Submitted by flabberghaster in just_post

The video is about nitroglycerin, and the history of dynamite. His dad, I believe, sold sea mines, that's where he got his original fortune. Video talks about how Alfred Nobel takes nitroglycerin and finds a way to make it stable to handle and calls it dynamite, then starts selling it to mining companies. He moves to England, saying "with England as a base, we will have customers in the whole empire" (paraphrasing). He invents a new, more efficient, higher yield explosive called gellignite, and tried to sell it to the french military, but they weren't interested until the german military started hurling dynamite into their lines. Then, they started selling it to all the militaries of western europe. He invented smokeless powder, a form of gellignite that can be used to replace gunpowder which has the advantage that it doesn't leave a big plume of smoke behind and it's more powerful than old style black powder. He invented numerous other things for use in guns including primitive early silencers. All kinds of guns, bombs and weapons which he sold to militaries and made a gigantic fortune doing it.

But then in New York, the "dynamite club", a group of anarchists, started using it to blow up people. These anarchists turned this wonderful tool that was invented for industry, into a tool of killing and mayhem. "These people sound crazy!" "They seem to just like killing people." IDK it seems unlikely that's all the turn of the century anarchists were about.

It seems odd that the first 40 minutes of this video was about all the different killing machines he invented and sold to militaries and companies, but it wasn't until the anarchists started using them to just kill people for no reason at all, that the video sees fit to say any of that was anything but morally neutral. Really bizarre.

Personally I think anyone building or using killing machines is bad. Strange video.

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