Blown to Bits in the Mine

Blown to Bits in the Mine is Eric Twitty's history of explosives in the United States mining industry. It follows how blasting went from a black powder necessity to a science, with tales of death and survival woven through the technical story so that it never reads like a manual.

The coverage begins with North America's Industrial Revolution and runs into the twentieth century. A dealer listing gives the full subtitle as A History of Mining and Explosives in the United States, and says the book covers the blasting process from drilling blast holes to firing charges, with attention to technology, material culture and what explosives did to the mine as a workplace.

The description says it is as much for the casual observer of western history as for explosives experts. The record we hold dates it to 2001. A dealer lists a 2009 first paperback edition, originally issued in hardcover, with endnotes, a bibliography and an index. The two lists of pages disagree, 220 in our record and 208 on the dealer's, so we give no page count.

This book fits mining history readers, collectors of western Americana, museum volunteers who explain old mine equipment, and anyone curious why blasting mattered so much underground. The description says casual readers are as welcome as explosives experts. Engineers and teachers can use the endnotes and bibliography to follow sources. It is not a safety manual and should not be read as instructions; it is a history about how miners and companies used powerful materials, and what happened when things went wrong.

Eric Twitty wrote this book and two others in our library, Riches to Rust and Basins of Silver. All three concern mines and mining. The dealer listing we found carries no biography either. We could not find a verified biography of Twitty, so we do not offer one. His author page lists all three books.

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Black powder was the main blasting agent in mining until nineteenth century chemistry changed the picture. Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist, developed dynamite in 1866, according to Wikipedia, and received patents in England on May 7, 1867 and in Sweden on October 19, 1867. Dynamite was the first safely manageable explosive stronger than black powder, and it quickly became a popular substitute.

Nitroglycerin had been the dangerous step before it. Wikipedia reports that an explosion at the Heleneborg factory on September 3, 1864 killed Nobel's brother Emil and several others. Nitroglycerin was unusable commercially until Nobel mixed it with diatomaceous earth, which stabilized it for transport and handling.

In the United States, the first dynamite production was by the Giant Powder Company of San Francisco, whose founder obtained exclusive rights from Nobel in 1867. DuPont later acquired Giant and dissolved it in 1905. After the DuPont monopoly was broken up in 1911 and 1912, Hercules Powder Company and Atlas Powder Company took over dynamite manufacturing. That industrial arc frames the period the book covers.

Source: Wikipedia, Dynamite