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.
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 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.
@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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
@@EarlColes-o9x Okay, well as far as the claim in my comment, I think the question is whether or not its energy density is actually higher or not. I don't know if it's actually a better explosive. If I recall correctly, ammonium nitrate is on the slower side of explosive velocity, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true of the mixture.
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 :)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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,
Bob, Thanks for that. I wish most comments were as good as yours. You may appreciate the following about explosives. (You may even know more about it and can correct me.) It is that the significant difference between black powered and high explosives like TNT is that the flame-front in TNT and nitroglycerine actually proceeds faster than the speed of sound in the material. And that the propagation may have something to do with light. That's why you don't need a tamper with HE.
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.
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,.
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.
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.
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.
"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 :-)
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.
@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.
This is a terrific section. I think to add to this set you should do a video on fulminated mercury. I could be wrong but I think that that is one of the main ingredients in the detonators.
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.
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.
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?"
Excellent one. The truth must be spoken: most anyone interested in chemistry will be riveted by talk about reaction explosions. Furthermore, while most people think of explosives only in terms of weapons, in fact explosives are used constructively and for the benefit of everyone FAR more than they're used in weapons.
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.
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.
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.
Everybody is ripping you apart, never mind Prof. I think your show's are brilliant and sometimes funny, I probably will never need to know that TNT came from nitroglycerin but it has entertainment value all the same!
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.
"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".
Yep. And that's one of the reasons why dynamite usually employs sawdust as the absorbent. The cellulose is a fuel, and uses the excess O2 to contribute to the blast. But in this day, dynamite is rarely used. It's been largely replaced by plastic explosives, which employ RDX as the main ingredient. They are much more stable, safer, and more powerful than dynamite.
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.
@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.
Here's a bit of interesting trivia..During the Spanish-American War, dynamite was the most powerful explosive available. But it could not be employed in artillery shells, because it could not stand the shock of being fired. This led to the creation of a unique weapon, the U.S. Navy ship, "Vesuvius." It was equipped with a giant AIR gun that worked like a pump-up Crosman or Daisy. It fired a finned torpedo-like projectile loaded with dynamite. It was used in an attack on the Cuban coast.
As I go on to study chemistry in like I hope I get the opportunity to meet Professor Poliakoff and the whole team at periodicvideos at some point, it would really be an honor.
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 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!
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.
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 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.
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.
@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...
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.
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 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.
chemistry can be used for many things, its good to see both sides that it is useful and can be destructive. Its scary sometimes when your product isn't well behaved and can end up on the ceiling.
Yes, unquestionably, TNT has a huge negative impact, but there is also the positive impact of explosives manufacturers not being constantly subject to the threat of the unstable nitroglycerin that was causing heavy casualties to production lines. I think I would consider that a benefit to the world.
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)
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.
"I was once asked to hit nitroglycerine... with a hammer." And this is how the professor's hair came to be. It's like a superhero origin story.
beeble2003 yea
beeble2003 **BOOM!** No more Chinese laundry.
I found myself in that boom.
Josh Adams i remember a disney character saying this in atlantis
I made nitroglycerine with age of 15 years, decades ago. And now i am Doctor in chemistry.
@@ludwigludwig3515 With a name like that, you should be.
This explains why in those old Crash Bandicoot games the nitroglyceryn crates explode instantly while the TNT crates have a short delay.
Proper science. Thanks 👍.
"Stroke it gently and it went off"? I'd like to see proof of that.
Cody!
If you only had to stroke it gently, it would explode if you tried to transport it
I was thinking of you this entire video.
i love ur videos codyn
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.
Yep, I was introduced to TNT by Warner Brothers animators as well.
ACME brand? endorsed by Wile E Coyote, Super Genius?
More like minecraft
Hahaha
Did tnt go off in the hair
Tnt toons
What I take from this video is: The professor eats chocolate for lunch.
The professor eats way too much chocolate for lunch
Ja wohl
Chocolate 🍫 is healthy is KETO friendly.
@@Interestingworld4567 I really hope you're joking.
@@somedonkus69420 Well, to be fair, chocolate with sufficiently high cocoa content IS keto friendly. However, it isn't particularly tasty.
0:14 Ah, I never tried to ask, but here he explains the "genesis" of his haircut ;)
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
What a joy it is to watch this gentle intelligent man share his love of science. This is peak civilisation.
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.
true. Unlike what is said at 4:25 it DOESN'T "have enough oxygen for all those carbons".
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 .
@@davemanning6424 acording to my Google search it was in fact TNT that turned there skin yellow, it reacted with melanin to create a yellow pigment
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 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.
Cordite, I did the same thing.
That was cordite,about 30 %nitroglycerin and 70 % nitro cellulose .
I used to steal my dad's .303 cartridges for the same thing haha.
" we're going to explode 500 tons of TNT"
" why ? "
" because this is America "
It was a part of the nuclear tests... essentially a calibration test for calculating the yield from nukes.
500 mega tons of TNT! Maka bigga booma!
I was thinking I'd like to have the money they spent on 500 tons of TNT.
@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.
You had me at explode.
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.
+Greg Gallacci xkcd: pumpkin carving
look at what the black hat guy does to his pumpkin ;P
Goodness, it's not like this is a prank! My pumpkin simply has chest pains!
(nitroglycerin IS used to treat angina)
I was a us army combat engineer. I love these explosives vids. Thanks for making them.
The most educational chemistry channel on TH-cam 😀👍
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.
Yes , the copper cone is to focus the expanding gases , cone turns to gas ,and the copper gas cuts the steel .
@@joeboscarino2380 the cone doesn't turn into gas, it gets accelerated to a very high velocity (~10 km\sec)
@@leouvarov8982 I think you'll find the copper gets turned into plasma, another state (beside solid, liquid, and gas).
When I think Chemistry Professor, this guy will now forever pop into my head. Awesome!
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!
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.
Roderick Cloutier I can clearly hear the history guy saying this in my head
I Love these videos,They should be shown in Schools everywhere
I found this channel through my Chen teacher, who showed us a few of their videos. Have been addicted to both Chem and the channel since.
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.
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
As Professor Poliakoff noted, the combination at the Chilwell plant killed over 200 workers on July 1st, 1918.
Are you sure, because from my studies amatol (TNT/AMMONIUM NITRATE) Is weaker than pure TNT. Lower R.E and lower velocity. Just by a little bit
@@EarlColes-o9x What is RE? Reaction energy?
@@DANGJOS Relative Effectiveness
@@EarlColes-o9x Okay, well as far as the claim in my comment, I think the question is whether or not its energy density is actually higher or not. I don't know if it's actually a better explosive. If I recall correctly, ammonium nitrate is on the slower side of explosive velocity, so I wouldn't be surprised if the same is true of the mixture.
"A bar of chocolate you know the kind you eat for lunch"
Well I'm having Chocolate for lunch from now on, the Professor said it's okay.
100g? Please. Anyone who eats chocolate for lunch knows that you do it by the pound. Or... half kilo? Damn metric system.
Damn imperial system
+NippelsoN The one and only only like 2 countries use it.
METRIC METRIC METRIC
And now the thread will digress into pointless argument about measurement systems
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 :)
0:11-0:18
Oh, come on. There's no way that joke was an accident.
For once in my life i didn't even see that one coming... uhhhh, i mean i didn't realize the ambiguity right away :D
Stroke means something different in UK lol
Well, pretty obvious that it was a joke as you'd normally say to someone to strike something gently. With an "i" and not with an "o".
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...
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.
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.
shaped charges are so cool
The Copper isn't melted, nor is it plasma, it is still a solid. Monroe Effect 101...
I am enjoying the knowledge that you include in your videos. It tickles me that it is virtually free to me to enjoy your work. Thanks!
My old chemistry teacher at school was called Tobias Nicholas Trevains T.N.T
lol.. cool. My son is William Andrew Ross.. W.A.R... small wonder he is a soldier.
@@VRossInMo lol
My son's initials are B.R.G.V. He's still only 2yo, but hopefully he'll live up to his name by not moving to Birmingham and joining a gang.
Cool story, bro.
As a Russian saying goes: Whatever you call a ship is how it will sail. Same applies to people.
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).
I thought Lyddites were those guys that hate technology.
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.
Mustard seed or safrin
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,
Bob,
Thanks for that. I wish most comments were as good as yours. You may appreciate the following about explosives. (You may even know more about it and can correct me.) It is that the significant difference between black powered and high explosives like TNT is that the flame-front in TNT and nitroglycerine actually proceeds faster than the speed of sound in the material. And that the propagation may have something to do with light. That's why you don't need a tamper with HE.
You mean TNT is not the same as Dynamite?
My life is a lie.
Yep.
Nitric acid and sulphuric acid you debil.
+Nicolas Broszky
I prefer torpex which is also insanely easy to make.
QB Mac
I thought Bon Scott from ACDC was both simultaneously.
Dude wrong channel
0:18 i must say, the professor is superman, he survived that experiment.
Mazaroth why?
Just search for “nitroglycerin” on TH-cam and you’ll see real explosions. They aren’t that impressive in low quantities.
hes missing fingers
Wasn`t it picric acid (Trinitrophenol) that was being loaded in the shells by the women? It is also used as a Dye and is canary yellow.
Correct! It was also called Lyddite, see my posting above. This needs correcting.
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.
I went to one of Col Shaw's lectures when I was at Nottingham University. Somewhat loud!
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,.
mistercococat peace You don't have to believe me. Look it up yourself. It was the Port Chicago Disaster.
*****
New Jersey doesn't matter even in New York. Why would it matter in California?
Mount Diablo is a 3849-foot mountain almost 14 miles from the port. The anchor never came close to the mountain;
Paul Sepe
I heard it was on top. And I know how high the mountain is. I rode a bike up more than once (3 or 4 times).
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.
0:11 _"Stroke it gently.."_ then hit it with a hammer, or before?
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.
"stroke it gently. and i did."
Hahaha
chemistry pranks be like
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.
Many nitrate compounds dilate capillaries causing a blood pressure drop, mostly in the head.
"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 :-)
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.
Stroke it gently, and I did 😂😂😂😂😂😂
Are you 11? So immature .
I am so lol
Rachet Diva Productions honestly i searched the comments just to make sure i wasn't the only one who that phrase stood out to ...
Everyone else was thinking the exact same thing. ;)
The Real Flenuan Every single person xD
Justin S. You forgot the best part "And it went off"
I'd really like to see a video on C-4 or semtex. Never knew dynamite could be thrown in fire. Great video!
5:03 is quite Minecraft-y.
@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.
The old man looks like he brushed his hair with dynamite.
This is a terrific section. I think to add to this set you should do a video on fulminated mercury. I could be wrong but I think that that is one of the main ingredients in the detonators.
TIL British people eat bars of chocolate for lunch.
I caught that too! :-)
lynth sigh. I use to do that growing up.
Not British.
English, not British.
@Zeeko Zappo You do realise... that it's England before Britain before UK. So an English person is English.
@Zeeko Zappo You're arguing semantics. Is a Canadian going to say that they're American since Canada is in North America? Are you ok?
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.
@TerminalRhinoVirus wow, never knew that
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.
I was really confused at 7:17
For a second...I thought that the Screensaver had jumped off of the screen. :p
3:00 the copper is probably from the shaped charge, liquid copper which shoots through the plate.
Not from the detonator
That double monitor setup.😂
I watch some proper rubbish on the TH-cam but this is my favourite channel ever.
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?"
Excellent one. The truth must be spoken: most anyone interested in chemistry will be riveted by talk about reaction explosions.
Furthermore, while most people think of explosives only in terms of weapons, in fact explosives are used constructively and for the benefit of everyone FAR more than they're used in weapons.
@0:02+ Now that answers all the questions about why his hair looks like that.
I love how he makes the molecule examples so damn cool
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.
Sobrero discovered NG, Nobel invented dynamite and more significantly the detonator.
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.
I wonder if today’s youth is going to know what TNT is in the absence of looney toons
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.
@@Songwriter376
Completely agree
Minecraft
@@EasyMoneyLuu minecraft
Everybody is ripping you apart, never mind Prof. I think your show's are brilliant and sometimes funny, I probably will never need to know that TNT came from nitroglycerin but it has entertainment value all the same!
A book about women turning yellow should be illustrated in color. JS
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.
"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".
Yep. And that's one of the reasons why dynamite usually employs sawdust as the absorbent. The cellulose is a fuel, and uses the excess O2 to contribute to the blast. But in this day, dynamite is rarely used. It's been largely replaced by plastic explosives, which employ RDX as the main ingredient. They are much more stable, safer, and more powerful than dynamite.
You know it's going to be an informative video when that hair tells you "I was once asked to hit nitroglycerin with a hammer..."
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.
He eats bars of chocolate for lunch? ;)
The professor eats TNT bars for breakfast ! it keeps his brain working at that high performance...
That's what I call Black humor joke ; )
@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.
When an apocalyptic event is imminent, I would feel at ease if this man was in the room with top leaders.
Nathan 100% correct , thnx
Here's a bit of interesting trivia..During the Spanish-American War, dynamite was the most powerful explosive available. But it could not be employed in artillery shells, because it could not stand the shock of being fired. This led to the creation of a unique weapon, the U.S. Navy ship, "Vesuvius." It was equipped with a giant AIR gun that worked like a pump-up Crosman or Daisy. It fired a finned torpedo-like projectile loaded with dynamite. It was used in an attack on the Cuban coast.
5:05 Kids, this is how Minecraft looked in 1965.
As I go on to study chemistry in like I hope I get the opportunity to meet Professor Poliakoff and the whole team at periodicvideos at some point, it would really be an honor.
the 500 tons of TNT is only a .5 kiloton nuke, what we use today is one megaton, two thousand times more powerful than that TNT
xXstealth9799Xx "-only- a .5 kiloton" ! ?
Nukes may have more blast power but they are also huge polluters.
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 air detonation of nukes really helps contain the radiation
+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 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!
5:08- When you didn't know you left the gas from your stove on and you light the eye
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.
S my iPad was muted and when I turned my sound on at 14 sec all i heard was "stroke it gently, and I did" hahahaha
hahahaha what a timing lol XD
We all do, to start.
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.
Right. This video had quite a bit of misinformation.
Hmm 100g of chocolate for lunch. Yumm I'm glad I watched this now :-)
@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.
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
Learn to speil
***** *read more carefully
TNT =/= Nitroglycerin, point taken about the vaccum explody bits though.
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.
@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...
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.
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 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.
Wrong
Jay Fischer Just saying "wrong" is useless.
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.
Lachlan Allen Except what? I said just saying "wrong" is useless. Whether he himself was right or wrong was and still is irrelevant.
Eric Lin It at least puts some doubt into others so they look it up for themselves.
chemistry can be used for many things, its good to see both sides that it is useful and can be destructive. Its scary sometimes when your product isn't well behaved and can end up on the ceiling.
7:21 #REKT
Haha
+wrrabec get rest skrub
+wrrabec 5:05 #Wrecked
+wrrabec THE WHOLE PLACE WAS #REKT
Don't mess with TNT, scrub.
MrNickTube1 fite me 1v1 irl then
Yes, unquestionably, TNT has a huge negative impact, but there is also the positive impact of explosives manufacturers not being constantly subject to the threat of the unstable nitroglycerin that was causing heavy casualties to production lines. I think I would consider that a benefit to the world.
einsteins younger bro youngstein
zweistein :P
+NorwayVFX frostein
Einstein's young brother AnderenStein
Damn you! I was just going to reply with Zweistein :D.
@@NorwayVFX best me to it three years ago bro
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)
7:13 Look at the text on the monitor behind the guy. It spins off the screen
dual monitor
There are two monitors
Fascinating. I didn't know TNT and Dynamite were different. Now, I know. Also, very interesting what was made for the war effort. What a time!
Please don't throw dynamite on a fire kids.
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.
@@eljuano28 yikes
Strong nitrogen bond👍👍