102 



JSitro- Glycerine. 



find it necessary to mix their yellow, acid, fuming and de- 

 composing products, with sand, rotten stone, sawdust, gun- 

 powder, plaster paris, red lead, etc., and for each mixture 

 exercising their inventive powers in fanciful names, as giant 

 powder, dynamite, dualin, lithofracteur, selenitic powder, 

 metalline, etc., whose value may be inferred from the in- 

 ventors and salesmen's assertions, that these compounds 

 are stronger than pure nitro-glycerine, as if a part could 

 be greater than the whole. 



There is an element of force in blasting, which has not 

 been sufficiently investigated. Powder burns from particle 

 to particle ; fluid nitro-glycerine in its pure state, when it 

 receives the shock on its surface instantaneously transmits 

 it throughout its whole mass ; and indeed the shock of an 

 explosion of nitro-glycerine, separated by a layer of ten 

 feet of water, will fire another charge of nitro-glycerine, so 

 that the two explosions cannot be distinguished by the ear. 

 The explosion of the whole mass of nitro-glycerine, is 

 therefore, in each atom, simultaneous. Another element 

 of force has been overlooked, the force of the initial ex- 

 plosion, which starts these nitro-compounds into gaseous 

 matter. Professor Abel, of the Woolwich Arsenal, twenty- 

 four years after the invention of gun cotton, discovered 

 and illustrated this fact, a fact which I had to provide for 

 when warned that two out of every five attempts to explode 

 nitro-glycerine on the Baltimore and Ohio R. R., were 

 failures. To ensure certainty of explosion of a charge of 

 any of these nitro-compounds, so that they may develop 

 their utmost force, or, in other words, be converted into gase- 

 ous form in the least possible atom of time, a very violent and 

 sudden initial force must be started on them ; thus a cable 

 of gun cotton turned round a post of 8 in. diameter, and 

 fired by a match, will not destroy the post, but if a copper 

 cap containing 35 grains of fulminate mercury be enclosed 

 in the core of such a gun cotton cable, and fired by elec- 



