Dynamite
Nitroglycerin was discovered by Ascanio Sobrero in 1847, and for twenty years it was almost unusable. It is a liquid. It leaks into cracks in the rock, it detonates when jolted, and it killed people constantly — including Emil Nobel, Alfred's younger brother, at the Heleneborg works in 1864. Several countries banned its transport outright.
Nobel's patent does not claim nitroglycerin, and it is important to be exact about this. It claims what to mix it with. In his words, the invention "consists in mixing with nitro-glycerine a substance which possesses a very great absorbent capacity, and which, at the same time, is free from any quality which will decompose, destroy, or injure the nitro-glycerine, or its explosiveness".
The answer is a fossil earth. A siliceous earth "generally composed of the remains of infusoria" — diatom skeletons — which "will take up about three times its own weight" and still stay a dry powder. A liquid that could not be carried became a solid that could.
US Patent 78,317, "Improved Explosive Compound", granted 26 May 1868 to Alfred Nobel, of Hamburg, Germany, assignor to Julius Bandmann of San Francisco.
⚠ This blueprint measures the ABSORBENT with an inert oil. It contains no synthesis of any explosive. See step 2.
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