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| View Larger Image | A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, and the Making of the Modern World
by Stephen Bown
| | List Price: | $23.95 | | Price: | $16.29 | | You Save: | $7.66 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 363899 | | Studio: | Thomas Dunne Books | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 272 | | Publication Date: | October 01, 2005 | | Publisher: | Thomas Dunne Books |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel's discovery of dynamite made possible the famous industrial megaprojects that transformed the countryside and defined the era, including the St. Gothard rail tunnel through the Alps, the clearing of New York harbor, the Panama Canal, and countless others. Dynamite also caused terrible injuries and great loss of life, and, in some cases, incalculable and irreparable environmental damage. Nobel was one of the richest men in a society rapidly transforming under the power of his invention, but with a troubled conscience, he left his estate to the establishment of the world-famous prizes that bear his name. As the use of explosives soared and growing populations consumed more food, nations scrambled for the scarce yet vital organic ingredient needed for both. The quest for nitrates takes us from the rural stables and privies of preindustrial Europe to the monopoly trading plantations in India and to the Atacama Desert in South America. Nitrates were as valuable in the nineteenth century as oil is in the twenty-first and were the cause of similar international jockeying and power politics. The "nitrogen problem" of creating inorganic nitrates was solved by an enigmatic German scientist named Fritz Haber. His breakthrough not only prolonged the First World War but became the foundation of the green revolution and the tripling of world population since then. Haber is also known as the "father of gas warfare" for his work on poison gas. When he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry, it sparked international outrage and condemnation. A Most Damnable Invention is a human tale of scientific obsession, shadowy immorality, and historical irony, and a testament to the capacity for human ingenuity during times of war. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 5 reviews)
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Most Damnable Invention 
I enjoyed this book. Very well written and explanatory. I was never bored by a continuos or lengthy explanation.
November 18, 2006 | |
Dynamite's explosive changes to the world
The age of explosives, which heralded the more sophisticated warfare choices of modern times, began in the mid-1800s with the inventions of one Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, whose discovery of dynamite made possible industrial changes and explosives. A MOST DAMNABLE INVENTION: DYNAMITE, NITRATES, AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD surveys the many changes the discovery of dynamite brought to the world; from the environmental damage it caused to the wealth it brought to its inventor, whose remorseful conscience led him to leave his estate to the establishment of the prizes which bear his name today. Nitrates were next on the list of discoveries, fostered by German scientist Fritz Haber whose breakthrough prolonged the First World War and helped triple the population of the world. No understanding of warfare or civilization's advancement would be complete without A MOST DAMNABLE INVENTION: DYNAMITE, NITRATES, AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD in hand.
March 13, 2006 | |
A World-shaking Invention & Earth-shaking Warfare. 
Swedish chemist Alfred Novel is the inventor of dynamite, meant to do the job gunpowder couldn't in a more explosive way. Gunpowder's potency and power cam from containment. While visiting in Luray Caverns thirty years ago, I first learned of saltpeter deep in the earth beneath the soil, described as the soul, sulphur the life, and charcoal the body of gunpowder. The Old English poets, John Milton and Samuel Coleridge, called sulphur a metaphor for the devil. Our local researcher of old Knoxville history wrote a two-part 1905 Christmastime horror story of kids playing with toy guns which would shoot real bullets. One of these toy guns, loaded with .22 shellls, exploded into half a dozen pieces, and the bullets fired from such could and did puncture a person's heart.
First, he tried nitroglycerin-fortified gunpowder in his experiments. They were seeking a smokeless, powerful "alternative to gunpowder...easy to store and transport" which Nobel was able to concoct in his French laboratory. Using nitrates from Chile who had taken over the plant in Atacama Desert from both Peru and Bolivia in 1880, used for fertilizer -- after guano (became a generic term for any fertilizer made from decaying bird feces regardless of its quality) was deemed too harmful to humans, causing thousands of workers' deaths in Peru. Nitrates are still used in fertilizer and was made into explosives by the Oklahoma City bomber.
"Dynamite was ideally shaped for insertion into bore holes, radically improving the productivity of mining, [marble] quarrying, and tunneling." It was also used in America to build the interstate highway systems to get rid of the multitude of enormous rockbeds in the right-of-way. It was needed by the "escalated demand brought about by the remarkable proliferation of high explosives." Dynamite ushered in a new era of industry and mining, also fantastic fireworks of which some plants have exploded and killed workers in this area.
It became the most sought after explosive in the world, and Nobel with his Nobel's Explosives Company, presided over a mighty industrial empire and accumulated a vast fortune. It was patented under two names, dynamite (after the Greek 'dynamas' for "strength" and Nobel's Safety Powder). He was "the chief progenitor of nearly every advance in the development of explosives during the late 19th century, yet he spent more time battling to protect his intellectual property than he did on research." His work and inventions, "though truly revolutionary in their near immediate impact on society, were astonishingly simple in concept and very easy to duplicate." In 1870, he said, "Even with such a luxury of patents, the protection in most cases would be illusory. I therefore propose giving the patenting of chemical improvements the name 'Taxation of inventors for the encouragement of Parasites'."
Despite ballistite being Nobel's greatest technical achievement and source of pride, it was to bring him only "disappointment and sorrow." When he died in 1896, he left his vast fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes. In 1917, Winston Churchill made this statement, "To utilize fully [Britain's] existing high explosive plants, it is necessary that we should ship from Chile approximately 788,000 tons of nitrates with the tonnage of only 600,000 agreed upon. New and very serious demands for TNT are also being made by the Admiralty for mines."
One of his Nobel prize winners (in 1920 for Physics) was Fritz Haber, known as the father of gas warfare." He'd completed research on ammonia synthesis, and developed synthetic nitrogen; his discovery "subtly yet radically altered the world by supplying unlimited nitrates for explosives and fertilizers." He also was awarded the Novel Prize in 1919 for Chemistry, the first postwar award for such. During the years of 1916 and 1917, the awards had been cancelled. "Twenty years later, Carl Bosch was also awarded a Nobel Prize for his role in adapting and expanding Haber's original model. L. F. Haber detailed his work on poison gas (used in both World Wars) in THE POISONOUS CLOUD.
In addition to this history of weapons and biographies of these two scientists who made earth-changing discoveries, Stephen R. Bown, a Canadian, has previously written THE AGE OF SCURVY, THE NATURALISTS and MOVING IN CANADA.
December 19, 2005 | |
The Boom in Boom
Each year we are treated to the announcements of the Nobel Prizes, and are invited to consider the irony particularly of the Peace Prize founded by Alfred Nobel who made his fortune perfecting explosives. While some might argue that explosives have brought victory and peace, their immediate effects are simply destruction, even in the cases of destruction directed toward non-lethal activities like making tunnels or canals. Our ambivalent relationship to explosives has been constant ever since we have had them, and is a key part of the story in _A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, and the Making of the Modern World_ (Thomas Dunn Books) by Stephen R. Bown. You would not expect this to be an exciting story, when you learn that a large part of it has to do with such things as compost and bird droppings and their strategic importance. Bown makes the case, though, that finding better explosives, and ways to tame them to our use, has been one of the foundations of our modern world.
Bown starts with black powder, and its manufacture from sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter, the last one, the supply of potassium nitrate to the mix, being difficult to get, as its formation from decomposition was not well understood. The hunger for the potassium nitrate of saltpeter grew gradually over the centuries, but then expanded due to scientific and technical advances in the nineteenth century. In 1864, Alfred Nobel began making nitroglycerine, which had been invented in Italy twenty years before, in his family laboratory in Stockholm. It was dangerous, and there was an international public outcry against Nobel and his efforts. In an attempt to tame nitroglycerine, Nobel tried combining it with inert ingredients, and found that a particular clay could be mixed with it to make the most stable explosive. Nitrates from organic sources only became more valuable. Bown estimates that Germany would have run out of armaments by 1916 if it had relied only on imported nitrates (mostly guano), but the second important chemist of this tale found an innovative way to get them in another fashion. After all, nitrogen is all around us, about 80% of the air we breathe, so there is an abundant supply. Extracting it from the air, however, was a goal unmet until Fritz Haber found a way to use high pressures and temperatures to get atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen to combine into ammonia, to which oxygen could be combined on the way to making nitric acid. It was enough to prolong Germany's participation in the war, and Haber also developed a way of releasing chlorine gas, making him known as "The Father of Gas Warfare".
Both Nobel and Haber justified their efforts not only by stressing the peacetime use of explosives, which are many and valuable, but also by the rationalization that making armaments more effective and terrible was really a humane effort that would shorten wars and result in fewer lives lost in the long run. Haber never saw the futility of such self-justification, and never had qualms over his work, but Nobel did. Nobel wrote, "I wish all guns with their belongings and everything could be sent to hell, which is the proper place for their exhibition and use." The guns were not restricted to that theater, of course, and Nobel became enormously rich. His peculiar will setting up the Nobel Prizes might be seen as some sort of attempt at atonement. Explosives, like all our gadgets, are neither good nor bad; the uses to which they are put determine that. Bown explains that they are only reflections of the duality of the human mind: "On the one hand, murderous, frightening, and destructive; on the other hand, optimistic, determined, and wildly inventive." Their story, dramatically told here with much insight into human cleverness and human folly, is an important one in understanding human civilization.
December 06, 2005 | |
Interesting Information.... Oddly Put Together 
There is much interesting information presented in this book. The topic of explosives is discussed from earliest times to essentially the end of World War I. The contributions of Alfred Nobel are particularly prominent, as are those of Fritz Haber towards the end of the book. The author's focus is mainly on the historical, political and sociological aspects rather than the technical and scientific details of the various inventions - in other words, no detailed recipes or chemical formulas of explosives are provided. The only aspect of this book with which I had some difficulty is its timeline which is rather erratic. The author zigzags from medieval times to the nineteenth century, then back to olden times then back again to more modern times, etc. Other than possibly being somewhat annoying for some readers, this format has resulted in a certain amount of repetition of some of the facts. Nevertheless, this odd quirk does not detract from the fact that the book does contain much very interesting information. It should be of great interest to history buffs, particularly those interested in the history of science and technology.
November 01, 2005 | |
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