150 Nitro-Glycerine: [April, 
acumen and a desire to aid industrial progress in the fullest sense 
of that term. 
It is not undesirable to refer, although very briefly, to the 
history and manufacture of nitro-glycerine, so as to carry our 
readers along with us intelligibly to the conclusion of our remarks. 
Nitro-glycerine has been known as a blasting material in the 
operations of mining, quarrying, and railway-cutting, for about 
three years; but it is fully twenty years since it was discovered by 
a young Italian, M. Ascagne Sobrero, while he was a student in 
the laboratory of the well-known French chemist, Pelouze. Briefly, 
it may be stated that Sobrero obtained it as a result of the action of 
a mixture of strong nitric and sulphuric acids on glycerine. He 
examined it somewhat minutely, as also did several other chemists, 
continental and British. Amongst them Dr. J. H. Gladstone is 
not unworthy of mention. He reported at considerable length 
regarding it to the Chemical Section at the Cheltenham Meeting of 
the British Association.* 
In course of time many facts were noted with reference to its 
true chemical nature and its chemical and physical properties, the 
chief of which, of course, was its great explosiveness, or rather its 
great power as an explosive compound. The practical utilization of 
this property was left for Mr. Alfred Nobel, a Swedish mining 
engineer. He was quick enough to observe that it might possibly 
be used in mining operations, and scientific enough to discover how 
it could be manufactured on the large scale, chemically pure, and 
always of the same quality in every respect. Former observers had 
been much troubled with it, owing to its instability, its tendency to 
decompose spontaneously, and generally with explosive violence. 
All chemists who know anything of the early history of gun-cotton 
will remember that chemical instability and spontaneous decom- 
position were almost invariably associated with it. Some French 
chemists still regard it as a very unstable, and, therefore, unsafe 
substance ; but Von Lenk and Professor Abel have amply demon- 
strated that, if thoroughly cleansed raw cotton be used and every 
trace of acid be removed from the manufactured product, the ten- 
dency of gun-cotton to spontaneous decomposition is completely 
overcome. Nobel did exactly the same for nitro-glycerine, and 
its manufacture soon became im his hands one of the practical arts. 
He secured patent richts for his process of manufacture in most 
European states, and himself settled down on the Elbe, in the 
vicinity of the city of Hamburg, as a manufacturer of the new 
explosive, or “blasting oil,” as he chose to call it. 
There are now five establishments in existence—collectively 
aged eleven years—where nitro-glycerine is manufactured on the 
* ‘ British Association Reports,’ 1856. 
