He may have been inspired to create the Nobel Prize after a premature obituary in a French newspaper called him a "merchant of death."Īs for TNT, it's also a high explosive, but it ain't dynamite. (Well, it wasn't that safe an explosion at the family factory killed Alfred's brother Emil.) Nobel used the huge profits from his dynamite patent to endow the Nobel prizes-one of which is for peace. And because it was stable and wouldn't explode from jiggling, like nitroglycerin, dynamite was initially marketed as Nobel's Safety Blasting Powder. By combining nitroglycerine with diatomaceous earth (the ground-up shells of microscopic diatoms, today used as a filtering agent in swimming pools) and sodium carbonate (found in baking soda and soaps), Nobel took explosives in a whole new direction. Patented in 1867 by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel (as in Nobel Prize), dynamite was discovered when old Alfie was looking for a way to make nitroglycerin more stable and less prone to, well, exploding in your face. But like any good misperception, that's just plain wrong. The Explanation: A lot of people use these two terms interchangeably, and the common misperception is that TNT is the chemical name and dynamite is the colloquial term. Use this little mnemonic to remember dynamite's inventor: "Winning a Nobel Prize would be dynamite!" The alternative, that winning would be TNT, just doesn't make any sense. The Quick Trick: If it's a white powder found in sticks, it's dynamite.
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