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In the small hours of February 3rd 1905, the
body of Peter Eberhart was discovered frozen to
death in a ditch just outside St Paul, Minnesota.
His body was found wildly contorted by his former
boss, Claude Argonvale, who took it upon himself
to haul it back to his home, where they endeavored
to give Eberhart a proper, and respectful burial.
They placed his body in a shed on the side of the
property next to a stove with a roaring fire to slowly
defrost the corpse, but before anyone could make an
attempt to embalm him, the shed exploded in a fiery burst
of light, leaving nothing left of Peter, save for one
button, a boot heel, and a small piece of a watch chain.
On the night of February 2nd, 1905, local town marshall
approached farm worker Peter Eberhart with a bottle
of nitroglycerin he confiscated from a would-be bank
robber while the two were drinking at a local tavern.
Eberhart, fulfilling his destiny of drinking himself
into a stupor, bet that he could drink the entire
bottle without experiencing any adverse effects.
Peter drank the entire bottle of the
substance, and started on his way back home.
He never made it back, and either from the drinking,
the nitroglycerin, or the glacial cold of a Minnesota
winter, he froze to death off the side of the road.
If you wanted to build a railway before nitroglycerin,
you would have to manually light black powder — an
older form of gunpowder — as mining charges,
but you ran the risk of blowing yourself up.
Nitroglycerin, shortened to NTG, is a substance
invented in 1847 by Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero.
It was vastly more powerful than
gunpowder, but also immensely unstable.
An early explosion of nitroglycerin in San Francisco
leveled an entire building and killed 15 people.
A 300 pound crate of the substance was
shipped into the city, leaking nitroglycerin.
When a worker brought a hammer to open the
crate, it exploded, levelling the building.
Liquid nitroglycerin is so unstable that even
a gentle knock can trigger a chain reaction.
This happens very quickly, and a lot
of energy is released in the process.
It’s also the reason why the Nobel Prize exists!
The Nobel Prize is named after Alfred Nobel, who
invented a method of stabilizing NTG for practical use.
While in Germany investigating an accident at one of his
factories, he realized that if the liquid was absorbed
into something, it could become easier to handle.
He found a naturally occurring substance called
Kieselguhr, which is a kind of diatomaceous earth,
in the German moorlands which he could combine with
NTG to make an explosive paste that we call dynamite.
Where a small bump could set off a chain reaction in
NTG, dynamite won’t go off even if you light it on fire.
It requires a blasting cap, aka a
smaller explosive to trigger detonation.
It’s even safer than substances like gasoline or propane.
Making nitroglycerin safer was pretty much everyone’s
main priority, but while attempting to do just that,
researchers discovered that workers in late 19th
century dynamite factories who had been suffering
from chest pains, suddenly found themselves with
some relief whenever they clocked in for work.
Nitroglycerin capsules, sprays, ointments, and patches
are used to treat a condition called Angina, a common
side effect of some kinds of coronary heart disease.
Chest pain can happen when your heart isn’t receiving
enough blood, usually due to narrow blood vessels.
When consumed, the body converts NTG into a
compound called nitric oxide, which widens
arteries and blood vessels, reducing chest pain.
So how did they make an explosive boom into a medical boon?
Manufacturers dilute the NTG with a 0.9% sodium
chloride solution, or 5% glucose solution,
to neutralize it’s explosive properties.
Most medications are diluted like this,
primarily in order to make doses of active
ingredients as small and effective as possible.
So, what happened to Peter?
Nitroglycerin is a vasodilator, which opens up blood vessels.
Peter Eberhart likely got very red in the face, or faint.
His heart rate probably increased,
and he would’ve felt nauseated too.
But if you remember, nitroglycerin wasn’t
the only thing Eberhart drank that night!
It’s outright dangerous to take any medication with alcohol.
All of his symptoms would only get worse.
The side effects include tachycardia—rapid
heart rate, sudden and drastic changes in
blood pressure, dizziness, and fainting.
It’s hard to say what happened inside his
body, but I can say that it was not good.
Most likely, he passed out along the
way home and then froze to death.
But this is where it gets a little
complicated, and a lot more explosive.
An explosion is just rapid combustion.
The difference between a fire and an explosion is time.
Fire, aka combustion, requires three
components: fuel, oxygen, and heat.
A lighter, for example, has fuel in the form
of butane, oxygen from the air, and heat from
the spark generated between flint and steel.
What makes nitroglycerin so volatile is that its molecular
structure already includes both a fuel source and oxygen.
It’s made up of three nitrate groups,
attached to a chain of hydrocarbons.
The nitrate groups contain a bunch of oxygen, the
hydrocarbons are a common ingredient in all fossil fuels,
so if my math is correct, that’s two out of three steps.
When nitroglycerin decomposes, it releases a lot of heat, and
according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, energy cannot be
created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another.
There’s more energy in a Nitroglycerin molecule than
there is in the molecules of what it breaks down into.
So when the bonds between nitroglycerin break down,
the extra energy is vented into the air as heat.
So there we have all three ingredients for
fire, all in one place, breaking down in a
matter of nanoseconds just from a simple jolt.
Remember, the difference between
fire and an explosion is time.
It’s honestly a miracle that Peter didn’t
explode while drinking from the bottle in the
first place, but moving him was also dangerous.
The freezing point of nitroglycerin is
unusually high at 13°C (55.4°F)
Frozen NTG is a little less reactive than liquid
NTG, so in the time before dynamite, it was
commonly shipped frozen inside large square
cans that could weigh up to 50 pounds (~22.6kg) each.
That isn’t to say that the frozen form isn’t explosive.
It absolutely is.
There are tons of stories of miners attempting
to unfreeze chunks of solid NTG in the field and
straight up burying themselves under mountains
because they did it every so slightly wrong.
This story is over a hundred years old, so
obviously we can’t know exactly what happened
that night, but we can make some educated guesses.
News articles about Peter’s fate mention that he
was drinking with the town marshall, and if any
of you have had a sip of devil’s firewater, you
know that he was probably feeling overconfident.
The town marshall, like a frat boy at a house
party, showed off the explosive, and Peter, like
another frat boy at a house party, accepted a
challenge that no one wanted, or asked, him to do.
Now, by the grace of whatever God he believed in, he
didn’t explode, but since Nitroglycerin and all medications
react badly with alcohol, his body was not having it.
You know look, I don’t know about you, but if I’m
going to be sick, I’d like to be sick at home,
which is exactly where Peter tried to go before
he passed out and froze to death along the way.
Later after they found his body, they carried it
to the home of his employer, Claude Argonvale,
and laid it out in a shed for embalming.
Little did they know, he was literally a human bomb popsicle
that could blow them to kingdom come at the drop of a hat.
As the frozen nitroglycerin in his guts started
to melt, either from heating up too quickly, or
from some natural jolt during the thawing process,
he exploded, taking the entire shed with him.
One way or another, there was nothing
left of Peter Eberhart to bury.
The discovery that Nitroglycerin could be
stabilized was obviously one of the most
“dynamite” scientific breakthroughs of all time.
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