Many members of my family worked at the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant at various times from the start of WWII on. I worked there a couple of summers myself while in college. The plant was decommissioned and razed a number of years ago. It occupied a lot of ground, some of which is now a national cemetery.
I noticed that they stated that the nose fuzes used "tetryl pellets" as boosters. That is interesting. Tetryl was adopted by Britain and the US Navy in 1928 and the US Army in 1918 (they had less tight safety requirements, obviously) as a booster charge between the tiny detonator hit by the firing pin (usually made of lead azide or fulminate of mercury) and the main charge (amatol in most of the shells mentioned here). Prior to that, less powerful explosives like TNT itself or picric acid (British Lyddite) were used, which worked in shells not designed to hit armor, since the booster could be made as big as needed, but in armor-piercing (AP) shells, the impact forces were so strong that the base fuze and booster had to be kept very tiny and heavily reinforced. Such tiny boosters caused many less-than-full-power explosions in AP and base fuzed Common/SAP shells and more than the desired number of duds, so a rather long process of trying to come up with a safe-to-use, yet very powerful, explosive to use as a booster in such shells was initiated and eventually it (both in the US and Britain) came up with tetryl (the short name for a very complicated chemical) that could be used in tiny quantities if properly designed into the fuze -- obviously the British also later used it in some non-AP shells, too, since it was effective with all shells, not just AP. The use of a tetryl pellet, encased in some sealed casing and properly internally isolated to keep it inert, was used in post-1928 British base and, obviously, some nose fuzes -- it was called "Composition Explosive" or "CE" in documents. The US did not allow this. The US Army and Navy in WWII used tetryl in tiny explosive filler cavities in 20mm HE/HEI shells, but even here it was supposed to be specially handled as dangerously sensitive ordnance. The tetryl in US Army base fuzes was in a sealed metal can that was attached to the tip of the fuze and inserted along with the fuze. It was not used in nose fuzes, to my knowledge, where large TNT boosters were employed instead. In the US Navy, it was also only employed in base fuzes (only when absolutely no other explosive could be used) and even here the amount used was minimized by a rather unusual design: The lipstick-can-shaped base fuze had near its upper end two small holes drilled into it on opposite sides, which were shaped like conical rocket nozzles. Two tiny cones of tetryl were pressed into the nozzle pits and covered with a very thin metal foil lid. On the inner end, the small hole of each pit was connected by solid TNT tubes to the detonator, which was set off by the black-powder delay when it burned through, or directly by the firing-pin-detonated primer if no delay was used (base fuzes were also used in HE/HC shells with the nose fuze removed). The use of TNT to set off the tetryl ensured that the tiny pellets in both pits went off with maximum power, the use of two pits made sure that at least one would work properly, and the shape of the pits focused their blasts into needle-shaped jets like those of a shaped-charge projectile to absolutely make sure that each jet had its maximum power focused into a tiny spot on the main filler (Explosive "D" -- ammonium picrate -- in US Navy WWII naval ammunition) so that a full detonation was virtually assured, assuming that the fuze worked properly on impact. In the US Navy safety in ordnance was paramount and they DID NOT trust tetryl unless they had absolutely used the smallest amount possible.
@@robertgift TNT is a rather insensitive explosive (can take some mild rough handling and, with things like mixing it with beeswax and/or using some small cushions in the cavity, can be an inexpensive and powerful explosive charge in ordnance -- there are others much more powerful like C-4 and so forth, but they are not insensitive enough to use when a projectile has to actually hit a target at a high velocity). To set it off reliably at maximum power ("complete detonation") requires a rather powerful "kick" from another high explosive -- black powder will not work -- and even then the initiator has to be at least as powerful as TNT -- preferably much more powerful if the booster has to be tiny, as in base-fuzed shell designed to penetrate armor, hence the eventual use of tetryl as the booster/exploder. In the US Navy delay-action base fuzes developed after WWI, when they finally reluctantly allowed tetryl to set of their extremely insensitive Explosive "D" fillers, they used the tiniest amount possible (those two tiny rocket-nozzle-shaped pellets mentioned above) and thus they wanted to absolutely make sure that these would always go off at maximum power when the fuze worked properly. Older fuzes usually just had an empty tube between the detonator (after the delay, if any) and the booster, but the US Navy decided on a unique system: Fill those tubes with TNT touching both the detonator on one end and the booster on the other, so that there are no air gaps at all and the TNT will also be focused on the bottom tips of the boosters since the detonator end will still be filled with incandescent extremely-high-pressure gas and seal that end so all of the power of the TNT tubes is blasted out the booster end like in a rifle (without the bullet). The primers and detonators in fuzes (all types in the 20th Century) were usually either fulminate of mercury (the US Navy after some experience, possibly because of the higher heat of the tropics, banned this explosive in the middle of WWII) or lead azide. Both are VERY powerful but so sensitive that only tiny specs were used compared to the boosters, even compared to tetryl. This is what is hit by the firing pin of the fuze as the primer (also acting as the detonator in most fuzes with no delay element) or, after the delay element, if any, as the detonator being set off by the flame of the -- usually black powder -- delay far end when it is done burning through. Nose-fuzed US Army and Navy WWII shells over 20mm, to my knowledge, did not need tetryl and just used a larger TNT booster just behind the nose fuze, though those nose-fuzed shells that also had a base fuze (if the nose fuze was removed by using a hardened steel pointed nose plug) had their base fuzes be very similar to the base fuzes used in the AP shells, including the two small tetryl boosters, though not as ruggedly-built and with no or a very short delay used. Since a base fuze does not ever hit the target itself, it relies on the sharp deceleration of the projectile (even if just a momentary jolt) to throw the firing pin and the primer together to start the explosive train in the shell -- all such shells have a minimum amount of force needed to set them off, which varies with design, and thus a roughly minimum thickness of steel plate (any kind) or equivalent other material to set them off. Usually this minimum gets thinner with increasing the impact obliquity up to a maximum angle and then this thickness increases extremely rapidly to infinity as the angle gets closer to 80 degrees or so (most WWII base fuzes will not work very well or at all much above 65 degrees obliquity from right angles, with a few with special "graze" modifications maybe making this change to 70 degrees). For the widely-used WWII US Navy Mark 21 Base Detonating Fuze for all AP shells over 3" in size and also in some large Common shells, the shell needed about 0.07-caliber minimum of steel at right angles (1.12" for a 16" AP shell) and spaced thinner plates did not work as they did with many earlier fuzes, but that went down to near half of that thickness at 61-64.99 degrees, with the required thickness going virtually straight up in the 65-69.99-degree range and almost no chance of working at 70 degrees or more, penetrating or not. I have the formula for this fuze in my NAVWEAPS.COM articles; I have little data on other fuzes outside of what I use there, but others are not going to be terribly far from this, mostly.
Interesting! Thank you. Unfortunate if only a grazing impact and the shell will not explode. Always wondered how do you make the projectile survive firing acceleration but not so insensitive that it fails to detonate upon impact. If a C-4 charge failed to explode, could one shoot it to detonate it? Example: Claymore mine fails, could one shoot it?
@@robertgift One of the tests of an explosive's sensitivity was indeed to shoot samples of it, often with a 50-caliber gun. Another test was to drop a certain weight onto it from a height, and note the height when it would either go off very occasionally, or go off very reliably. BTW, it was not mentioned in the film or the above comments from @Nathan Okun , but TNT was found to be _dangerously sensitive while molten,_ which led -after a few disastrous accidents- to it being pressed into shells in a hydraulic press. But then another problem emerged: If TNT was pressed too hard, either due to excessive travel of the pressing jig, or due to an excessive volume for the particular shell, the TNT would become "dead pressed", meaning it would no longer detonate. It could still be burned as a solid fuel, which soldiers sometimes did, and presumably if melted the TNT might have 'returned to life', but I have no data to support that hunch. Also, TNT is not the only chemical which can be dead pressed; certain pharmaceuticals can also be permanently changed if pressed too hard when making pills, and small bits of ruby (yes, the gemstone) are used in extreme pressure research using _DACs_ (Diamond Anvil pressure Cells), because at a certain pressure, ruby color will change, as in... th-cam.com/video/vO4kZfhpWBU/w-d-xo.html
That's awesome they had such a sense of community on the job. Indeed , the factory was like a small town in itself. I wish I could work in such a place
My father worked at a WWII arsenal......pouring melted TNT into 500 lb. bombs. The aresenal covered roughly 50,000 acres, had a village that housed 15,000 workers, and a railyard that could hold 1000 train cars at a time.
The largest man made explosion in the world at that time before the Trinity bomb was the Halifax explosion. The second largest explosion was the British Chemical munitions plant located in Trenton Ontario. It blew up on Thanksgiving day 1918. It kind of goes without saying I guess that working in an explosives factory is very hazardous work. Many thanks to those that were brave enough ...
Years ago there was a gunpowder plant near my home in kenvil nj called hercules. some time in the 90s the place blew sky high and busted windows in a 5 mi radius and tremors were felt 30mi away. needless to say, there was no buildings left standing. Dont mess with explosives!
Here is a quote from "Careers of Danger and Daring" by Cleveland Moffett, published in 1900. The copyright ran out, so you can read it online. Each chapter covered a dangerous job like bridge construction, flying in hydrogen filled balloons, firefighting, etc. "The men below did their best, but it was a vain effort, for in those days the roofs of powder-mills were made of pitch and cement - not of iron, as to-day - and by this time the fire had eaten its way nearly through. Alexis Dupont, working desperately, stood there with flames spreading all around him. It was plain to every one that the minutes of his life were numbered. Again they shouted - and - The explosion came like an execution, and out of the wreck of it they bore away his crushed and broken body. The last thing he knew was that he had played the game out fairly to the end - he died like a Dupont, said the men."
I had a Jr Chemistry set that my dad who had never opened it, re-gifted it to me on my 7th birthday... sometime before the middle of the 20th century. lol Anyway, there were chemicals in the set to make all kinds of goodness including Gun cotton . It came with some really cool glass bottles with cork, plastic and glass stoppers. Had a small sample of everything from the periodic table except anything dangerous/deadly through breathing fumes/particles/dust. Touch/contact also. Had things like Liquid metals, Mercury, gallium 1-2 more I think. just everything a very inquisitive boy needs, I made chlorine gas and almost killed me and my little dog while trying to kill wasps by saturating a rag on the end of a long pole and leaning it 2 inch. away from the huge (12in around) nest.
Yes, Oliver Sachs wrote a book about his passion for chemistry as a boy in Britain. The local chemists would sell just about any chemical to anyone, even children. He took full advantage.
For something of a shock, consider that on the other side of the war German or Japanese civilians were doing the exact same things under the threat of aerial bombardment.
Same about Brits, especially in 1940, and the Soviets. Well, the latter mostly had to cope with terrible surroundings due to mass evacuation of factories.
Was about to become one at any rate. But yeah. Very few folk at the time would have had the slightest inkling. And I suppose that almost every war is an engineers war. As engineering as absolutely critical to virtually every facet.
kylesenior I was trained as a chemist but have worked as an engineer and also as a physicist. Although training is different, there are overlaps, or were.
No mention of sulfuric acid, essential in the manufacture of those explosives: simplification or willingness not to disclose the "recipe" to the public?
Simplification, as it does not partake in the actual nitration process. They also didn't list the required temperatures, cleansing rinses or anything, because it is unnecessary information to get the idea across.
now instead of that regime in caps & dets, they just handle the powder wetted: the cups on a holed tray are shaken to enter the holes, the wet powder mass is dumped and squeegee swept across the rims en masse, then it dries in the cap so all those safety procedures are unnecessary.
I've heard from people that worked in ammunition plants that people would regularly end up with big bright yellow boogers from breathing is powederized TNT. Pretty weird
On the plus side of modernity we aren't dumping nitic acid into the ditch behind the factory, but I'm pretty sure there's something still in the water these days.
We’re gunna build a better world!!! By first building weapons of destruction and death; are you serious? I guess I finally realized we are the only generation left to fix this mess, please help
No you can't. Were you not watching. If one is past the demarcation and in a contraband zone, no matches, smoking, naked flames or nails in shoe soles. No source of heat, spark or any ignition source whatsoever. That is how it is down many coal mines too. Due to the Methane gas that seeps out of the strata and can get into explosive concentrations. In fact unprotected aluminium is also not allowed, as it can cause a spark hot enough to ignite Methane gas. Whereas steel and other metals will not do so, no matter how you hammer or strike it. Battery/quartz watches, and these days cell phones are also banned. Everything must be either intrinsically safe, or for the bigger, higher voltage things everything had to be housed in a flame proof cabinet. Usually a ruddy great big cast steel box. The idea being that IF an explosion takes place in the cabinet, it cannot escape to the outside atmosphere and spread. It remains contained. No doubt, especially nowerdays, that safety and security on Armaments, especially explosives factories is the tightest of all.
My grandfather was a blaster, and always had his tobacco smoking pipe in his mouth. The only time he wasn't puffing on his pipe was when he was blasting, or sawing logs with his drag-saw. He never started a fire, or caused an unplanned detonation. He died a natural death at 93 years of age.
I love the opening shots that show open pit chemical waste disposal. What a nightmare these men were creating for us generations later when it came time to clean up all that waste that they thought they could just pour down the sewers and into rivers and lakes and thought it would just "go away". You think today, "what were they thinking!?" But I remember my grandpa (a farmer born at the end of the 19th century) would dump used tractor oil, whatever.. into a ditch that ran along a property he farmed on. And if anyone said anything to him about it, he would just dismiss them and say, "All them chemicals just mix with rain water and break down and dilute.. and so much of it gets soaked into the earth where it's naturally filtered and turned back into the individual elements that it was before they turned it into oil! You know where they GOT that oil from in the first place, don't cha? They pumped it right out of the ground! Just like the water you drink! And whatever doesn't get soaked up by the ground washes out to the nearest river, and once it mixes with the river water it is instantly diluted into millions of times weaker and weaker parts until it's literally water again! By the time it gets 10 feet away from where it enters the river it's SO diluted you could drink gallons of it and it wouldn't hurt you! And when asked how he can explain those images of polluted rivers you see in China and India on TV, he would say, "Oh that's because they overwhelmed the river because those are factories that are dumping millions of gallons into a tiny stream non stop day and night! If they did it slowly it would be just fine! That poor bastard, had NO idea the damage he was doing every time he dumped a tray of waste oil. But his poor kids (my Father and his brothers) found out how bad it was years after Grandpa died, and they went to sell the old farm land to a developer who had a survey done and they found the entire side of the property on the low-lands, where his rainwater ditch would drain the fields was heavily contaminated with oil, gasoline, and chemical waste from the breakdown of old fertilizer and long-banned pesticides that Grandpa had been dumping there for years! They had to scrape several feet of topsoil off the dry ravine bed, and install monitoring wells, and disclose the "contaminated" status of the property, severely limiting what any residential developer could do with the property from then on! I don't blame Grandpa, I mean he was raised in a different era, he wasn't highly educated, and was seriously misinformed (in part by the US Army themselves, who encouraged those same practices right up until as recently as the 1980's!) But the fact remains that man created that crap to improve humanity and raise the quality of life, but in the process they reduced it because of their ignorance and failure to think ahead and have the foresight to realize how important it was to actually EDUCATE the public about these new wonder chemicals they were producing and selling!
Did you just assume my gender and not ask me what my pronouns were, look what this proud country has become, you cannot assume someone’s gender or not use their preferred pronouns, pathetic.
"buy bonds" because just as Banksters wont send their children to die in war, they want their parents to also foot the bill so that the Bankster hegemony can continue financial slavery across the world. Great film otherwise!
I suppose it was meritous in times of war. Nitroglyceryn is sort of small for the sake of high-expolsives these days. Ammonia from feline urine; You can get the nirates from an established fish tank. Low-explosive bombs are easy.
" Nitroglyceryn is sort of small for the sake of high-expolsives these days." ?? Nitroglycerine is more powerful that TNT, dynamite and many others. It was just too unstable to use commercially. In fact, dynamite is stabilized nitroglycerine. The stabilizers reduce it's potency but not by much. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_velocities
I was impressed with the opening credits. Each box of TNT weighed 50lbs. They were lifting them 2 at a time!😊
i still rember when cement and all other industrial powders came in hundredweight (112lbs) bags -
Movie Magic!
Folks were stronger in those days
@@Sam-el2we men were men back then, not "he/hims"
Now you know why your grandfathers back was all jacket up.
Many members of my family worked at the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant at various times from the start of WWII on. I worked there a couple of summers myself while in college. The plant was decommissioned and razed a number of years ago. It occupied a lot of ground, some of which is now a national cemetery.
Thanks for commenting! Hardly anyone talks about 'working through school' anymore...🇺🇸 😎👍☕
I noticed that they stated that the nose fuzes used "tetryl pellets" as boosters. That is interesting. Tetryl was adopted by Britain and the US Navy in 1928 and the US Army in 1918 (they had less tight safety requirements, obviously) as a booster charge between the tiny detonator hit by the firing pin (usually made of lead azide or fulminate of mercury) and the main charge (amatol in most of the shells mentioned here). Prior to that, less powerful explosives like TNT itself or picric acid (British Lyddite) were used, which worked in shells not designed to hit armor, since the booster could be made as big as needed, but in armor-piercing (AP) shells, the impact forces were so strong that the base fuze and booster had to be kept very tiny and heavily reinforced. Such tiny boosters caused many less-than-full-power explosions in AP and base fuzed Common/SAP shells and more than the desired number of duds, so a rather long process of trying to come up with a safe-to-use, yet very powerful, explosive to use as a booster in such shells was initiated and eventually it (both in the US and Britain) came up with tetryl (the short name for a very complicated chemical) that could be used in tiny quantities if properly designed into the fuze -- obviously the British also later used it in some non-AP shells, too, since it was effective with all shells, not just AP. The use of a tetryl pellet, encased in some sealed casing and properly internally isolated to keep it inert, was used in post-1928 British base and, obviously, some nose fuzes -- it was called "Composition Explosive" or "CE" in documents. The US did not allow this. The US Army and Navy in WWII used tetryl in tiny explosive filler cavities in 20mm HE/HEI shells, but even here it was supposed to be specially handled as dangerously sensitive ordnance. The tetryl in US Army base fuzes was in a sealed metal can that was attached to the tip of the fuze and inserted along with the fuze. It was not used in nose fuzes, to my knowledge, where large TNT boosters were employed instead. In the US Navy, it was also only employed in base fuzes (only when absolutely no other explosive could be used) and even here the amount used was minimized by a rather unusual design: The lipstick-can-shaped base fuze had near its upper end two small holes drilled into it on opposite sides, which were shaped like conical rocket nozzles. Two tiny cones of tetryl were pressed into the nozzle pits and covered with a very thin metal foil lid. On the inner end, the small hole of each pit was connected by solid TNT tubes to the detonator, which was set off by the black-powder delay when it burned through, or directly by the firing-pin-detonated primer if no delay was used (base fuzes were also used in HE/HC shells with the nose fuze removed). The use of TNT to set off the tetryl ensured that the tiny pellets in both pits went off with maximum power, the use of two pits made sure that at least one would work properly, and the shape of the pits focused their blasts into needle-shaped jets like those of a shaped-charge projectile to absolutely make sure that each jet had its maximum power focused into a tiny spot on the main filler (Explosive "D" -- ammonium picrate -- in US Navy WWII naval ammunition) so that a full detonation was virtually assured, assuming that the fuze worked properly on impact. In the US Navy safety in ordnance was paramount and they DID NOT trust tetryl unless they had absolutely used the smallest amount possible.
Thank you for your information.
What initiates TNT?
@@robertgift TNT is a rather insensitive explosive (can take some mild rough handling and, with things like mixing it with beeswax and/or using some small cushions in the cavity, can be an inexpensive and powerful explosive charge in ordnance -- there are others much more powerful like C-4 and so forth, but they are not insensitive enough to use when a projectile has to actually hit a target at a high velocity). To set it off reliably at maximum power ("complete detonation") requires a rather powerful "kick" from another high explosive -- black powder will not work -- and even then the initiator has to be at least as powerful as TNT -- preferably much more powerful if the booster has to be tiny, as in base-fuzed shell designed to penetrate armor, hence the eventual use of tetryl as the booster/exploder. In the US Navy delay-action base fuzes developed after WWI, when they finally reluctantly allowed tetryl to set of their extremely insensitive Explosive "D" fillers, they used the tiniest amount possible (those two tiny rocket-nozzle-shaped pellets mentioned above) and thus they wanted to absolutely make sure that these would always go off at maximum power when the fuze worked properly. Older fuzes usually just had an empty tube between the detonator (after the delay, if any) and the booster, but the US Navy decided on a unique system: Fill those tubes with TNT touching both the detonator on one end and the booster on the other, so that there are no air gaps at all and the TNT will also be focused on the bottom tips of the boosters since the detonator end will still be filled with incandescent extremely-high-pressure gas and seal that end so all of the power of the TNT tubes is blasted out the booster end like in a rifle (without the bullet).
The primers and detonators in fuzes (all types in the 20th Century) were usually either fulminate of mercury (the US Navy after some experience, possibly because of the higher heat of the tropics, banned this explosive in the middle of WWII) or lead azide. Both are VERY powerful but so sensitive that only tiny specs were used compared to the boosters, even compared to tetryl. This is what is hit by the firing pin of the fuze as the primer (also acting as the detonator in most fuzes with no delay element) or, after the delay element, if any, as the detonator being set off by the flame of the -- usually black powder -- delay far end when it is done burning through. Nose-fuzed US Army and Navy WWII shells over 20mm, to my knowledge, did not need tetryl and just used a larger TNT booster just behind the nose fuze, though those nose-fuzed shells that also had a base fuze (if the nose fuze was removed by using a hardened steel pointed nose plug) had their base fuzes be very similar to the base fuzes used in the AP shells, including the two small tetryl boosters, though not as ruggedly-built and with no or a very short delay used.
Since a base fuze does not ever hit the target itself, it relies on the sharp deceleration of the projectile (even if just a momentary jolt) to throw the firing pin and the primer together to start the explosive train in the shell -- all such shells have a minimum amount of force needed to set them off, which varies with design, and thus a roughly minimum thickness of steel plate (any kind) or equivalent other material to set them off. Usually this minimum gets thinner with increasing the impact obliquity up to a maximum angle and then this thickness increases extremely rapidly to infinity as the angle gets closer to 80 degrees or so (most WWII base fuzes will not work very well or at all much above 65 degrees obliquity from right angles, with a few with special "graze" modifications maybe making this change to 70 degrees). For the widely-used WWII US Navy Mark 21 Base Detonating Fuze for all AP shells over 3" in size and also in some large Common shells, the shell needed about 0.07-caliber minimum of steel at right angles (1.12" for a 16" AP shell) and spaced thinner plates did not work as they did with many earlier fuzes, but that went down to near half of that thickness at 61-64.99 degrees, with the required thickness going virtually straight up in the 65-69.99-degree range and almost no chance of working at 70 degrees or more, penetrating or not. I have the formula for this fuze in my NAVWEAPS.COM articles; I have little data on other fuzes outside of what I use there, but others are not going to be terribly far from this, mostly.
Interesting! Thank you. Unfortunate if only a grazing impact and the shell will not explode. Always wondered how do you make the projectile survive firing acceleration but not so insensitive that it fails to detonate upon impact.
If a C-4 charge failed to explode, could one shoot it to detonate it? Example: Claymore mine fails, could one shoot it?
@@robertgift One of the tests of an explosive's sensitivity was indeed to shoot samples of it, often with a 50-caliber gun. Another test was to drop a certain weight onto it from a height, and note the height when it would either go off very occasionally, or go off very reliably. BTW, it was not mentioned in the film or the above comments from @Nathan Okun
, but TNT was found to be _dangerously sensitive while molten,_ which led -after a few disastrous accidents- to it being pressed into shells in a hydraulic press. But then another problem emerged: If TNT was pressed too hard, either due to excessive travel of the pressing jig, or due to an excessive volume for the particular shell, the TNT would become "dead pressed", meaning it would no longer detonate. It could still be burned as a solid fuel, which soldiers sometimes did, and presumably if melted the TNT might have 'returned to life', but I have no data to support that hunch.
Also, TNT is not the only chemical which can be dead pressed; certain pharmaceuticals can also be permanently changed if pressed too hard when making pills, and small bits of ruby (yes, the gemstone) are used in extreme pressure research using _DACs_ (Diamond Anvil pressure Cells), because at a certain pressure, ruby color will change, as in... th-cam.com/video/vO4kZfhpWBU/w-d-xo.html
You know too much....i must report you
That's awesome they had such a sense of community on the job. Indeed , the factory was like a small town in itself. I wish I could work in such a place
did you see how little each worker did? by the end of a week you would be crazy or mind numbingly bored.
I think this is probably the best wartime doco I've seen. Seems the Canadians know what they're doing.
Your comment made me watch this!! I’m Canadian!
My father worked at a WWII arsenal......pouring melted TNT into 500 lb. bombs. The aresenal covered roughly 50,000 acres, had a village that housed 15,000 workers, and a railyard that could hold 1000 train cars at a time.
Wow! 🇺🇸 😎👍☕
Another treat from times past. These are great. Thanks.
The largest man made explosion in the world at that time before the Trinity bomb was the Halifax explosion. The second largest explosion was the British Chemical munitions plant located in Trenton Ontario. It blew up on Thanksgiving day 1918. It kind of goes without saying I guess that working in an explosives factory is very hazardous work. Many thanks to those that were brave enough ...
Excellent point. I was watching these people work with all this dangerous stuff and yep, Halifax and Trenton. Chilling reminders of what can happen.
Years ago there was a gunpowder plant near my home in kenvil nj called hercules. some time in the 90s the place blew sky high and busted windows in a 5 mi radius and tremors were felt 30mi away. needless to say, there was no buildings left standing. Dont mess with explosives!
And casual handling of shells and detonators/fuses caused the biggie at RAF Fauld. 70-80 died I think th-cam.com/video/OdLs52eZXVY/w-d-xo.html
That plant still operates at Valleyfield, QC. Now owned by General Dynamics
Gee-wizz, they sure had some swell looking dames working there.
How old are you guys? 100? You sure know your 40's slang hahahahahaha!
Say here, dont you be tryin anything on my Sally, yeah? She's my broad! You try gettin silly with her, I'll bop ya one!
@@christianitis Whyyyy I oughta.....
And how...
Hubba, hubba!
They worked with determination.
With love.
With focus.
With gusto!!!!!
Here is a quote from "Careers of Danger and Daring" by Cleveland Moffett, published in 1900. The copyright ran out, so you can read it online. Each chapter covered a dangerous job like bridge construction, flying in hydrogen filled balloons, firefighting, etc.
"The men below did their best, but it was a vain effort, for in those days the roofs of powder-mills were made of pitch and cement - not of iron, as to-day - and by this time the fire had eaten its way nearly through. Alexis Dupont, working desperately, stood there with flames spreading all around him. It was plain to every one that the minutes of his life were numbered. Again they shouted - and -
The explosion came like an execution, and out of the wreck of it they bore away his crushed and broken body. The last thing he knew was that he had played the game out fairly to the end - he died like a Dupont, said the men."
Hi!...I'm Troy Maclure....you may remember me from such films as....
The Watcher 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣 excellent
Man vs nature - the road to victory!
Thank you for finding this Gem, before it gets deleted by forces of Politically Correct.
That voice! The immediacy! The grim dread!
I had a Jr Chemistry set that my dad who had never opened it, re-gifted it to me on my 7th birthday... sometime before the middle of the 20th century. lol Anyway, there were chemicals in the set to make all kinds of goodness including Gun cotton . It came with some really cool glass bottles with cork, plastic and glass stoppers. Had a small sample of everything from the periodic table except anything dangerous/deadly through breathing fumes/particles/dust. Touch/contact also.
Had things like Liquid metals, Mercury, gallium 1-2 more I think. just everything a very inquisitive boy needs, I made chlorine gas and almost killed me and my little dog while trying to kill wasps by saturating a rag on the end of a long pole and leaning it 2 inch. away from the huge (12in around) nest.
And every kid with a chemistry set wanted to make nitroglycerine lol.
Yes, Oliver Sachs wrote a book about his passion for chemistry as a boy in Britain. The local chemists would sell just about any chemical to anyone, even children. He took full advantage.
Late in the 1940's Gilbert made a NUCLEAR science kit which was recalled soon thereafter. It had radioactive elements... sheesh!
My mom worked in an explosive factory, binary types. Clothing had to be removed and changed because of the potential for static electricity.
I like that canada was the country in this one.
"This Water Contains Acid" and then goes into a river. WTF??
They assumed it would be sufficiently diluted to cause no harm.
Lockbar environmental considerations were not invented yet, glad they are now.
It's Obama's fault
The same guy who decided to pour acid in the rivers was the one that told people breathing cellulose dust not to wear masks...
When a enemy nation is trying to bomb your cities and end your way of life. Environmental concerns are not your top priority
For something of a shock, consider that on the other side of the war German or Japanese civilians were doing the exact same things under the threat of aerial bombardment.
Same about Brits, especially in 1940, and the Soviets. Well, the latter mostly had to cope with terrible surroundings due to mass evacuation of factories.
Should be titled day in the life in the 40s great video 👍👍🇺🇸⚓️⚓️🇨🇦🇨🇦🇬🇧🇬🇧
Amazing to see strong women working 80 years ago and not feeling the need to act like Miley Cyrus.
Women like those should have been given awards. Women like that were in my family, 'spoiling me rotten' in the 1960s...
Yeah Boy!!
The workers not only handled and were around mass amounts of lethality, the lived right there close to the plant. Yikes!
The workers survived because they treated the materials with the appropriate level of respect.
yes, it's work I would have preferred to commute to (had I done it)
They did a bang up job. What job they did.
What would these Canadians think of Canada today ?
You mean what would they think of canadian peoplekind?
Can you imagine Trudeau next to Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin?
Not much' they're all dead now.
@@jfloresmac Trudeau couldn't hold a candle to Churchill or Roosevelt.
"a chemists war" I guess at this point they didn't know it was a physicists war.
Was about to become one at any rate.
But yeah. Very few folk at the time would have had the slightest inkling. And I suppose that almost every war is an engineers war. As engineering as absolutely critical to virtually every facet.
@@rationalmartian Virtually _everything_ is part of physics.
kylesenior I was trained as a chemist but have worked as an engineer and also as a physicist. Although training is different, there are overlaps, or were.
It became a physicists' war with the atomic bomb.
they fused the shells in the factory?
nope !
Done in the field
@@gaylebordeaux7632 ok. that mskes more sense.
in 1942 my father was in the U.S Navy on a munition ship in the South Pacific******=====
Hitler was crazy, if he thought he could beat these people.
Interesting that the Cordite Girls have girly pinups in their dorm rooms
Role models.
14:25 "There's lots to do at an explosives plant".
No mention of sulfuric acid, essential in the manufacture of those explosives: simplification or willingness not to disclose the "recipe" to the public?
Simplification, as it does not partake in the actual nitration process. They also didn't list the required temperatures, cleansing rinses or anything, because it is unnecessary information to get the idea across.
Back in the day people didn’t have Wikipedia to tell them how to make instruments of death
Never give out the full recipe they do that way too often and I hate to see it
They did mention acid...going down the river. duh.
SNA, DNA, Oleum, sulphuric acid etc
We are sitting on top of the TNT store
Ahhhh...the shower room....
Damn.
0:43 when your friend works for the CIA and he hands you a drink
now instead of that regime in caps & dets, they just handle the powder wetted: the cups on a holed tray are shaken to enter the holes, the wet powder mass is dumped and squeegee swept across the rims en masse, then it dries in the cap so all those safety procedures are unnecessary.
13:50: Yawza
I can't believe they cut the shower scene.
A cigarette, "Tastes good".... 😂😅🤣
Making primers for the shells and she called it “ticklish”
Yes, Rico. Kaboom!
The voice over says TNT is trinitro toluol. Is that a Canadianism? I thought it was trinitro toluene.
Both are correct
I've heard from people that worked in ammunition plants that people would regularly end up with big bright yellow boogers from breathing is powederized TNT. Pretty weird
I hope that the workers never sneezed, and blew their heads off.
Their skin and hair turned yellow in wwj.
They were called canary girls
17:53 I see this is before OSHA was founded
When your first mistake could be your final mistake,you tend to be very careful!
OSHA was founded in 1971, so yes it was.
and the best bang since the big one....
5:40
I haven't been in a science lab since high school biology class
But seeing this guy with no eye-pro or gloves is giving me anxiety
or the guy smoking the pipe in the intro section. I made picric acid crystals when i was 8 yrs old...lucky to make 9..
I like the guy smoking a pipe at 3:55. What could go wrong?
If you see me run, you better run past me.. some shit gonna go down
SO FEW COMMENTS
unity goes hand in hand with adversity
.
HEY, TH-cam.
WHY AM I GOING THRU ROKU TO SEE THIS?
.
I really wish if I lived 100 years ago instead this stupid new times with full of garbage around..
On the plus side of modernity we aren't dumping nitic acid into the ditch behind the factory, but I'm pretty sure there's something still in the water these days.
I wonder how many of my Canadian cousin worked there?
Season one of "Bomb Girls"... :) OL J R :)
Cool now I know how to make tnt 😂
they should have shown this picture in port chicago a second time !!!
Not too many safety precautions. Eyes, lungs and hands. Wow. Cilicosis would be taking lives right and left.
IYAAYAS, AMMO troops rule
IYAOYAS
Até fiquei apreensivo de ver o vídeo. Era muito perigoso manipular.👍👍
"Look to the prairie", then shows two guys in gas masks!
These old propaganda films are solid gold when played to techno.
How tf is this a "propaganda film" lmao
So Sad what Human strive to do .👽
Sorry enemy.... we had to destroy you to help you.
We’re gunna build a better world!!! By first building weapons of destruction and death; are you serious? I guess I finally realized we are the only generation left to fix this mess, please help
Funny, I didn't see any of those TNT factory safety signs in Spanish.
In Canada the official languages are English and Canadian French, so no need for Spanish.
Because this is in Canada. Are you that dense?
@@rubiconnn I think he's being sarcastic, Mr. Wizard!
I had no idea TNT came flaked lol wtf
It's kind of waxy.
Definitely like curds when mixed with AN
no matches but the can allowed to smoke
No you can't. Were you not watching.
If one is past the demarcation and in a contraband zone, no matches, smoking, naked flames or nails in shoe soles. No source of heat, spark or any ignition source whatsoever.
That is how it is down many coal mines too. Due to the Methane gas that seeps out of the strata and can get into explosive concentrations.
In fact unprotected aluminium is also not allowed, as it can cause a spark hot enough to ignite Methane gas. Whereas steel and other metals will not do so, no matter how you hammer or strike it.
Battery/quartz watches, and these days cell phones are also banned. Everything must be either intrinsically safe, or for the bigger, higher voltage things everything had to be housed in a flame proof cabinet. Usually a ruddy great big cast steel box. The idea being that IF an explosion takes place in the cabinet, it cannot escape to the outside atmosphere and spread. It remains contained.
No doubt, especially nowerdays, that safety and security on Armaments, especially explosives factories is the tightest of all.
My grandfather was a blaster, and always had his tobacco smoking pipe in his mouth. The only time he wasn't puffing on his pipe was when he was blasting, or sawing logs with his drag-saw. He never started a fire, or caused an unplanned detonation. He died a natural death at 93 years of age.
The only thing it's missing is the Looney Tunes method of testing for dudes.
Wow they are making nitroglycerin
Don't see that anymore real woman not that there isn't any at all it's just kind of rare
Notice?....no fat chicks
OMG where is the diversity, the virtue signaling, the wokeness in this film?
I've had it with you all.
You're Cancelled.
12:47.
How can the British be so boring... definitely rubs off on the Canucks.
I love the opening shots that show open pit chemical waste disposal. What a nightmare these men were creating for us generations later when it came time to clean up all that waste that they thought they could just pour down the sewers and into rivers and lakes and thought it would just "go away". You think today, "what were they thinking!?" But I remember my grandpa (a farmer born at the end of the 19th century) would dump used tractor oil, whatever.. into a ditch that ran along a property he farmed on. And if anyone said anything to him about it, he would just dismiss them and say, "All them chemicals just mix with rain water and break down and dilute.. and so much of it gets soaked into the earth where it's naturally filtered and turned back into the individual elements that it was before they turned it into oil! You know where they GOT that oil from in the first place, don't cha? They pumped it right out of the ground! Just like the water you drink! And whatever doesn't get soaked up by the ground washes out to the nearest river, and once it mixes with the river water it is instantly diluted into millions of times weaker and weaker parts until it's literally water again! By the time it gets 10 feet away from where it enters the river it's SO diluted you could drink gallons of it and it wouldn't hurt you!
And when asked how he can explain those images of polluted rivers you see in China and India on TV, he would say, "Oh that's because they overwhelmed the river because those are factories that are dumping millions of gallons into a tiny stream non stop day and night! If they did it slowly it would be just fine!
That poor bastard, had NO idea the damage he was doing every time he dumped a tray of waste oil. But his poor kids (my Father and his brothers) found out how bad it was years after Grandpa died, and they went to sell the old farm land to a developer who had a survey done and they found the entire side of the property on the low-lands, where his rainwater ditch would drain the fields was heavily contaminated with oil, gasoline, and chemical waste from the breakdown of old fertilizer and long-banned pesticides that Grandpa had been dumping there for years!
They had to scrape several feet of topsoil off the dry ravine bed, and install monitoring wells, and disclose the "contaminated" status of the property, severely limiting what any residential developer could do with the property from then on!
I don't blame Grandpa, I mean he was raised in a different era, he wasn't highly educated, and was seriously misinformed (in part by the US Army themselves, who encouraged those same practices right up until as recently as the 1980's!)
But the fact remains that man created that crap to improve humanity and raise the quality of life, but in the process they reduced it because of their ignorance and failure to think ahead and have the foresight to realize how important it was to actually EDUCATE the public about these new wonder chemicals they were producing and selling!
4th Industrial Power and then Trudeau and Person-Kind!
Canadian wartime propaganda.
Did you just assume my gender and not ask me what my pronouns were, look what this proud country has become, you cannot assume someone’s gender or not use their preferred pronouns, pathetic.
Booooom.
Not
LSD ,PCP ,MDMA a thank you mr chemist
You can also thank chemistry for hypertension medication,etc...
"buy bonds" because just as Banksters wont send their children to die in war, they want their parents to also foot the bill so that the Bankster hegemony can continue financial slavery across the world. Great film otherwise!
yawn!
27,000,000 shells lioaded into boxcars
Hitler would be proud
I suppose it was meritous in times of war. Nitroglyceryn is sort of small for the sake of high-expolsives these days.
Ammonia from feline urine; You can get the nirates from an established fish tank. Low-explosive bombs are easy.
" Nitroglyceryn is sort of small for the sake of high-expolsives these days." ??
Nitroglycerine is more powerful that TNT, dynamite and many others. It was just too unstable to use commercially. In fact, dynamite is stabilized nitroglycerine. The stabilizers reduce it's potency but not by much.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_velocities
Boyfriend is jodi.
I really wish if I lived 100 years ago instead this stupid new times with full of garbage around..