This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

For most of history, there's really only been one way to blow things up.

Basically, gunpowder was invented sometime around 800 AD and you packed a bunch of gunpowder and as small

illification as you could and you set fire to it and blew it up and that was basically the state of the

art for a millennium. That's Stephen Johnson. He writes about science, technology

and the history of innovation and he explained how the second half of the

1800s forever changed how we make explosives.

First came the discovery of nitroglysron.

Basically, this extraordinarily unstable substance that just jostling could cause an explosion.

You know, you didn't need to kind of light a match to set it off.

You could just shake it and it would blow up in your face.

Nitrolytron was just too volatile to use.

It literally blew up in people's faces all the time.

And so one scientist named Alfred Nobel wanted to figure out how to create a controlled

explosion.

Eventually he had upon this idea, which he referred to as kind of the blasting cap, where you would

use basically just a little bit of gunpowder to trigger a small little explosion which would then set off the big

shockwave explosion of nitric glycerin detonating.

However, working with these materials led to lots of unwanted explosions, including one which hit too close to home.

There was an accidental explosion at the lab that he had set up on his family's property in Stockholm and his brother was blown to bits in this

explosion. To avoid these premature detonations, Nobel needed to figure out a way to safely work with and transport this compound.

And while tinkering in one of his labs off the River Elb, he realized that the solution was in the dunes all around him.

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