Nitroglycerin is a heavy, oily, colorless or light-yellow liquid that is very unstable. It was discovered in 1846, but not used as an explosive until Alfred Nobel, a Swedish engineer and inventor, used it in dynamite. Dynamite is simply nitroglycerin soaked up in a porous material such as sawdust. When detonated, nitroglycerin produces 10,000 times its own volume of gas and is eight times as powerful as gunpowder in proportion to relative weight.
If not for the discovery of nitroglycerin and the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel, we would still be mining with a pick and shovel. We would not be able to blast away rocks with significant ease and just haul them away. We would still be digging tunnels for railroads and working on many other types of construction across the globe. This just makes you wonder, how advanced would our ways of travel be, would we still be riding horses on short trips, or would our cities and towns be in the same places around the world? Could we have gotten there to begin with without the invention of dynamite and the discovery of nitroglycerin? These few questions make us wonder how much our lives would really change with such simple things, as they seem to us, as explosives.
Next, in the explosive timeline, would be a high explosive, as it is classified, called trinitrotoluene or TNT for short. The invention of this new level of explosives greatly replaced dynamite. TNT was widely used and the main explosive employed in World War I. Would we have been able to win this war without it, and how many lives around the world would have been lived to the fullest without the invention of this explosive?.
As we move forward, we come upon a new era in explosives with the invention of the atom bomb and many other new and more powerful explosives. We wonder would we have won the Second World War if not for the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, would Hitler be in control of the world at this time, or would we be speaking German instead of English? How would our landscape around the world be changed? We would have no guns or artillery pieces in the many war museums that dot the globe.
