"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.

What I take from this video is: The professor eats chocolate for lunch.

This explains why in those old Crash Bandicoot games the nitroglyceryn crates explode instantly while the TNT crates have a short delay.

" we're going to explode 500 tons of TNT" " why ? " " because this is America "

Yep, I was introduced to TNT by Warner Brothers animators as well.

0:14 Ah, I never tried to ask, but here he explains the "genesis" of his haircut ;)

"Stroke it gently and it went off"? I'd like to see proof of that.

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

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!

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.

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 was a us army combat engineer. I love these explosives vids. Thanks for making them.

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!

"A bar of chocolate you know the kind you eat for lunch"

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.

0:11-0:18 Oh, come on. There's no way that joke was an accident.

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

"stroke it gently. and i did."

When I think Chemistry Professor, this guy will now forever pop into my head. Awesome!

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.

The old man looks like he brushed his hair with dynamite.

I Love these videos,They should be shown in Schools everywhere

I love these videos. I have fond memories of my chemistry education. I get the Ah-Ha pleasant recall of the reactions and the fascination still lives in this retired old soul.

I 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!

You mean TNT is not the same as Dynamite? My life is a lie.

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.

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.

I love how he makes the molecule examples so damn cool

0:18 i must say, the professor is superman, he survived that experiment.

Stroke it gently, and I did 😂😂😂😂😂😂

I went to one of Col Shaw's lectures when I was at Nottingham University. Somewhat loud!

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.

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'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...

I'd really like to see a video on C-4 or semtex. Never knew dynamite could be thrown in fire. Great video!

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 :)

That double monitor setup.😂

"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 :-)

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.

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.

0:11 _"Stroke it gently.."_ then hit it with a hammer, or before?

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 :)

My old chemistry teacher at school was called Tobias Nicholas Trevains T.N.T

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.

TIL British people eat bars of chocolate for lunch.

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.

Great video!!!! And great help for my dissertation. Thanks Andres

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!

I was really confused at 7:17 For a second...I thought that the Screensaver had jumped off of the screen. :p

5:03 is quite Minecraft-y.

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.

I absolutely like your videos.Could you please tell something about RDX? It seems to be twice as strong as TNT. Thanks.

I wonder if today’s youth is going to know what TNT is in the absence of looney toons

He eats bars of chocolate for lunch? ;)

@periodicvideos I surely appreciate that style!

A genuine mad scientist. Wonderful!

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?"

@TerminalRhinoVirus wow, never knew that

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.

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.

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..."

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.

3:00 the copper is probably from the shaped charge, liquid copper which shoots through the plate. Not from the detonator

Wait. Just glycerine and nitric acid? ...and I would have thought that to be a neat test. You just saved a life!

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

5:05 Kids, this is how Minecraft looked in 1965.

I enjoyed the chemistry class. Nitro-glycerin reacts with something to produce TNT, trinitro glycerides. I wonder what the catalyst is?

You make great videos, period

"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".

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.

@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...

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.

When an apocalyptic event is imminent, I would feel at ease if this man was in the room with top leaders.

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

Awesome video! Thanks for sharing!

@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.

A book about women turning yellow should be illustrated in color. JS

5:08- When you didn't know you left the gas from your stove on and you light the eye

@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.

love the explanation, thank u folks, especially to professor ;)

einsteins younger bro youngstein

Hmm 100g of chocolate for lunch. Yumm I'm glad I watched this now :-)

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.

I always thought TnT and dynamite were the same thing? You learn something new every day

detonator cap? So all the movies are wrong then when they blow up dynamite with a firework style fuse?

7:21 #REKT

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.

Dynamite are the parts of fabrics dipped and soaked in nitroglycerine then set in the stick casing that we call the dynamite stick.

Please don't throw dynamite on a fire kids.

WTF is a arctic roll?

@MrAtheist93 He has a dual screen set up. You can make windows, pointers, screen savers and other things go from one monitor to another.

RIP Those Chilwell Young Women. Thankyou Very Much for Your Effort. Also Thankyou Professor for Your Wisdom!.

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.

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.

@loveslashdeath i think so too.based on what they said, and on the undergraduate chemistry I know, i think that only a small modification would be required to the formulation of the TNT stick such that some extra oxidizing agent would be required to both set off the explosion, and to help burn all of the TNT powerder.

I was wondering, what's the benefit of TNT over trinitrobenzene? What use, if any, is that methyl group on the benzene ring?

7:13 Look at the text on the monitor behind the guy. It spins off the screen

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

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.

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.