Creation
After the death of his younger brother Emil in an 1864 nitroglycerin explosion at the family's armaments factory in Heleneborg, Stockholm, Nobel founded Nitroglycerin AB in Vinterviken, Stockholm. A year later, having found some German business partners, he launched the Alfred Nobel & Company in Germany, building an isolated factory in the Krümmel hills of Geesthacht near Hamburg. This business exported a liquid combination of nitroglycerin and gunpowder known as "Blasting Oil", but it was extremely unstable and difficult to transport, as shown in numerous catastrophes. The buildings of the Krümmel factory itself were destroyed in 1866 and again in 1870.
In April 1866, the company shipped three unmarked crates of nitroglycerin to California for the Central Pacific Railroad, who wished to experiment with its blasting capability to speed the construction of a tunnel through the Sierra Nevada for the First Transcontinental Railroad. One of the crates exploded, destroying a Wells Fargo office in San Francisco and killing fifteen people, leading to a complete ban on the transport of liquid nitroglycerin in California.
Liquid nitroglycerin was widely banned elsewhere as well, and this finally led to Alfred Nobel & Company's development of dynamite in 1867, made by mixing the nitroglycerin with the diatomaceous earth (kieselguhr) found in the Krümmel hills. Competitors tried to mix nitroglycerin with other inert absorbents in many different combinations to get around Nobel's tightly controlled patents.
Read more about this topic: Dynamit Nobel
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