Sobrero
NAME: Sobrero, Ascanio.
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Discovered nitroglycerine in 1846.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None.
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 12th October 1812, in Casale Monferrato, Alessandria, Piemont [now Italy].
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 1888, in Turin, Italy. Aged 76
DISCIPLINE: Chemistry of explosives.
FIELD: Chemistry.
LANGUAGE: Italian.
PARENTS: ?
SIBLINGS: ?
SPOUSE: ?
CHILDREN: ?
EDUCATION: University of Turin, 1830s.
MAJOR WORK: Paper on nitroglycerine addressed to the Turin Academy of
Sciences, February 1847.
LIFE AND TIMES: During the 1830’s, Sobrero studied medicine in Turin and in the same decade became seriously interested in chemistry.
In 1840, he went to Paris where he worked for two years assisting the French chemist, T J Pelouze. Two years before, Pelouze had found that if he soaked cotton in concentrated nitric acid, the process created nitrocellulose, which was highly explosive. The process was improved by German chemist <developed work of> Schonbein*, when he used a mixture of one part nitric acid to three parts sulphuric acid to digest clean cotton, then collected the resulting product.
This form of nitrocellulose, known as gun cotton, came into use as a major explosive in the 1860’s.
In 1843, Sobrero moved to Giessen, Germany, where he worked for two years in the laboratory of the German chemist <worked with> Liebig*, before returning to the University of Turin to take the job of Professor of Chemistry.
In 1846, he produced an explosive liquid that was much more powerful than gunpowder, by adding glycerol to a mixture of concentrated sulphuric acid and nitric acid. He called this new explosive pyroglycerin, later to become known as nitroglycerine.
The main drawback with this new explosive was that it was highly volatile and would explode in a very unpredictable way if subjected to heat and pressure. After his face was badly scarred in an explosion in the 1840s, Sobrero declared the new explosive to be too dangerous to be of any practical use.
In a different form nitroglycerine was to become a widely-used explosive. In 1851, the young Swedish chemist, <work used by> Nobel*, spent a year in the Pelouse laboratory in Paris, where he studied Sobrero’s work and decided that there might be a use for it in the construction industry.
In the 1850’s and early 1860’s, Nobel, together with his father Immanuel worked on developing nitroglycerine as a controllable explosive and mixed it with silica, resulting in what they called dynamite, which could be exploded using a blasting cap or detonator ignited with a lit fuse.
In 1859, Sobrero was appointed as professor of chemistry at the Application School for Engineers in Turin. Nobel began exploiting his new product commercially in 1865 and, when dynamite proved to be hugely successful, Sobrero made it known that he considered himself to be the subject of an injustice, even though Nobel openly acknowledged his part in the development of nitroglycerine.
ASSESSMENT: It could be said that Nobel’s work denied him his rightful fame for the discovery of nitroglycerine.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None.
ONELINER: Ascanio Sobrero, inventor of nitroglycerine
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
EB, DSB
Nobel Foundation.