How Did Dynamite Become Heart Medicine? Why Nitroglycerin Treats Angina

In short: Dynamite itself never became a drug. Its explosive ingredient, nitroglycerin, turned out to widen blood vessels — an effect first noticed in Alfred Nobel's own factory workers — and from 1879 it was prescribed for angina. The same molecule, at a vastly smaller dose and in a different context, went from blasting rock to saving hearts.

How can an explosive and a heart drug be the same substance?

Nitroglycerin was first synthesized in 1847 by the Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero. The liquid was so unstable that handling it was perilous. In the 1860s Nobel mixed it with diatomaceous earth to create a far more manageable solid explosive: dynamite. Then, in Nobel's factories, something strange was reported.

	Dynamite	Angina medicine
Key substance	Nitroglycerin	Nitroglycerin
Purpose	Blasting, construction, mining	Widening blood vessels, relieving chest pain
Difference	Dose and context — bulk explosive vs a tiny medical dose

What did the factory workers discover?

Workers who suffered from angina noticed their chest pain eased during the working week and returned on weekends at home. Others complained of headaches on Monday mornings. Both effects came from the same cause: nitroglycerin vapor widening blood vessels. More blood flow to the heart meant less chest pain; widened vessels in the head meant headaches. Local physicians traced the pattern, and in 1879 William Murrell published nitroglycerin as a remedy for angina pectoris, bringing it into standard medical practice.

How did Nobel himself react to the drug?

The irony was not lost on Nobel. Late in life he was himself prescribed nitroglycerin for chest pain, and he wrote about the paradox of being ordered to take the substance his fortune was built on — while disliking the headaches it caused. After his death in 1896, his fortune endowed the Nobel Prizes.

Why did the mechanism take another century to explain?

• 1879: After Murrell's paper, nitroglycerin became a standard angina treatment — but nobody knew why it worked.
• 1970s–80s: Researchers showed the body converts nitroglycerin into nitric oxide (NO), which relaxes the smooth muscle around blood vessels.
• 1998: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for discovering nitric oxide as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system — the prize created by the dynamite maker, for unlocking the secret of dynamite's own ingredient.

For another substance with two faces, read how lithium, the battery metal, became a bipolar medicine. For a correct observation that was ignored instead, see the doctor called mad for telling colleagues to wash their hands, one of the five stories collected in WowScience Marathon EP1.

What lesson does this story leave behind?

A molecule on the list of the most dangerous substances also sits on the list of the most common heart medicines. The difference was never the molecule alone — it was dose, context, and doctors who paid attention to a repeating pattern of pain in ordinary workers. World-changing discoveries can begin not only in laboratories, but on factory floors.

FAQ

Q: Is dynamite itself used as medicine?
A: No. Its explosive ingredient, nitroglycerin, is purified and given in tiny medical doses to treat angina.

Q: Who discovered nitroglycerin's effect on the heart?
A: It was observed in workers at Nobel's dynamite factories — chest pain that eased on workdays and returned on weekends — then traced by local physicians and formalized by Murrell in 1879.

Q: Is nitroglycerin still used today?
A: Yes. Sublingual tablets, sprays and patches of nitroglycerin remain standard treatments for angina.

Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/sqX7m3LYosA