In 1868, a frail, anxious man boarded a British train, lugging a suitcase laden with 20 pounds of explosives. Though the Swedish industrialist risked prison if authorities discovered his travel bag’s combustible contents, he didn’t seek to detonate his new explosive, but to sell it. After years of experimentation, Alfred Nobel was ready to cash in on his newly patented invention that would revolutionize the world—dynamite. 

Nobel’s innovation harnessed nitroglycerin’s volatile energy and marked a quantum leap forward from gunpowder, which for centuries had been the world’s most potent explosive. Reliable, portable and by some estimates 10 times more powerful than gunpowder, dynamite lit the fuse of the Second Industrial Revolution and transformed civil engineering, mining, warfare and revolutionary movements. “So much we take for granted as part of an industrial society would not have been possible without dynamite,” says Stephen R. Bown, author of A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates and the Making of the Modern World. 

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1833, Nobel spent part of his childhood in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father, Immanuel, manufactured explosive munitions and underwater mines for the Russian military. Steering his son away from an interest in poetry and toward the family business, Immanuel Nobel dispatched 17-year-old Alfred to Paris, where he worked in the laboratory of Théophile-Jules Pelouze and encountered Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, who had invented nitroglycerin in 1847.   

Although considerably more powerful than gunpowder, nitroglycerin had a sizable downside: It blew up randomly. The highly unstable liquid proved extremely sensitive to movement and heat. Even a single equine misstep on a cobblestone street could blow up a horse-drawn carriage. Following dozens of accidental detonations, some states and countries banned nitroglycerin’s use and transport. 

Severely injured by glass splinters when a nitroglycerin drop combusted in a test tube, Sobrero was frightened by his creation. “When I think of all the victims killed during nitroglycerin explosions, and the terrible havoc that has been wreaked, which in all probability will continue to occur in the future, I am almost ashamed to admit to be its discoverer,” he admitted.   

Nobel, however, saw nitroglycerin’s commercial potential if he could tame its volatility. Toiling for long hours, Nobel undertook experiments so dangerous that they twice blew up his laboratory, such as an 1864 explosion that killed several people, including his youngest brother, Emil, and led to the banishment of his experiments from Stockholm city limits.

Two discoveries, however, enabled Nobel to become the first producer of nitroglycerin on an industrial scale. His development of a blasting cap—a wooden plug filled with gunpowder ignited by a fuse—ensured a controlled detonation. He also found he could stabilize nitroglycerin by adding kieselguhr, a fine sand consisting of fossilized algae, to create a putty-like substance that could be molded into sticks and coated with stiff paper. In 1867, Nobel received a patent for “dynamite”—based on the Greek word for “power,” dynamis—which was also marketed as “Nobel’s Safety Blasting Powder.” 

Dynamite immediately transformed civil engineering. Construction crews that had relied on dangerous, inefficient blasting powder now had a safer, more transportable and more powerful alternative. While gunpowder could only blast small sections of rock, dynamite sticks improved the efficiency of explosions. “You could place dynamite in holes drilled into stones, and it would blast out. It’s not just a massive increase in explosion capacity. It changes the direction of the explosion, so that it’s now blasting outward,” Bown says.   

Nobel’s invention saved time and lives. Dynamite allowed laborers to conquer difficult geological formations and rugged terrain to build the railroads, canals, bridges, tunnels and highways that stitched together America and the world with wide-ranging implications for trade, migration and globalization. Dynamite made possible engineering marvels such as the Panama Canal, Brooklyn Bridge, London Underground and Hoover Dam.  

Trading their picks and shovels for dynamite, miners extracted more ore with less labor. Miners using Nobel’s explosive more easily harvested coal and the metals that fueled the Second Industrial Revolution, such as copper, lead and iron. Additionally, the ability to blast gypsum and lime deposits spurred the development of concrete and cement, which transformed construction. 

While Nobel intended dynamite to facilitate construction, it quickly became a tool for destruction as well. Although the inventor understood dynamite’s potential use as a weapon of war, he believed that the more destructive the weapon, there was greater chance for lasting peace through deterrence. “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war. . . On the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops,” he commented in 1891. 

Nobel’s hope that dynamite could deter wars, however, was quickly dashed. Just three years after dynamite’s introduction, both sides in the Franco-Prussian War used it in combat, and anarchists wielded dynamite to destroy public monuments during the subsequent Paris Commune of 1871. 

Dynamite made it easier to breach fortified positions and blow up defenses. In subsequent wars, armies dynamited wars, armies dynamited roads, bridges, canals and dams —the very infrastructure the explosive made possible. Nobel’s invention made warfare even more lethal as dynamite was used as an explosive in mines, grenades, torpedoes and artillery shells. 

Since it was cheap, safe to transport and easy to use, dynamite also became the weapon of choice for anarchists, saboteurs and revolutionaries. From his exile in New York, Irish nationalist Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa established a “dynamite school” in Brooklyn to train volunteers in the handling and use of explosives, while anarchist newspapers described how to make dynamite bombs. “It’s an easily transportable, small-scale substance that could fit in a suitcase and do tremendous damage,” Bown says. “You can’t roll up 12 barrels of black powder and have no one notice as opposed to a tiny, triggered explosion in which all you need is a suitcase. Dynamite transformed terrorism like it did war and civil engineering.” 

With access to the same firepower as nation-states, rogue actors ramped up their use of dynamite for political violence in the 1880s. Russia’s Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 when a revolutionary threw a bomb at him. During Chicago’s Haymarket Riot in 1886, an unknown person tossed a dynamite bomb into a phalanx of police during a labor rally, resulting in gunfire that left at least eight dead. In the early 1880s, Irish nationalists dynamited government and civilian targets in Great Britain, including the Tower of London, House of Commons and Scotland Yard. 

With 355 patents and ownership of nearly 100 explosives and munitions factories, Nobel was enormously wealthy by 1895. A year prior to his 1896 death, the “dynamite king” reworked his will to bequeath most of his fortune to establish annual awards to those who “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. (The Nobel Prize for Economics was added in 1968.) 

Although Nobel never explained his motivation for creating the prizes, which were first awarded in 1901, a popular story holds that when newspapers erroneously reported his death in 1888—instead of that of his brother—he read an unflattering obituary that called him a “merchant of death.” While that obituary has never been found, Nobel may have still been driven at the end of his life to change his legacy and donate profits partially gained from warfare. As Bown says, “He devoted himself to philanthropy to counterbalance the moral gray area he perceived resulted from the explosives.”