The Controlled Explosion

Alfred Nobel, unintended consequences, and the future of political violence.

I had it in my mind when the calendar turned over to 2024 to write a Year In Review post here at Adjacent Possible, as one does—but then I looked back at my year, and realized it was almost entirely dominated by my work finishing my next book The Infernal Machine, and launching NotebookLM, both of which have been (and will be) amply covered here at Adjacent Possible. There was also my extended series on radical life extension, Immortality: A User's Guide, available in text form here for paying subscribers (and in audio format at Audible or The Next Big Idea Club.) But beyond that, the only major writing project this year was "The Man Who Broke The World," my extended essay about Thomas Midgley Jr., the inventor of leaded gasoline and the CFCs that caused the hole in the ozone layer, published by the Times Magazine in March.

The response to the Midgley piece was quite striking, I thought. Despite the fact that it was 8,000 words long and almost exclusively focused on a chemist who had been dead for 80 years, it was apparently the most-read piece on the Times' site for several days. The popularity of the piece was yet another reminder, for me, of the innate appetite that readers have for stories that dramatize negative developments, the bigger the calamity the better. (Midgley's calamity was about as massive as a single human being could possibly set in motion—transforming the atmosphere of the planet itself.) And it was a story about something else that I've found also has intrinsic narrative appeal: the unintended consequences of scientific or technological developments. That was a major theme of the How We Got To Now project: someone invents a new tool or device designed to solve a specific problem, but it ends up triggering a chain of invents that transforms some seemingly unrelated field, like Willis Carrier's air conditioning ultimately enabling the mass migration to the Sun Belt that alters the distribution of the electoral college, which Reagan then uses to catapult himself into the White House in 1980.

The Midgley story—brilliant inventor solves a pressing problem but unleashes destructive forces that he failed to anticipate—parallels a major plot line in the new book. The Infernal Machine has so many different historical figures woven through it that we actually include a cast of characters at the outset—the first one I've ever had in any of my books—but one of the most intriguing figures arrives at the very beginning of the book: Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. In a way, you can think of Nobel as a kind of 19th-century version of Midgley: a brilliant chemical engineer who solved a set of problems that were enormously helpful to industry, but whose solutions ended up triggering a set of more troublesome secondary effects. But there’s a political angle to Nobel’s story that was not really a part of Midgley’s innovations, one that has some interesting implications for our own moment.

Nobel's story first caught my attention during the tumultuous first weeks of 2020. I was early in the research phase for Infernal Machine and had gotten interested in the idea of writing about the wave of bombings that tore through New York City in the early 1900s, the most violent period of terrorist attacks in American history. If you've read any of my history books, like Ghost Map or Enemy of All Mankind, you know that my preferred mode is to both tell the story of what happened, but also to try to explain to the reader why things happened the way they did—not just on the level of the individual characters and their personal arcs, but also in terms of deeper historical or technological developments. So in a very obvious way, writing about a sudden surge in dynamite bombings sent me back to the invention of dynamite itself. I tracked down a now-out-of-print biography of Nobel, and was immediately captivated by his story, which is many ways a tragic one despite the vast wealth he accumulated. (I even ended up writing a three-part series at my old podcast American Innovations about Nobel's life -- the only series in the two years that podcast ran that I wrote myself.)

Nobel's story is actually the exception to the rule of networked innovation that I've written about many times over the years. While most important breakthroughs--most famously Edison's lightbulb--turn out to be collective operations, with many players contributing ideas to the final transformative product, in the case of dynamite Nobel was very much a solo agent, in large part because no one else was crazy enough to conduct experiments that involved deliberately inducing nitroglycerin explosions. The Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero who had first discovered the compound in the 1840s had nearly killed himself in the lab, and later declared: “When I think of all the victims killed during nitroglycerin explosions, and the terrible havoc that has been wreaked, which in all probability will continue to occur in the future, I am almost ashamed to admit to be its discoverer.”

But Nobel sensed (correctly, as it turns out) that if you could somehow tame the explosive power of nitroglycerin—which was vastly more intense than gunpowder—you would have a tool that could transform industry, greatly accelerating the pace of infrastructure development around the world: helping to create tunnels, bridges, subways, railways, mines, and more. This was the dream of the "controlled explosion" that obsessed Nobel for about a decade of his life in the 1860s. (And that took the life of Nobel’s younger brother, who died in an accidental explosion in a lab Nobel built on the family property in Stockholm.)

The story of how Nobel ultimately figured out how to package nitroglycerin in a stable state—the product that he ultimately branded dynamite—is a fascinating one, and if you're interested it is recounted in detail in the opening chapters of The Infernal Machine. But for our purposes here--connecting back to Thomas Midgley's career—the ultimate irony of Nobel's "controlled explosion" was that once he unleashed it on the world, the technology was out of his control in a fundamental way. It did indeed get adopted by tunnel builders and the railways and the mining companies for all the industrial uses he had imagined. But it also turned out to have a political use that had never occurred Nobel: its compact and portable form factor—and unprecedented destructive power—made it the ideal weapon for a new kind of social protest that would eventually come to be called terrorism.

Not only did Nobel fail to anticipate the way political radicals would hijack his invention, he actively believed that it would be a driver of world peace. "My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions," he once said, anticipating the nuclear-age logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. "As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace." Needless to say, that didn't come to pass.

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In some ways, I find Nobel to be a more troubling precedent than Midgley, for one primary reason. The invention of dynamite follows a pattern that has generally been true of scientific advances over the long term: science and technology puts ever-increasing power—power in the sense of energy, not politics—in the hands of smaller and smaller groups. Dynamite gave a solo anarchist the destructive power of a military platoon, which—for a while at least—threatened to level the playing field between the state, the industrial magnates, and the radicals who wanted to overthrow them. (It was not for nothing that the anarchists were popularly described as "the dynamite club" around the turn of the century.) That technological trend—more destructive power in the hands of smaller and smaller groups—is likely to continue, only the next generation of weapons could be even more deadly: suitcase nukes or bioweapons or semi-autonomous drones or some 21st century version of Nobel's breakthrough that we haven't imagined yet.

If that seems like a particularly grim vision of the future, the one consolation might be that, in the United States and Europe at least, political violence is generally at a low level compared to many other points over the past two centuries. One of the things you will appreciate if you get a chance to read Infernal Machine is just how relentless the bombing campaigns and the assassinations were a little more than a hundred years ago; when I was born in in D.C. in June of 1968 the country was reeling from the assassinations of MLK and RFK in the space of a few months, and parts of downtown Washington were still burning from the riots. So the technology may be trending towards more concentrated and portable means of destruction, but we are still in a world where the political tempers are more mild than in the past, despite all the noise from social media and cable news. But that, of course, can change, and if January 6 is a sign of things to come we may be headed back to the volatility that I tried to capture in Infernal Machine. My hope with this book is that it serves as a reminder of how unstable the world was back then, compared to our own times. But my fear is that it turns out to be a glimpse of our future.

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