A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, and the Making of the Modern World

by Stephen R. Bown

Book Overview

Humanity's Desire to Harness the destructive capacity of fire is a saga that extends back to the dawn of civilization. The true age of explosives, when they radically and irrevocably changed the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670045241
• ISBN13: 9780670045242
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Viking
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.

Customer Reviews

More bang for the buck!!

This book is an excellent combination of many things: History,Biography,Business,Politics,Warfare,Sociology,Science,Advancementof Civilization,Human Nature,Greed,Oppression,Philanthrophy.Loneliness,Failure,Success,and even much more. The author covers the development of explosives from its earliest days to modern times,or at least up to pre nuclear times. A large part of the book centers around the life and work of Alfred Nobel,why he experimented with explosives ,and how he invented Dynamite. Of course, inventions that promise an advantage in military power,great riches ,and particularly useful in making huge construction or destruction possible;will naturally have far reaching implications. These implications are well detailed and explained throughout the book.However;whenever mankind finds a new, valuable and limited resourse ;conflicts occur in its control;eventually the supply becomes scarce and an alternative is searched for. When the naturally occuring sources of nitrates can't keep up with the demand;then along comes a person who is nohere as well known in history as Nobel,Fritz Haber,who develops methods to manufacture synthetic nitrogen and whole new worlds of advancement open up.While explosives,more often than not,thought of as warfare weapons ;the discovery of synthetic nitrogen,changed the world's food production with its ability to provide cheap,and highly efficient fertilizer for growing crops.While, with every advancement,there are also unforseen problems.In this case, great advancement in food supplying ,came great advances in population.Now the earth has a population of over 6 billion where prior to the discovery of synthetic Nitrogen it was about 2 billion.Along with that,since the crops absorbe only a small amount of these "artificial" fertilizers,the rest end up in oceans and rivers,creating huge,uncontrolled growth in algae and its accompanying problems. Another part of the book covers what Nobel did with the huge fortunes his discovery brought to him.He had no family,and left almost everything to fund the Nobel Foundation that awards prizes we have all come to hear about. In a way this book really looks at the great discoveries and advncement in civilization and wonders is it all really for the best. Mankind has always wondered this, and will continue to discover and ,advance and wonder.I guess the answer lies in the fact that ,despite the problems that come with advancement;they are never enough to turn back. Mankind has learned to live with the advancements made with Gunpowder and Dynamite; will we also learn to manage Nuclear Energy as well? Overall a very interesting and thought provoking book.

Most Damnable Invention

I enjoyed this book. Very well written and explanatory. I was never bored by a continuos or lengthy explanation.

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.

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 se

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.