It is easily prepared by the action of concentrated nitric and sulphuric acids on glycerol. Commercial production was pioneered by the Swedish Chemist Alfred Nobel in 1862. Unfortunately nitroglycerin is extremely shock sensitive and many fatal accidents occurred. In 1864 Nobel discovered that this shock sensitivty could be reduced to safe levels by mixing it with diatomaceous earth. This new safer explosive, called dynamite, became very successful and made Nobel a very wealthy man. The fortune he accumulated from dynamite and other related explosives is the basis of the Nobel Prizes. In modern dynamites much of the nitroglycerin has been replaced with ammonium nitrate. .
Ironically, nitroglycerin has been used for the treatment of heart diseases such as angina since 1879 and is still widely prescribed today.
a heavy oily explosive poisonous liquid C3H5N3O9 used chiefly in making dynamites and in medicine as a vasodilator .
http://webserver.lemoyne.edu/faculty/giunta/week.html.
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http://www.anesthesia-nursing.com/ether.html.
1819-68, American dentist and physician, b. Charlton, Mass., studied at Baltimore College of Dental Surgery. He practiced dentistry in Boston, for a time with Horace Wells, whose unsuccessful demonstration of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, he sponsored in 1845. C. T. Jackson interested him in ether anesthesia, and in 1846 Morton demonstrated its use during an operation at Massachusetts General Hospital. The prior work of C. W. Long in ether anesthesia had not then been made public. Morton's subsequent claim to the discovery of the anesthetic effects of ether was bitterly disputed.
a light volatile flammable liquid C4H10O used chiefly as a solvent and anesthetic b : any of various organic compounds characterized by an oxygen atom attached to two carbon atom. .