Also it is the huge high explosive shell that makes way for the march of modern armies, and high explosive mines and torpedoes are the terror of the underseas.
All forms of dynamite are high explosives, and all high explosives may fairly be called dynamite.
Smokeless gunpowder is actually but a modified form of high explosive. It is dynamite that has been chained and tamed by the chemist’s cunning, so that it will burn without detonation, and thus permit the utilization of its awful energy to hurl shot and shell from war’s great guns.
Thus it is that dynamite in its varied forms deserves the high place with steam and electricity as one of the great triumvirs that have been the architects of the modern world.
THE FORGOTTEN BIT OF FULMINATE
In experimenting with high explosives and in their manufacture, a little absent-mindedness, a very slight lack of exact caution, a seemingly insignificant inadvertence for a moment, may cost one a limb or his life. The incident that cost me my left hand is a case in point.
On the day preceding that accident, I had had a gold cap put on a tooth. In consequence, the tooth ached and kept me awake the greater part of the night. Next morning I rose early and went down to my factory at Maxim, New Jersey. In order to test the dryness of some fulminate compound I took a little piece of it, about the size of an English penny, broke off a small particle, placed it on a stand outside the laboratory and, lighting a match, touched it off.
Owing to my loss of sleep the night before, my mind was not so alert as usual, and I forgot to lay aside the remaining piece of fulminate compound, but, instead, held it in my left hand. A spark from the ignited piece entered my left hand between my fingers, igniting the piece there, with the result that my hand was blown off to the wrist, and the next thing I saw was the bare end of the wristbone. My face and clothes were bespattered with flesh and filled with slivers of bone.... The following day, my thumb was found on the top of a building a couple of hundred feet away, with a sinew attached to it, which had been pulled out from the elbow.