Brief History of Mining Explosives The inventor of the first explosive; gunpowder, will probably never be known with

certainty, although it is believed that the Chinese, the Arabs, or the Indians were the first to use gunpowder. The thirteenth century writings of Roger Bacon from Great Britain contain instructions to the preparations of black powder. After 1250 AD, the composition of gun powder was well established. Gunpowder was first used as a propellant in the early forms of cannons. Three hundred years after Roger Bacon, the use of black powder as a tool to break rock had not been explored, and it wasnt until the Seventeenth Century that it was being used for mining. Records indicate that in February 1627, the Royal Mines of Schemnitz at Ober-Biderstollen in Hungary fired a blasting charge. By 1689 gunpowder was made into the form of paper cartridges and used extensively in the tin mines in Cornwall, England. The charges were ignited by crude handmade squibs of quill and fine powder. It wasnt until 1831, that William Bickford invented factory made Safety Fuse as it is known today. In 1832 electricity was first used to fire charges in England.

An Italian by the name of Ascanio Sobrero made nitroglycerin for the first time in 1844, but it wasnt until 20 years later in 1864 that Alfred Nobel also invented a means to safely initiate this very powerful explosive; the fulminate detonator. Up until that time, detonating nitroglycerin was a very dangerous business. The problem with nitroglycerin was that by itself it was very sensitive and dangerous to handle. By 1866 Nobel discovered that a mineral powder called kieselguhr, a diatomaceous earth powder, could absorb up to three times its own mass of nitroglycerin, and desensitized it sufficiently to make it safer to handle. There were two disadvantages to using kieselguhr. Because kieselghur is an inert substance, approximately one quarter of the cartridge took no part in the explosion; its presence reduced the power by absorbing heat. The second problem was that the kieselguhr had a tendency to dissolve in water and leave free nitroglycerin. About 1870, James Howden, a San Francisco chemist, solved the problem of reduced power by replacing the kieselguhr with sugar and adding potassium and magnesium carbonate. However the sugar still dissolved in water. In 1875 Nobel discovered that he could dissolve collodion cotton, (a colorless gummy liquid resulting from a solution of guncotton and ether) into nitroglycerin, which resulted in a gelatinous mass which was much more powerful than his original dynamite. This new product was called Blasting Gelatin.

From 1890 to 1950 most commercial explosives were based on nitroglycerin which was blended first with potassium nitrate (later sodium nitrate) together with combustibles such as sawdust or wood-meal, flour or oat husks and generally formed into cartridges for general blasting use and depending on the manufacturer, were given various trade names such as Dynamite. The 1950s ushered in a new era of ammonium nitrate based explosives. The sodium nitrate content of the nitroglycerinbased explosives was replaced with ammonium nitrate. It was found that by adding ammonium nitrate, the nitroglycerin content of the explosive could be reduced without reducing its power. The resulting explosive was much more stable and safer to use. The greatest development was the mixing of hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel oil) with ammonium nitrate to produce a very economical bulk explosive called Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil (ANFO). The ingredients for this explosive can be produced at considerably less cost compared with packaged type explosives and are very safe to store and transport. ANFO continues to be used today in all types of commercial blasting operations. By the 1970s packaged nitroglycerin based explosives were beginning to be phased out and a new generation of water gel explosives (based on ammonium nitrate) was introduced into the blasting industry.

They are called water gels because the explosives are made from ingredients that are not explosives in themselves. They consist of an oxidizer (usually ammonium nitrate), a fuel, and a sensitizer dispersed in a thickened and cross-linked aqueous gel medium. These new generation explosives dramatically improved the safety of blasting compared to nitroglycerin based explosives because of their relative insensitivity to handling in the mining/blasting environments. A good illustration is that as nitroglycerin based explosives age they can become very unstable, whereas water gels become less sensitive as they age, in fact to the point where they can no longer be used as an explosive. These water gel explosives are the current technology used in most mining in the United States and are produced in very large quantities. Other explosives are used when circumstances and special requirements must be met. Handling explosives in large scale mining and demolition operations has become a professional specialty.