this book called Lay Down Your Arms that became kind of a sensation, and established these peace congresses across the world.
38:53To her, he insisted, my rockets are meant not only for war, but also for the rescue of shipwrecked persons.
38:59He even took it a step further.
39:02Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses.
39:06On the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second,
39:10all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.
39:15This is a concept that we see a lot of.
39:18When people are sure to kill each other with the modern weapons that I've given them, no war will be possible.
39:23It's also the same thing that we think about in Oppenheimer.
39:27I feel like we've heard it so many times that you just can't believe it ever.
39:31No.
39:32And that it's just marketing on the part of all these guys who are selling weapons.
39:35They don't want to come across as evil guys who are like,
39:37I'm going to make something that will help you kill more people than ever before.
39:40I mean, that's kind of the truth of it.
39:42Especially in the dynamite case, it feels like a tremendous misjudgment of human nature.
39:47It's like, yeah.
39:48Yeah.
39:49This is not going to be used to stop war.
39:52And we definitely don't see that in the decades that follow.
39:56Between the 1890s and the 1920s, over 7,000 bombings occurred in New York alone.
40:02Imagine waking up, opening the paper, and seeing another explosion every other day for decades.
40:09The most common perpetrators were known as the dynamite club.
40:14They were part of a deadly new political movement on the rise in America.
40:18They rejected industrialization and longed for a simpler world.
40:21Today, their name evokes chaos and destruction.
40:25But at the time, it was more literal.
40:27No ruler.
40:28Anarchos.
40:29This was anarchy.
40:31They were so crazy and so effective using dynamite that Theodore Roosevelt addressed Congress and he said the largest threat facing the US is the anarchist threat.
40:42Were they intentionally just killing people?
40:45Yeah.
40:46Their argument was that, you know, if one person dies at the hands of an anarchist, a hundred people died in the industrial machine.
40:53Yeah, these people sound crazy.
40:58In fact, the entire modern practice of terrorism, using spectacular violence to advance a political agenda, often targeting civilians.
41:06But that all began with the anarchists and their dynamite.
41:10Dynamite unlocked a new scale of destruction previously unimaginable.
41:14With only a few sticks in a coat pocket, one person could walk into a crowded street and wreak havoc.
41:21What began as an industrial tool had become a weapon of mass murder.
41:26In 1927, in Bath, Michigan, a man spent months wiring the town's new elementary school with dynamite.
41:34He hid the charges in the basement and crawl spaces, concealed them under floors and behind walls, all while serving as the school board treasurer.
41:43Then, on the morning of May 18th, just after classes began, he triggered the explosives.
41:49As parents and rescuers rushed to the scene, he arrived in a truck packed with more dynamite and shrapnel and detonated.
41:58In all, 38 children, six adults, and the attacker died. Another 58 were grievously injured.
42:05The deadliest school massacre in American history was not a shooting. It was a dynamite attack.
42:12Of course, Alfred couldn't know all the ways in which his inventions would be abused.
42:18But he had seen the destruction in his own life.
42:21And he had heard the pleas to change his ways.
42:24So, in 1888, when he read that paper, something in him broke.
42:33Just a few years later, as his health began to fail, as he took pellets of nitroglycerin to ease the pain in his chest,
42:40he couldn't shake the thought.
42:42So, he called his lawyer and wrote a new will.
42:47With 94% of his personal fortune, 31.2 million Swedish kronor, or about 340 million dollars today,
42:55he created a set of prizes for those who during the preceding year shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind,
43:04the Nobel Prize.
43:06There were five in total for chemistry, physics, medicine, literature, and finally, peace.
43:17On December 10th, 1896, Alfred Nobel died in his villa in Italy.
43:22Just as he had always feared, he died alone.
43:26At the time of his death, he held 355 patents and ran an empire of 90 factories that produced explosives and armaments across the world.
43:35And yet, in his final act, he gave his fortune away.
43:39For an idea.
43:41So, did it work?
43:43Did it redeem him in the eyes of everyone today?
43:47Have you ever heard the name Alfred Nobel?
43:49Oh, yeah.
43:50He was the creator of the Nobel Prize.
43:53Nobel Prize.
43:54Nobel Prize.
43:55Nobel Prizes.
43:56Nobel Prizes.
43:57Nobel Prizes.
43:58Nobel Prizes.
43:59Nobel Prizes.
44:00Nobel Prize.
44:01Nobel Prize.
44:02Anything else?
44:03Um...
44:04I should know more.
44:05The Nobel Prize.
44:06Is that it?
44:08Yes.
44:09I'm saying nothing like dynamite.
44:10Don't think about that at all.
44:12Dynamite.
44:13Yeah.
44:14He also invented dynamite.
44:15Did not know that.
44:16I didn't know about dynamite.
44:17I knew about the Peace Prize.
44:18But that's it.
44:19I think the attempt has been to have him portrayed as somebody who tried to promote new understanding
44:27and advances in science.
44:30And so that's...
44:31That's his legacy.
44:32Yeah.
44:33Yeah.
44:34It would seem.
44:35I mean, if you're cynical, you say it's a PR move.
44:38And are you inclined to be cynical?
44:40I think it must be at least somewhat a PR move.
44:44To me, Nobel Prize has always been the pinnacle of achievement.
44:47If anyone wins the Nobel Prize, it's like, yeah, you're done.
44:50That's all you need to accomplish in life.
44:52I mean, in some ways, maybe he was in control of his legacy.
44:55Yeah.
44:56And he took control of his legacy.
44:58He did.
44:59He decided he wanted it to be a positive thing.
45:01There's a twisted irony to this story.
45:03When Alfred Nobel created dynamite, he was trying to make explosives safer to prevent
45:08the kind of accident that killed his brother.
45:10But by making nitroglycerin easier to handle, he also made it more accessible.
45:15And that made it more deadly.
45:17So why then did he create the Nobel Prizes?
45:20Was it out of the goodness of his heart?
45:22Or a desire to redeem himself in the eyes of everyone who would come after?
45:27I mean, I think the idea that anyone anywhere can be recognized for advancing science, literature,
45:32or peace is beautiful.
45:34This award is not just a piece of metal that you would wear or an award that you would
45:38keep in your room.
45:39But this is really an encouragement for me to go forward and to believe in myself,
45:44to know that there are people who are supporting me in this campaign.
45:48So maybe it doesn't matter why he did it.
45:51Only that he did.
45:57If you see things in life, I think they could look for someone who is in person.
46:00I think.
46:01If the we have jobs in this campaign, I think,
46:02we are not going for social media.
46:03But if the one thing is, we have to give you the chance to do this.
46:05I think that you have to make sort of a surprise.
46:06I think that you can just see it before.
46:07And get that concept, like you said,
46:08I think the secret of the pirate said.
46:09But for me, I think that it was called the start to get the start to get the start.
46:12I think that we need to go forward and get it through the start.
46:14I think that it's a little bit of a surprise.
46:16But I think that we'll need it.
46:18It's a little bit of our sister figure.
46:20It's a little bit of a surprise.
46:22I think that you can do something.
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