Scottish Nitroglycerin and One Legged Stools (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Scottish Nitroglycerin and One Legged Stools (2014)

lateralscience.blogspot.com

121 pointstheelous336 comments

This article was quite the interesting read for me! I grew up in Ayrshire, and knew well of the ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) plant at Ardeer. My maternal grandfathed worked there until retirement, involved in some aspect of the acid mixing and nitroglycerine production (erroneously named by others in my family as 'nitrous'). During World War 2, he was denied release to join the British Army due to being designated "essential to the war effort" as part of the chain to create high explosives. Sadly, he died when I was too young to really be interested in the intricacies of his work. Thus, I was unable to ask him questions about it. I wished others had had the interest in it I have now, so many years later.

While of no relevance to this article or these comments... my memories of my Grandfather are all of a kind, mostly self-educated man, who was denied accepting a full university scholarship - despite pleading from the local Headmaster to his own father - due to his alcoholic father requiring him to go to work and earn money to be able to sustain his 8 younger siblings. He loved his Wife and Daughter, reading Omar Khayyam, watching horse-racing, had a legendary reluctance to accept gifts from anyone lest it put them at a financial disadvantage for having thus done so, and as my Mother told me - always took 2 sandwiches to work with him for over 30 years for his nightly "lunch"; one with cheese, and one with jam.

I mention about him in such manner, as there will likely never be another time that I will find reason to immortalize him online in some small measure of remembrance. And... it made me miss him.

For what it's worth, I felt like I could see him as you wrote about him. And more, I think it's absolutely on topic to hear about the life of a man who worked in the very place the article is about. Gives us an idea of a person to place there. Maybe during lunch he'd prop himself on the embankment side of the blast walls in the sun, with his jam sandwich.

This is a partial transcription of an article from McClure's Magazine, August 1897 issue: "The Great Dynamite Factory at Ardeer." You can see it as originally printed here:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030656139&vi...

The original has more pictures illustrating the text and is considerably longer. It goes on to describe much more about the explosives manufacturing complex than just the nitroglycerin production. It also describes a disastrous explosion that occurred just a week after the author visited in person.

What a link. Thanks!

Standards, controls, corporate structures, standards, and communications emerged out of novel complex commercial organisations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, notably railroads (complex in space and time) and chemistry (complex in process and consequence). Studies of standards, communications, R&D, etc., fascinating for the sort of person fascinated by this sort of thing, focus strongly on such organisations and operations.

The thermometer-watcher, and set of practices for avoiding incidental explosions and runaway heat would be examples of this.

There's an interesting contrast, brought to mind with the focus on remote work, of autonomous working groups operating remotely an incommunicado for extended periods: merchant and military sailing ships, before the eras of radio and particularly of steam.

Ship captains were not subject to Zoom calls, Slack channels, keyboard and video monitoring, or daily virtual stand-ups, from superiors. They operated autonomously, at distance, for days, weeks, months, even years at a time. They were given mission objectives and empowered to act as agents for their merchants or militaries with remote vendors, counterparties, countries, even novel cultures.

And no, it didn't always go well. Mistakes were made, atrocities committed, misadventure encountered, fraud, abuse, and violence.

For long periods, the distinction between "merchant', "sailor", and "pirate" was at best vague:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pirate

https://www.etymonline.com/word/corsair

But it was the best option available, and worked, after a fashion, until replaced as new capabilities emerged.

My dad, a retired industrial chemist, told me many years ago about the one-legged stools. He worked for a company with a long history. It wasn't just nitroglycerine, but any reaction that required close monitoring. The way to scale up some reactions was just to build a whole row of reactors, with a worker at each one.

I'm surprised that there aren't more comments. This was an article both humorous and informative about creating something (dynamite) which made the modern world possible.

I’m not sure I can trust this site to be historically accurate, given http://lateralscience.blogspot.com/2013/02/victorian-product...

The OP article is a historical account from 1897. What you linked to is clearly marked as fiction:

"Victorian Production of One Ounce of Nitrogen Trichloride" is the first chapter of The Ernest Glitch Chronicles. A Novel by Roger Curry

Yeah, there's a few things there that are a bit of a worry, not to mention that element 17 seems overly represented in the wrong places (instead of element 7)!! Bit a nonsense really. Incidentally, in my other post I refer to an organic chemistry book given to me by my father decades ago when I was a teenager. It also had descriptions of the production of fulminates and it described the different sensitivities of the more common Hg and Ag forms. (When one's a budding chemist of about 14, one's chemistry books get well thumbed around such descriptions.) ;-)

The same book covered picric acid in considerable detail. It made a specific point of mentioning that sometime during WWI TNT replaced picric acid in shells for various reasons including safety. Being a reasonably strong phenolic acid, picric acid readily formed metallic picrate salts with shell casings and that these salts are much more unstable than the straight acid.

It seems that even nowadays with the still-regular roundup of WWI munitions on the 'Western Front' (in Belgium, etc.) old corroded picric acid shells are a major ongoing problem (dozens of them still turn up (usually plowed up) every year). If I recall correctly said acid was also largely implicated in the enormous Halifax disaster of 1917.

One final point: when I was a school picric acid was one of the standard reagents in our school chemistry lab. Seems it was no big deal back then, nor was the 'fertilizer' which we used to remove tree stumps.

Milking stools[1] (especially the strap-on variety) can also be one legged.

> "[He'd] give a warning shout and run. So would everybody, you included."

reminded me of MAXIM 3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23503989

[1] another reason for single-legged stools: less likely to trip you up if you need to jump quickly away from a kicking cow. I wouldn't be surprised if nitro factory staff prized that reason, but told management they used them to not fall asleep.

The maxims are The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries¹, the third of which is originally from the Schlock Mercenary webcomic strip of November 1, 2009².

1. https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...

2. https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-11-01

Maxim 3. An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody

I suspect "If you see the bomb squad running try to keep up" is a joke older than the internet.

I saw some bricklayers lay paving stones recently. A few tons of them. They also had strap-on single-legged stools and I was really surprised to see such a specific tool!

Re you sure they weren't hods

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick_hod

Used to carry bricks up and down steps

Well, they were only about a foot in length, attached around the trousers, and the workers were sitting on them.

I liked this typo: “A sample is taken of each lot of nitroglycerin when mad.”

I assumed the "mad" part was just some archaic term.

Curious whether it does actually mean something or if it is just a typo.

It’s listed as a form of made in the OED but without any examples close to the 19th century. Webster has this spelling.

It's just a typo. The original has "made". I was expecting the text to be a bit more corrupt, but it looks clean and is probably not an OCR type, but a normal human one.

I'm suspecting a meaning of "marked by uncontrolled excitement". Given deliberate language of the article otherwise.

Suggesting freshly-brewed, not-yet settled nitroglycerine.

I think that “when made” would make more sense in context.

Apparently yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24673928

It is "when made" in the original: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030656139&vi...

Thanks. That settles it.

Maybe that’s where the erroneous “e” in “Ayreshire” was meant to be (note: should be Ayrshire)

A bit random, my Grandma went to school in Ayrshire, Iowa [1], which I have to imagine was named after Ayrshire, Scotland.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrshire,_Iowa

I imagine it was!

The one legged stool was A COST SAVING DEVICE - a better fix was to have three people on shift at a given point in time, all with different shift starts.

This isn't a safety story, it's the least cost barely safe story.

Having three people watching a single thermometer invites distraction as they start talking to each other. Redundancy is great for electronic sensors, but people doing critical though boring work sometimes are best left alone.

That said, for more demanding tasks, alternating between two people over a shift can be incredibly valuable.

Some context:

https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobel-in-scot...

Wasn't really aware of these details. Very interesting article.

Despite having used various nitrogen-based compounds that go bang in the past (and like many techies, that I find them interesting), I'm rather glad that I've never been involved with them in a big way professionally.

Perhaps I'm a bit timid, but it's always seemed to me there's always a reasonable probability of an accident, usually when one's least expecting it. I recall some time around the early 1970s a friend of mine who used to go prospecting for gold always having a large box of gelignite in the back of his car and he'd keep it there even if he hadn't been prospecting for some considerable time. In fact, I recall his stock of it getting so old that it used to get to the sweaty stage (this means it's unstable).

It used to scare the hell out of me and I'd keep well away but it never worried him. Still, it never went bang and he's still around. These days, he's a licensed fireworks maker.

OT, but has “tools” become a normalised suffix for anyone else? It took me a second parse at the title — after wondering for longer than I’d like to admit at what “s-tools” were — to realise it’s referring to furniture.

Many decades ago, I made some of this stuff in the chemistry lab at school at lunchtime—although, obviously, it wasn't an officially sanctioned experiment!

(Those were the days when black powder was not only made in the lab and the teacher demonstrated the method and we tested the result but also we had to know the chemical equations and work out the optimal ratio of the three ingredients as part of the chemistry curriculum.)

Now, you perhaps think me a lunatic or at least stupidly reckless. Perhaps so, but I did give it considerable forethought and I'm still here complete with all my bodily bits.

No, I'm not going to go into explicit details for obvious reasons but I'll say this much. I made the smallest amount that was practical to make and I achieved this by measuring the reagents out with an eye dropper. I chose the narrowest test tube I could get as the nitro separates out into a layer and I had to have sufficient product to cover the CSA of the test tube (so I could see its meniscus). Oh, and the lab gear was very clean and I used BP-grade reagents to stop any contamination. (In those days, we had important/key reagents in BP-grade at school as we budding chemists were expected to know their taste (but only BP-grade was used for this purpose). They were diluted to a weak N/40 or so and we tasted them! Can you imagine that ever happening now? Not likely, oh how we overprotect our poor little darlings these days.)

I carried out the reaction in winter which meant the reagents had to be heated to the recommended reaction temperature which was only a few degrees above the lab's ambient (it was easier to heat up the large bottles of regents rather than cool them). I was careful to hold the recommended reaction temperature as accurately as I could but it wasn't difficult with the reaction being only a little above ambient.

Everything went according to plan and it was done according to book (this included even cleaning (neutralizing) the final product with sodium carbonate to eliminate residual acid (from one of the reagents).

Did it go bang as expected? Yes! Was anything damaged? Nothing during manufacture, and nothing of any consequence during testing. Did the chemistry teacher find out? No! Did other kids participate? Yes, two others (but for some reason they quickly left the lab when I mixing the reagents). How did I know what to do? The procedure was well documented in a large general book on organic chemistry of about 800 pages given to me by my father. It described dozens of chemical processes in detail such a Haber's nitrogen fixing and how to make various nasties, such as HCN, in industrial quantities. Whilst it may not seem like it, I was reasonably responsible around chemicals and I still am.

In the above post, there are a few things I should have mentioned but didn't as they should be understood without saying them. Nevertheless, hindsight suggests that I need to state the obvious.

The school lab experiment I've described above was both dangerous and unofficial in that it was not sanctioned or supervised by a qualified teacher and I would strongly suggest no one attempts it (or anything similar). Moreover, these days, in many jurisdictions it will likely be unlawful†. My message is do not try it both for your own safety and that in this hypersensitive, overly-political world you will draw the ire of others!

† Back then—decades ago in much simpler times—this would not have been the case for small lab quantities although it likely would have drawn the ire of the chemistry teacher—not so much because of the material's intrinsic dangers—as then, there were many dangerous chemicals that were both commonly available and easily obtainable without authority (and that are now no longer available)—but rather because he'd have deemed we'd not have had sufficient experience to do it safely.

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