A Most Damnable Invention: Dynamite, Nitrates, and the Making of the Modern World - Hardcover

Bown, Stephen R

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670045241 ISBN 13: 9780670045242

Publisher: Viking, 2005

Synopsis

Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel's discovery of dynamite made possible the famous industrial megaprojects that transformed the countryside and defined the era, including the St. Gothard rail tunnel through the Alps, the clearing of New York harbor, the Panama Canal, and countless others. Dynamite also caused terrible injuries and great loss of life, and, in some cases, incalculable and irreparable environmental damage. Nobel was one of the richest men in a society rapidly transforming under the power of his invention, but with a troubled conscience, he left his estate to the establishment of the world-famous prizes that bear his name.  As the use of explosives soared and growing populations consumed more food, nations scrambled for the scarce yet vital organic ingredient needed for both. The quest for nitrates takes us from the rural stables and privies of preindustrial Europe to the monopoly trading plantations in India and to the Atacama Desert in South America. Nitrates were as valuable in the nineteenth century as oil is in the twenty-first and were the cause of similar international jockeying and power politics. The "nitrogen problem" of creating inorganic nitrates was solved by an enigmatic German scientist named Fritz Haber. His breakthrough not only prolonged the First World War but became the foundation of the green revolution and the tripling of world population since then. Haber is also known as the "father of gas warfare" for his work on poison gas. When he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry, it sparked international outrage and condemnation.  A Most Damnable Invention is a human tale of scientific obsession, shadowy immorality, and historical irony, and a testament to the capacity for human ingenuity during times of war.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen R. Bown was born in Ottawa, Canada, and graduated in history from the University of Alberta. He has a special interest in the history of science and exploration. His previous books are The Naturalists: Scientific Travelers in the Golden Age of National History and Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail. He lives in the Canadian Rockies with his wife and two young children.

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A Most Damnable Invention
1Playing with FireA Thousand Years of Explosives 
It hath been doubted whether so ingenious and dreadful a Machine could be a humane Invention ... when it was first published, the World thought she had lost all her strength; for what more terrible or violent could humane Wit invent to its own destruction, than this artificial Lightning and Thunder.--William Clarke, 1670 
 
Four centuries ago, on January 31, 1606, a bedraggled, haggard, and limping man was led through the gathered throng at the Old Palace Yard at Westminster. Past the laid-out corpses of his comrades and fellows, past the solemn deputies and mounted justices and sheriffs, past the pike-bearing men-at-arms who kept the surging onlookers at bay. He was roughly hauled up the stairs onto a newly constructed scaffolding in the center of the square and turned to face the black-hooded hangman. Crowds congregated in the vast courtyard, hoping for a good view of the action; vendors sold foods and beer. Whether the day was pervaded by an air of lighthearted gaiety or profound import is not reliably documented, but it was a significant moment in England's history, and the people knew it. The man's imminent death was a cause for celebration, however muted during the final moments. After making a short speech, the hunched, red-bearded man bowed weakly for the noose, slowly crossed himself, and prepared to die.The man's name was Guy Fawkes and his crime was none otherthan high treason. A quick and foreordained trial had found him and a handful of others guilty of a most horrendous and frightening crime: the attempted assassination of the new king, James I, his queen, and the lords of the realm while they gathered in the House of Lords for the opening of Parliament. The new king had only ascended to the throne of England after the death of Elizabeth a few years before. Fawkes had signed his confession, his own death warrant, in a crippled, barely legible scrawl that reveals the extent of his torture. After nearly three days in the Tower of London, stretched on the rack and mercilessly squeezed by the manacles to extract a suitable statement, he had broken down and revealed the details of his bold and fiendish plot.Nothing in Fawkes's upbringing destined him for notoriety and revulsion as a national traitor and potential murderer. The date of his death is still commemorated four centuries later. Born into a respectable family in York in 1570, he enjoyed a good education and a comfortable upbringing. His father died when he was eight, and for nine years he was raised by his mother. She remarried when he was seventeen, and her new husband was a recusant gentleman who first introduced Fawkes to the Catholic faith. Fawkes came of age amid the religious turmoil of the Protestant Reformation, a northern European religious movement that sought to shake off the bonds of papal authority. England was the latest in a series of countries, centering on Switzerland, Scandinavia, Scotland, and many German states, that were frustrated by the corruption of the church. Henry VIII established the Anglican church and began confiscating Roman Catholic church property and dissolving monasteries. For much of the second half of the sixteenth century opposing factions struggled to place either Catholic or Protestant monarchs on the English throne. When Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in 1558, conflict with Catholic Spain escalated and the plight of Catholics in Englandgrew worse. Many of the Catholic families had their lands confiscated, and they were driven underground, to practice their religion in secret to avoid reprisals. When Philip II of Spain launched his grand armada in 1588, it was an attempt to depose Elizabeth and set a Catholic monarch on the throne and outlaw the Protestant faith. It was a savage and barbarous age. The separation of church and state and religious tolerance, even between Christian factions, lay in the distant future.At some point the young Fawkes converted to Catholicism under the influence of his stepfather and decided to leave England for Flanders, where he enlisted in the Spanish army (then occupying the Netherlands in a bloody war to crush the growth of Protestantism). He was reputedly a strong and calm commander "of excellent parts, very resolute and universally learned." He earned a reputation as "a man of great piety ... remarkable for his punctual attendance upon religious observance." After he had served with distinction in the Spanish army for years, the issue of religion in England again raised its ugly head. Elizabeth I died in 1603, and the throne passed to the Scottish king James V. English Catholics in exile agreed to send Fawkes on a mission to Spain to obtain support for another Spanish invasion of England, claiming that the English people would eagerly rise up and overthrow the new king, now James I. When his plea failed, Fawkes returned to Flanders and met with several other fanatical men who resolved on a plan to murder the new king themselves in defense of their religion.The ringleader of the small group was a recusant country gentleman from Warwickshire named Robert Catesby. He urged blowing up Westminster because "in that place, they have done us all the mischief and perchance God hath designed that place for their punishment." At first the plotters began digging a tunnel, and when this became too difficult, they rented a vacant storeroomunder the Parliament that at one time had been used to store coal. They then somehow secretly ferried thirty-six hundred-pound barrels of gunpowder across the Thames from Catesby's house and trundled it down into the storeroom and covered the mountain of casks with firewood. The opening of Parliament was originally scheduled for February 1605 and was then postponed until October 3 and then again to November 5. Fawkes, who had taken on the role of firing the powder because of his military experience, occasionally checked it and replaced any that had become too "decayed" to explode after such long storage in the damp cellar.Meanwhile, Catesby had widened the plot and taken in more conspirators. They planned to flee to Europe soon after the explosion to spread the good news and rally support for an uprising among Catholic troops stationed in Flanders. On Saturday October 26, an anonymous servant delivered a nondescript letter to William Parker, Lord Monteagle, as he settled down for dinner in the evening (Monteagle was married to the sister of one of the newly recruited conspirators). "This Parliament," the letter read, "shall receive a terrible blow, and yet they shall not see who hurts them." Monteagle immediately raised the alarm. A thorough, yet discreet, scouring of the premises revealed the unusually large pile of firewood in the cellar and a man claiming to be John Johnson guarding it. Johnson, who was actually Fawkes, was apparently "a man shrewd enough, but up to no good." He was immediately arrested and dragged away for questioning. He later claimed that had he been prepared or quick enough when the guards entered the cellar, he would have "blown him up, house, himself, and all."Later that night Fawkes was presented to the king and asked why he took part in such a cowardly scheme. "A dangerous disease required a desperate remedy" was his defiant reply. The next morning James I issued a letter instructing his constables that "The gentler tortours are to be first used unto him, and so by degreesproceeding to the worst, and so God speed your goode worke." After three dreadful days a mangled and broken Fawkes confessed all, revealing the names of the other conspirators and that his motivation was "for the advancement of the Catholic Faith and saving his own soul." After a swift mock trial he was led to his death. When he was jerked into the air and swung from the gibbet, it was, according to the official government propaganda of the time, "to the great joy of all the beholders, that the land was ended of so wicked a villainy." In quick succession several others were similarly hanged, their bodies left to swing erratically, before the ropes were cut and they dropped unceremoniously to the earth. A contemporary engraving of the scene shows the curious throngs ringing the courtyard while pike-wielding soldiers keep order. The still live bodies of the conspirators were dragged by horses around the clearing (drawing) before being castrated, eviserated, and beheaded. Each limp limb was tied to a stout horse, which then surged forward at a gallop, tearing the corpse into four parts (quartering), according to the brutal custom of the day. The date of Fawkes's capture, November 5, 1605, was proclaimed a public holiday, which is still celebrated today with firecrackers and the burning of effigies. One of the liturgies of the Church of England soon afterward was titled A form of prayer with thanksgiving to be used yearly upon the fifth day of November; for the happy deliverance of the King, and the three estates of the realm, from the most traiterous and bloudy intended massacre by gun-powder.Historians have since questioned the accuracy of the official government story of the time. The scene of the fiendish, mustachioed Fawkes hunched over a burning slow match adjacent to a great mound of gunpowder, cackling and singing his defiance of the king and the Protestant faith, seems a little too contrived. Many historians now believe that the plot was as much a government scheme to flush out disloyal Catholics as a secret plot toblow up Parliament, or alternately that the brash public display of the execution was orchestrated to conceal how easily the plot almost succeeded and how easily the government monopoly on gunpowder production was circumvented.Up until this time the potential of gunpowder was still being explored and was not entirely appreciated. Although it had been used in guns and cannons for several centuries, their effectiveness was only slowly improving to the point where the damage they inflicted was equal to the frightening noise and billowing smoke. Fawkes's creative and new use of gunpowder as a targeted explosive outside of cannons foreshadowed the tremendous power that would in the late nineteenth century be easily available in the form of dynamite and other high explosives. The Gunpowder Plot for the first time revealed just how powerful black powder could be and starkly exposed its awesome capacity to play kingmaker and determine the destiny of nations. In the political turmoil and uncertainty following Queen Elizabeth's death, and the ongoing religious struggles between Catholics and Protestants, the near miss of the plot, how close the plotters had come to eliminating a government they despised, turned heads across Europe. If the relative simplicity of the plan became generally known, future plots by religious zealots and usurpers would be assured. The origin of the vast quantity of gunpowder placed by Fawkes under the Houses of Parliament was never mentioned in the official records of the trial, probably to conceal just how easily such a frightening and remarkably dangerous substance could be obtained by amateurs, even though it was technically under government control. It was one thing for an assassin to attack by wielding a knife or by shooting a crossbow or placing poison in food, quite another for a handful of disgruntled fanatics to bring down the entire government with ease and without a moment's notice. 
 
Three and a half centuries before Guy Fawkes tried to explode the English Parliament a curmudgeonly middle-aged English scientist and friar named Roger Bacon staggered back from a terrifying explosion in his Oxford monastery cell. A jarring boom was followed by a billowing cloud of noxious gases from a crucible on the table where he had been experimenting. Coughing and choking on the brimstone fumes and shaken by the lightninglike eruption, he quickly moved to conceal the evidence of his experiment. His haste and secrecy were prompted by fear both for the destructive capacity he had unleashed and for his own safety if he were branded a heretic for toying with magic or matters of the devil. Unlike his other discoveries, which he wrote about in great detail, his experiments with black powder he concealed and only alluded to in his writings. Bacon was one of themost famous and forward-thinking philosophers of his time, and one of the great practical experimenters of the medieval era.Born at Ilchester in Somerset into a wealthy family in 1214, Bacon quickly earned a reputation as a bold and original thinker. After receiving his degrees from Oxford, he studied and taught at the University of Paris, then the center of learning in the European world, where he earned the title "Doctor Mirabilis" (Astounding Doctor) for his brilliant theorizing and knack for getting to the heart of matters. After a distinguished career at the university, Bacon joined the Franciscans in the 1250s, probably for health reasons, and returned to England. His passionate abhorrence of dogma and superstition soon ran him afoul of the church authorities--a conflict the deeply religious friar struggled with his entire life. Bacon was a participant in the quarrels between science and religion that would dominate much of European thought for centuries thereafter. Some historians consider him to be the first modern scientist. He earned a reputation as a sorcerer, alchemist, and magician despite his lifelong insistence on empiricism and objectivity.A deeply religious and devout Christian, Bacon passionately believed that a failure to explore the world was an insult to God, and that it was humanity's obligation to study nature. "If someone who has never seen fire," he wrote, "claims through reasoning that fire burns, changes things and destroys them, the mind of his listener will not be satisfied with that, and will not avoid fire before he has placed his hand or something combustible on the fire, to prove through experience what his reasoning had taught him. But once it has had the experience of combustion the mind is assured and rests in the light of truth. Reasoning is not enough--one needs experience." In addition to suggesting a much needed calendar reform to the church, he set out to show that seemingly supernatural phenomena were not the product of dark magical forces, but were rather products of the natural world and reproducible by experimentation. Two centuries before Leonardo daVinci, he predicted the development of "things of Nature that will amaze and astonish us" such as "perpetuall lights, and baths burning without end," spectacles, telescopes, magnifying glasses, flying machines, and motorized ships. In 1266, many of these observations were published in his Opus maius, a tome only recognized centuries later for its astonishing modernity. "These are marvailous things," he wrote, "if men knewe how to use them effectually in due quantitie and matter."Bacon's most famous discovery was the recipe by which "the sound of thunder may be artificially reproduced by natural causes." In the Middle Ages, despite Bacon's insistence otherwise, the study of science was often blended with a belief in magic powers. Although the church was naturally suspicious of this line of study, Bacon was a keen alchemist and believer in the philosopher's stone, the universal secret to turning ordinary metals into gold. Most of his experiments involved a primitive form of trial-and-error chemistry, which is probably how he stumbled upon the formula for black powder. Bacon had been scouring ancient Arabic texts and had come upon a recipe for exploding powder, which was at one time be...

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0670045241
• ISBN 13: 9780670045242
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288