Blow Up the Earth? Not with Dynamite 



By Hudson Maxim 



These wonderful facts about explosives are taken from a chapter in the author's 

 recently published "Dynamite Stories." They indicate that to know all there 

 is to know concerning even dynamite is to fear practically nothing. — Editor. 



WHEN one of our big army or navy 

 cannon is fired, the time which 

 elapses from the instant of complete 

 ignition of the 

 powder charge to 

 the instant that 

 the projectile 

 leaves the muzzle 

 of the gun is about 

 the fiftieth or the 

 sixtieth of a 

 second, and in that 

 time the hard and 

 horn-like smoke- 

 less powder ma- 

 terial is burned 

 through only 

 about a sixteenth 

 of an inch; hence 

 the rate of com- 

 bustion or rate of 

 explosion of 

 smokeless powder 

 in a cannon is 

 about four inches 

 per second, while 

 it has been ascer- 

 tained by actual 

 experiments that 

 the rate of com- 

 bustion or rate of 

 explosion of dyna- 

 mite and other 

 high explosives is 

 about four miles 

 per second, so that 

 the rate of con- 



If a celestial giant should touch off a bomb immedi- 

 ately behind our earth, the earth would be thirty 

 thousand miles away before the bomb exploded 



around the sun, and 



sumption of smokeless powder, as com- 

 pared to that of a high explosive, is as are 

 four inches to four miles. 



As the time required for the projectile 

 to be thrown from a twelve-inch cannon 

 is only about the sixtieth of a second, sixty 

 of these huge guns could be placed side by 

 side and fired by electricity one after the 

 other, while grandfather's clock is making 

 but one tick. 



Our ideas of duration are but relative. 

 Great as is the speed of the detonative 

 wave, yet the speed of the earth in its 

 orbit is four times as great. If a celestial 



giant with a huge dynamite bomb the size 

 of the earth itself were to approach the 

 earth in its flight through space, and de- 

 tonate the bomb 

 immediately be- 

 hind the earth, it 

 would take half 

 an hour for the 

 bomb to explode; 

 that is to say, it 

 would take half an 

 hour or thirty 

 minutes for the ex- 

 plosive wave to 

 pass through the 

 eight thousand 

 miles of its diam- 

 eter. As the speed 

 of the earth in its 

 orbit is four times 

 as great as that 

 of the explosive 

 wave, the earth 

 would rush away, 

 leaving the bomb 

 about thirty thou- 

 sand miles behind 

 by the time it had 

 completely ex- 

 ploded. If the in- 

 terstellar ether 

 were a high ex- 

 plosive mixture 

 and were to be set 

 off, by the bomb, 

 the earth would 

 pass on clear 

 while coming back 



sun, 

 about six months later, would meet the 

 explosive wave still going. It would re- 

 quire nearly a year for such a detonative 

 wave to reach our sun from the earth. 



Can Our Earth Be Blown Up? 



We frequently hear the theory advanced 

 that planets and suns sometimes explode 

 from pent-up forces within them, and that 

 our earth might possibly blow up. Now, 

 the force exerted by a high explosive is 

 dependent entirely upon the pressure capa- 

 ble of being exerted by the gases liberated 



754 



