It does go off easily when one tries to transport it.. which is why raw nitro is seldom transported. Dynamite was invented as a way to stabilize it and make it safer to handle and transport. When transporting nitro, they fill the bottles all the way, leaving no air in the bottle, because even a droplet splashing around inside the bottle can detonate it.
@Tt Miller I think TNT is relatively cheap and easy to make. When compared to the cost of the Manhatten Project those 500 tons will be a drop in the ocean.
I remember well, attempting to explain the characteristics of nitroglycerin to my father who had discovered that I was using the rod propellant from his 303 British ammunition as fire starter. I also remember that it was no use to try, as fear of what (to him) was unknown would always trump anything I knew.
Those photographs of the TNT detonation are pretty amazing. 5:19 Look at the steel casing on the tube/cylinder thing, the shockwave from the TNT makes it look like it's rubber or elastic... _Steel!_ Thats awesome... haha
TNT C6H2(NO2)3CH3 is classed as an Oxygen Deficit explosive. - it only has six oxygens for 7 carbons and 5 hydrogens. It has a very characteristic black smoke plume.
I think the professor is confusing tnt with picric acid when he talks about the Canary girls, picric was a dye that had tremendous explosive power and was bright yellow in color, it was the main British explosive in ww1 .
Hello, i have a question about oxigen balance. How does affect oxigen balance in high explosives? I want to mean for example, if we compare rdx with pentryte; rdx has less oxigen than pent? So what effect has this oxy balance when these stuff is set off? Is better more oxigen, less?? What.
@@longimanusisurus132 The oxygen balance doesn't seem to be a major factor in effectiveness of TNT for high bruisant purposes. It is mixed with ammonium nitrate to make Amatol which is much more oxygen balanced, less bruisant, but a lot cheaper. It's also mixed with a host of other explosives for much the same reasons.
I worked with dynamite [ok, played with it!] years ago, and I can tell you there is no headache worse than a nitroglycerine withdrawal headache! Those dilated veins and capillaries [I hear this as 'cap-pillories' and not the American cap-pill-airies. Thanks BBC!] draw tight when the nitro runs out! Think deep 'brain-freeze' pain for about three days! This is why you carry nitro 'samples' home!
+Steve Johnson You DO get withdrawal effects after long term nitroglycerin exposure since your body adjusts for the vasodilation. When you stop using it after building a tolerance you suffer from vasoconstriction and the pains associated. Medical administration of nitroglycerin includes gradual dose reduction procedures because of this.
***** Vasoconstriction is quite literally the cause of headaches. Nitroglycerin withdrawals do cause headaches. And it would depend entirely on how much the person was playing with nitroglycerin, what the methods of exposure were, and on the individual in question.
+Greg Gallacci I've had a powder headache working in mines. Staying around after a blast and breathing the blast smoke (not all the nitroglycerine explodes but it is vaporized) and the headache starts and doesn't quit for hours. Aspirin didn't help me.
Very cool. Back in 1992 I studied chemistry, second year had a unit of explosive chemistry - we got to make some (a very small amount) of TNT, and much more nitrocellulose in prac - those were the days!
there's a slight mistake in this vid. TNT does not have enough oxygen to burn all the carbon even to the monoxide form. That's why ammonium nitrate is sometimes needed to increase the oxygen and hence the energy
I've been to the crater that was created in operation sailors hat on Kaho'olawe. It was... rather startling how big it was. Come to think of it, that whole island was pretty startling...
The copper residue is from the copper liner, which actually penetrates the steel, not the detonator, the detonator will be flying the other way in a shaped charge.
You may also recall the 1917 explosion in Halifax,Canada. A ship carrying gun cotton collided with another ship,a fire broke out and consequently exploded. Over 2000 were killed and 9000 were inured.
2:55 The copper wasn't from the detonator. The copper was a cone with the widest end at the front, towards the target, and the narrow end, (where the actual detonator is), is to the rear. The explosive material is shaped around the copper cone, and when the device explodes, melts the copper into a plasma that burns through the target.
There is no plasma involved, that is a myth. It doesn't go above a few hundred degrees C, IIRC. The enormous pressure just forces the liner material to act as if it was a fluid.
7:55 How do you keep a huge explosion secret? Something like this happened at Port Chicago near San Fransisco. An ammunition ship was being loaded and it exploded. The ship's anchor was found atop Mount Diablo, a 3500 foot high peak several miles away from the port.
The ships anchor was found on top of a 3500 foot mountain peak several miles away? I highly doubt that, no way would an uncontrolled explosion send an un aerodynamic, heavy and large object that far, even if it's humongous,.
Thee bright-yellow color of skin of "Canary girls of Chilwell", most probably, was because not of TNT, but of "Lyddite" (picric acid, trinitrophenol, TNP).
Wasn't going to weigh in but in both nitroglycerin and TNT manufacture there is a second step that imparts a yellow hue to the final product. That yellow color is readily absorbed into porous material including skin.
I love watching these videos just because they remind me of just how much I actually learned from my university studies... which, as it turns out, is quite a bit more than I would have expected.
Dynamite and nitroglycerin causes dreadful headaches from blood vessel dilation. We sometimes used dynamite on our farm and you did not wear gloves you would get "explosive" headaches. A few years ago I was in the hospital for heart and blood pressure problems I would nearly cry whenever it was time for the nitro dose, morphine would hardly dull the pain.
the way you guys are teaching this information is great i would hae had a bigger intrest in chemistry if this is the way i was thought in school instead of text booxs and boring slide notes vids are awsome keep them up :)
we did several explosive experiments when I was studying chemistry at "O" Level in the 1980s, It is a shame schoolboys don't do anything practical these days,
The TNT delay is on the order of 0.003 second. Fuzes using this full explosive-only TNT-type delay (base fuzes, for example, at the far end of the shell away from the target they hit) are called "non-delay" (they can have longer delays made inside the fuze, but that is not part of the explosive charge itself), as compared to "instantaneous" for nose impact fuzes ("Point Detonating" or "Direct Action") where the fuze firing shock on crushing against the target moves the blast sequence to the main explosive charge *backward* as the shell moves forward, so the shell center only moves a tiny amount forward as it is destroyed nose-to-base (as in those Dynamite pictures) even though that TNT delay happens there too.
another early use for both nitroglycerine and shaped charges was in oil wells; tubes of nitro were set off inside early oil wells to frack them & release more oil from the formation. shaped charges are still used today to perforate the steel casings to allow oil & gas to flow into the wellbore.
By that time, picric acid was not really being used any more as an explosive, more as a feedstock for making better ones. Its sensitivity was problematic and it wasn't very stable ... and the devastating Halifax explosion had turned people off of picric acid. It was TNT that turned the Canary Girls yellow. Of course, if picric acid was used in the process somewhere (I don't know the TNT process offhand), then there might have been a route for contamination.
Having handled artillery shells and their picric acid booster charges, what I saw was that TNT is an off-WHITE color. Five years later, I made my own picric acid (2,4,6-trinitroPHENOL), which was QUITE YELLOW, thank you very much! Oh, and while nitroglycerine can be set off with a five-pound weight dropped from four inches, I also made some mercury fulminate, which can be set off with the same amount of weight dropped from only TWO inches. Always thought-proving when making primary explosives! 😄😄
At circa 7:12 the Prof says the explosion occurred in the ammonium nitrate (AN) and TNT works. AN + TNT mixtures were used as shell fillers (" amatols"). Both the Allies & Germany used amatols to "extend" supplies of TNT. The problem with picric acid is that it forms extremely shock/friction sensitive salts with common metals such as Fe, Cu, Zn ... for which a small amount of the salt can detonate a large amount (such as the main charge in a cannon shell). Premature detonation in the barrels of artillery is bad for the soldiers. Guess what, munitions are commonly made of Fe, Cu, Zn, ...
@@schautamatic I am really confused because it seems that pure picric acid is also pale yellow. I made some and at first my picric acid was exactly that. Pale yellow. But after a recrystallization it turned very yellow. I'm not sure why. Possibly sodium ion contamination that formed some sodium picrate? The recrystallization was somewhat of a failure though. No proper crystals were formed and the contents of the flask bumped and spilled out a lot of the contents which was quite a shame.
"They poured some out on a brick, gave me the hammer, said stroke it gently and I did... and it went off with one hell of a bang!" .. Sentence of the year :-)
I love these videos. I have fond memories of my chemistry education. I get the Ah-Ha pleasant recall of the reactions and the fascination still lives in this retired old soul.
i just want to say thanks, your vids have helped me through a leave chemistry and i just got accepted into medical school thanks to my good grades in chemistry, i always found you an inspiration :)
Some errors: TNT does NOT contain enough oxygen to "turn all the carbon into carbon dioxide" (claimed at 4:28). Only part of the carbon is able to react and it forms CO, NOT CO2 (5:30 in the video).
The term "a banging headache" comes from the old workers involved in the production of Nitro Glycerin as it does indeed cause a crashing headache in some people.
In my experience the snowflake soyboy youth hate the old cartoons from those times saying they are violent and the characters are so mean to each other. They have no capacity to see humor in slapstick and appear to not be able to really laugh at anything. So sad.
2:55 - I may be about ten years late but presumably the traces of copper are not from the detonator casing but rather the copper liner which is compressed/directed by the shaped charge (The Munroe Effect) into a hypersonic fluid-like "jet" which causes the actual penetration.
The penetration depth of a missile or shell before detonation is controlled by a delay fuse,not the time of initiation of the explosive.TNT has a VOD of approx 7000ms,which is virtually instantaneous.
0:13 I could imagine the scientist looking back at this video and being like "Wait, I don't remember surviving that..Where did you get this footage? Is that even nitro exploding?"
@Epblueyes First, sulfur hexafluoride is not an element. Second, it's used as a gaseous dielectric medium (it works much better than air), as a contrast agent for ultrasound imaging, as a tracer gas, as a waveguide pressurizer...
Sorry to be picky .. TNT isn't yellow that is Picrate Acid, and the ladies mentioned at 6-56 were working with picrates not TNT . Picrate was also used as a textile dye.
TNT is LESS SENSITIVE than nitroglycerine with a somewhat lower detonation velocity. It does NOT delay before exploding. TNT is used for bombs that penetrate before exploding because of its lower sensitivity so it does not detonate on impact. Any delay in detonation is in the FUSE, not the explosive itself. TNT is deficient in oxygen so it is significantly less powerful than nitroglycerine. This deficiency is overcome by the addition of ammonium nitrate or other oxidizers.
@sk8erguy552 Glycerine is the common name for the compound propan-1,2,3-triol. It comes from a Greek word meaning "sweet," because glycerine has a sweet taste. Nitroglycerine is glycerine which has been modified by the addition of nitrate groups. Dynamite was an advertising name introduced by Alfred Nobel to boost sales, and doesn't really mean much of anything.
Fun fact: Mr. Nobel, who discovered nitroglycerin, was told by his doctors to take nitroglycerin for his heart problems. I refused to consume something that he considered to be a very dangerous explosive. He died of heart problems. EDIT: K so he didn't discover it. He made dynamite and made his fortune off of nitroglycerin.
"It was found out very quickly that it was very explosive." I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that "very quickly" probably means "during the process of purifying the very first sample".
Near where I live (not far from Nottingham) is Fauld, where 3000 tonnes TNT equivalent exploded at an arms dump in 1944. The 120m deep crater is still visible on google maps, although the tags are all slightly out, the crater is in the wooded area just to the south. Its still fenced off as somewhere underneath are still thousands of tonnes of explosive.
one small detail that i am compelled to note here is that a 'shaped charge' doesen't actualy use the explosion to make the hole. well ofcourse the explosion is needed but its a 'lance' of copper that makes the hole. see the copper is made into a < shape with the explosive on the side with the pointy bit(right in this case). so that pointy bit melts and shoots out at a quite high speed, witch melts/shoots through the steel or whatever it in its way.
planetwalker compared to the first nukes todays nukes are like smart cars they put out very little radiation due to the fact that they are more efficient and don't leave as much radioactive materials left over
+Michael Jones Uhhhhh no incorrect here. Left over radioactive materials is not what fallout is..... its radioactive dust that gets picked up from the ground along with ash. It become radioactive due to the fission action occurring in the explosion.
+Michael Jones that's true, though thing about the thousands of nukes those degenerates detonated, in water, high atmosphere, underground etc.. that's massive pollution, plus every single atom is radioactive.. that's silly when you think about it 1 atom = 1 potential cancer or whatever autoimmune disease mutation etc ! think about the millions or billions of particles sprayed in the atmosphere, scary !
i guess professor made a little mistake. if you trow a drop of nitroglicerin in tne fire it will slowly burn, but if you trow a dynamite stick in the fire it will sure blow up because it will reach the critical temperature. in fact, dynamite is a very good explosive but its almost not used anymore because its very unstable and a lot of accidents happen when people use it. its the most sensitive industrial explosive there is.
Yiṣḥāq David It is a UK dessert, similar to a swiss roll (or jelly roll in the US) but filled with ice cream too. In fact it is just a tube of ice cream surrounded by a single turn of sponge and jam not a complete spiral to the middle like a swiss roll, which is probably what the chap was thinking of.
There's a contact explosive that is stable when liquid but highly unstable when dry. Itdoesn't have any real industrial application but chem students have been known to paint it on toilet seats (very carefully) - it usually lifts the toilet-seat user a foot or so off the seat and burns all the hair from their backsides. (you have to rinse the excess from any container with ethanol)
George Smith Two kinds of detonators; electrical (push the t-handle on the box) & pyrolitic; firework style. Both provide heat to an azide compound. Look up azides: they're great fun ;D
You cant make dynomite explode with a usual fuse as it doesnt produce any shockwave. You need a shockwave from another explosion to detonate the dynomite.
No, they just didn't show that you push a detonator with the fuse crimped into it into the stick, as opposed to putting the fuse in directly. Now some may have had them tape the fuse to the outside or something, but if the fuse was sticking out the end, it was coming out of blasting cap/detonator.
@sk8erguy552 Nitroglycerine is an organic name. Nitro is given since you're nitrating glycerin, an alcohol (alcohols are organic molecules who's most important functional group is an -OH, like ethanol which is CH3-CH2OH). Dynamite is just a name. Trinitrotoluene (TNT) is the same, toluene is another organic molecule, and there's those nitrated nitro- groups, but there's 3 of those. You nitrate these compounds by using certain acids, and then you get these.
Hole inside steel block is made using "shaped charge" - Munroe effect. Copper casing is not from detonator which is made from aluminium, its copper made conical charge cavity.
Indeed, it's a remarkable irony that the same chemical often used to destructively end lives, is also an effective drug (still in use today) for prolonging them. I'd be very curious to know how effectively that Nitroglycerin permeates human skin to enter the bloodstream. It is commonly prescribed as sublingual lozenges, & can pass through the oral mucosa relatively quickly.
The original dynamit was not a success. It was too weak and miners still used nitroglycerin. The real success was "rubber dynamite", which is a gel of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin. Modern dynamite is mainly ammonium nitrate with some fuel, sensitized with some nitroglycerin or nitroglycol. In civil construction the explosives most frequently used is emulsion explosives, which are a mixture of an ammonium nitrate solution and fuel, sensitized by microspheres or similar. None of the components are themselves high explosives, and the resulting mixture is extremely insensitive to accidentalt detonation.
Eric Lin Except Jay Fischer is right: TNT stands for Tri-nitro-toluene NOT ammonium nitrate... We do use AN-FO (ammonium nitrate + fuel oil) but it isn't called dynamite.
I'm not an expert, just an old Marine, but it's my understanding that dynamite is "close to" as stable as C4 as long as you haven't let it weep. I've burned C4 many times to heat up my coffee, but I gotta say, even I'd be a little nervous putting dynamite in a fire. There's a reason the military really doesn't use it anymore. Someone better qualified than me, may have a difference of opinion.
My father told me as a boy ( born 1906) he and his brothers would break or cut pieces from dynamite sticks. They would put the pieces on an anvil and hit them with a sledge hammer. The fun was the sledge hammer being blown backwards over their heads. That dynamite was nothing more than sawdust or a form of clay into which nitroglycerin had been added. The sticks indicated the percentage of nitro in the dynamite stick.
I had a mathematics teacher in my first year if high school who had been a powder monkey in the mines of outback Australia in the 50s and he would tell us stories of using dynamite, gelignite, RDX and TNT to blow up things and how different explosives were used for different applications. Also he told us how one day when they had finished a job and they had some sticks of gelignite over and so during their lunch break they packed them into the base of a huge tree stump and let it off. The stump shot hundreds of meters in the air which was great..... until it came down and created a huge crater! Of course no one knew how had actually done it... of course!
@4ristotle This comment didn't deserve to be down rated. People need to learn the difference between disagreement and censorship, besides there was nothing malicious said in this post, it was just honest feedback.
@loveslashdeath i think so too.based on what they said, and on the undergraduate chemistry I know, i think that only a small modification would be required to the formulation of the TNT stick such that some extra oxidizing agent would be required to both set off the explosion, and to help burn all of the TNT powerder.
4:22 "These have enough oxygens in here to make all these carbons turn into carbon dioxide". /counts the atoms 6 atoms of oxygen, 7 atoms of carbon Nope.
That's why it always makes me smile when movies show explosions in space, because one condition for an explosión to take place is oxigen and in space there is no oxigen.... Excellent videos. thank you for sharing
Explosions really need no external oxygen. It would not be possible to get oxygen in from the surrounding air that fast anyway, so that cannot be the mechanism. The mechanism is really a rearrangement of the atoms that are present in the explosive molecules, so that lots of gas is formed and lots of energy is released. Which can happen in space too. What is funny though about most movie images of explosions in space, is that the explosions end up in clouds that stay. Outward motion is not decelerated at all in the vacuum of space.
Explosives which require outside oxygen source are useless. Explosives contain both the fuel and the oxygen within them. Ammonium Nitrate/ Fuel Oil (ANFOS) for instance... the fuel oil provides the carbon based fuel, and the ammonium nitrate provides the oxygen. Koen Th described it correctly. Another funny thing is in most movies, etc, there is noise from the blast, which is not possible in vacuum.
