Safety First! Don't Touch

The History of Explosives and Blasting

What is an Explosives Engineer?

How Explosives Work

How Explosives Have Shaped Our World

The Many Uses of Explosives

A Few Major Projects

Blasting in Your Neighborhood (coming soon)

Links and Further Reading

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How Explosives Have Shaped Our World

Few people today give much thought to the role that explosives play in their lives each day and how they are linked to our standard of living and our very way of life. Explosives provide the means to free up the vast resources of the earth for the advancement of civilization.


Our Standard of Living
In order to maintain our standard of living in the United States, every day 187,000 tons of cement are mixed, 35 million paper clips are purchased, 21 million photographs are taken using millions of ounces of silver...80 pounds of gold are used to fill 500,000 cavities and 3.6 million light bulbs are purchased.

Few people know that 42 different minerals are used to make a telephone and 35 are used to make a color television. Even everyday products such as talcum powder, toothpaste, cosmetics and medicines contain minerals, all of which must be mined using explosives.
(http://www.smenet.org/education/GEM/index.cfm)

In fact it is difficult to think of any product that is not extracted from or improved upon through the use of explosives. The roadways we travel on and tunnels we travel through are built by first breaking rock using explosives. The cars we travel in contain steel, copper, aluminum, and zinc — all raw materials extracted from the ground using explosives. Our computers are built using gold, silver, copper and silica. Our power sources — coal, fuel, natural gas pipelines, hydroelectric dams — are extracted or built using the power of explosives.

From the Beginning
During the very beginnings of this country, the explosives industry was founded when black powder was used to extract minerals, break rock, clear fields and make roads. It is not an overstatement to say that the infrastructure of the United States was built with the help of explosives. In the 1860s, Alfred Nobel, a Swede, invented dynamite and the blasting cap required to make dynamite explode.

He licensed it in the United States and the industrial revolution began.

With the use of dynamite, mines could be dug deeper and more quickly, and mineral deposits that were uneconomical to mine became profitable. The mining of copper, coal and iron ore increased a hundred fold. New industries began.

Rock quarries delivered materials such as limestone, cement and concrete which became common building products, replacing bricks and cobblestones. Harbors were deepened and widened, railways and roads expanded into the West and dams were built creating enough electricity to pave the way to the 20^th Century.

Between the end of the Civil War and the end of World War II, no single engineering tool surpassed the achievement of dynamite. During the last four decades this workhorse of industrial progress has been joined by even more efficient and safer products such as watergels, emulsions and ANFO.

Today, we rely on explosives engineering more than ever in our quest for more electrical energy, better roadways and more mineral harvesting.