Alfred+Nobel

Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833 and died December 10, 1896. Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. He started off building bridges and buildings in Stockholm. His construction work inspired him to research new methods of blasting rock. In 1860, the inventor first started experimenting with nitroglycerine. Italian chemist first invented nitroglycerin in 1846. In its natural liquid state, nitroglycerin is very volatile. Alfred Nobel understood this and in 1866 he discovered that mixing nitroglycerine with silica would turn the liquid into a malleable paste, called dynamite. One advantage of dynamite over nitroglycerin was that it could be cylinder-shaped for insertion into drilling holes used for mining.