The story of how much credit this budding industrialist gave to the inventor of nitroglycerin is a bit muddied by later conflict between the two men, but the Nobel Prize website and Nobel's biographer Fant both state that Nobel never tried to claim credit for that discovery. As far back as the s, writes Rebecca Rawls for the Chemical and Engineering News , the positive effects of nitroglycerin on people with heart conditions was being explored. It helped ignite a field of research into heart medicine, write Neville and Alexander Marsh in Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology , and it remains important in heart care more than years later.
Kat Eschner is a freelance science and culture journalist based in Toronto. Eight hundred pounds of dynamite exploding. Library of Commons Ascanio Sobrero, born on this day in , invented nitroglycerin. At about the same time Nobel was perfecting dynamite, scientists in Britain were using a molecule called amyl nitrite to treat angina, an excruciating chest pain connected with inadequate flow of blood and oxygen to the heart.
Noting similarities between amyl nitrite and nitroglycerin, London physician William Murrell became the first to recommend nitroglycerin as a treatment for angina in He did so after carrying out several studies with nitroglycerin on himself as well as on other people. Today, scientists know that the human body breaks down nitroglycerin into a molecule called nitric oxide. Not to be confused with laughing gas a. The World Health Organization considers nitroglycerin one of its essential medicines for a basic health system.
Even Alfred Nobel got a prescription for nitroglycerin from his doctor. Nobel declined the medication, and wrote about it in a letter :. My heart trouble will keep me here in Paris for another few days at least, until my doctors are in complete agreement about my immediate treatment. Isn't it the irony of fate that I have been prescribed [nitroglycerin], to be taken internally!
They call it Trinitrin, so as not to scare the chemist and the public. Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel in an undated photo.
For a heart condition, Nobel was prescribed AP Photo. You read that right. It is designed to stimulate blood flow to sustain men who report having trouble keeping erections with a condom. The goal is to encourage safer sex by convincing those same men to stick with condoms.
The condom first made news in , when it was under development by Futura and consumer products company Reckitt Benckiser. That deal has since fallen apart. Read one patent here. Currently, the condom is available to residents of Belgium and The Netherlands. This is a BETA experience. He realized that cellulose, the basic component of cotton, had somehow reacted with the acids to create an explosive material.
Sobrero realized that glycerol and cellulose shared some chemical features and he wondered what would happen if he reacted it with the mix of acids that Schonbein had used. The results were remarkable. The nitric acid converted glycerine into Sobrero's "pyroglycerine," which in chemical lingo was better described as "nitroglycerine.
But as the temperature reached oC nitroglycerine exploded, although not always in a predictable fashion. The yellow liquid was also sensitive to shock, and it seemed to Nobel that if nitroglycerine were to be used as an explosive, a reliable detonation system would have to be found. Alfred suggested to his father that they focus their attention on making nitroglycerine on a large scale.
Immanuel Nobel did not need much convincing because his factory in St. Petersburg, which had been very profitable during the Crimean War, now faced bankruptcy. The family moved back to Sweden and set up a factory to produce nitroglycerine. Almost immediately tragedy struck when an explosion killed Emil, the youngest son. The nitration of glycerine was a dangerous business. So dangerous that in some cases the workers who monitored the reaction were made to sit on one-legged stools so that they would immediately wake up should they dose off.
One would think, though, that sitting in front of a bubbling kettle frothing with brown fumes of nitrogen oxides, containing the most powerful explosive known to mankind, would have been enough of a motivator to staying awake.
Making nitroglycerine wasn't the only problem. How to detonate it was an even bigger concern. Alfred solved this problem with his invention of the mercury fulminate blasting cap.
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