Explosives as Movie Star: 10th Anniversary of Vertical Limit

December is the tenth anniversary of Vertical Limit. There are rescues, avalanches, blasts, leaps, and crevasse plunges every few minutes, high up on K-2. Emotions run high as recriminations and treachery abound.

It's not my favorite movie, but it's fun to watch, because it counts as one of the sillier portrayals of high explosives. Apparently inspired by The Wages of Fear and the excellent remake Sorcerer, the writers ladled a generous amount of nitroglycerin into the plot.

In the movie, the explosive is portrayed as a glowing liquid inside glass containers, which are packed conveniently in cases. When sunlight falls on it, run for the hills!

In reality nitroglycerin doesn't blow up when sunlight falls across it (though it is ultra-sensitive when thawed, after having been frozen), and it's not a garish fluorescent color. It's clear to slightly amber, and has the consistency of a light syrup. Miners used the liquid long ago in hard-rock tunnel jobs and mines, but it was so unsafe that dynamite took its place. Nitroglycerin and its close relatives are still used in manufacturing a limited number of explosives, propellants for cannon and rifle ammunition, and heart medicine. Anscanio Sabrero first mixed up a batch in 1847.

Back in 2000, when visiting Dyno Nobel's dynamite plant near Carthage, MO, I learned that Dyno Nobel had ceased using nitroglycerin there in favor of metriol trinitrate, aka nitropentaglycerin. It's abbreviated MTN. MTN is less likely to cause headaches and is somewhat more stable than nitroglycerin when heated, but equally prone to exploding under shock.

I had the chance to accompany a Dyno Nobel employee inside some of the buildings while the dynamite manufacturing process was underway, and found it quite interesting. The smell of MTN reminded me of a blend of two familiar odors: the chemicals used to disinfect swimming pools, and the disinfectant once used in hospitals.

An “aha” moment for me was seeing a stream of MTN flow from an upper pipe to a lower one with a bigger diameter. The clear liquid gurgled peacefully across an air gap, so it was in plain view. (This precaution is for a good reason; it avoids shock waves -- see below). Later I went to the wooden building where MTN is mixed with absorbent and loaded into casings to make the familiar “dynamite sticks.” The packaging structure was decades old and had a peaceful, timeless quality, and reminded me of an old mining building of the kind I've seen out west because it was built into a hillside. There were no radios and every nail head was covered, to prevent sparks.

But even when experts take much care there is still a residual risk when dealing with nitroglycerin and MTN, which are extremely powerful, pound for pound. In fact, two months before I visited, the Carthage plant had suffered a good-sized explosion while processing a batch of MTN. But there were no injuries that time, thanks to many precautions: intense training, sirens, a generous distance between buildings, doors that open easily when a man is running for his life, stuff like that. See Chapter 9 of Inviting Disaster.

One no-no for visitors to a dynamite factory is dropping stuff: say knocking a coffee mug onto a hard surface with one's elbow. That's because of the slim chance that MTN could have leaked onto a floor. My guide on the tour made sure I left behind my cell phone, coins, and car keys. Even though the plant was doing everything it could to prevent such a puddle, the precaution was mandatory.

Back to the adorably bad movie Vertical Limit: I can't think of any reason that even half-sane mountain climbers would load up their backpacks with nitroglycerin. When I visited Dyno Nobel wasn't shipping any MTN as a liquid to quarries and mines; it blended the liquid with absorbent and packed it into dynamite casings first.

(Yes, there was a time in oilfield work when quantities of nitroglycerin would be made locally and delivered by truck; it helped cleanse aging oil wells of paraffin build-up downhole. Readers with access to Ebsco Host databases can read all about it in a Saturday Evening Post article, "The Most Dangerous Job in the World," January 27, 1951.)

I first read about the history of nitroglycerin when writing an article on the history of vault-breaking and safecracking. In the late 1800s, itinerant criminals called yeggs would steal dynamite from quarries, boil it with water in kettles (very bad idea, that one), skim the "soup" off and store it in rubber flasks. Once on the job, they'd funnel it into tight-fitting safe doors before detonating it.

One reason that nitroglycerin and MTN can be so dangerous when transported in liquid form is that they slosh. They have the consistency of a light syrup, so they trap air bubbles. Explosions have been triggered by sudden shifts of the liquid, although it's not inevitable. (Old hands in the oil field industry tell stories of cans of nitroglycerin falling off a truck and bouncing down a hillside, without incident.) Sloshing caused the entrapped air bubbles to compress rapidly; this made the air in the bubbles heat up; this made the container explode. It's called adiabatic heating. According to Dyno Nobel, adiabatic heating is not a problem if plumbing is adapted to MTN's special demands. Hence the air gap I mentioned above.

Spontaneous explosions are most likely if MTN hasn't been thoroughly cleansed of all unused ingredients and unwanted reactants. Tainted batches can blow up promptly, or months later if the explosive has been stored (unwisely) as a liquid.

Strangely, I found while researching Inviting Disaster that a great many more people have been killed by accidental explosions of the “safer,” modern explosives based on ammonium nitrate than by accidental explosions of nitroglycerin. The most common reasons for ammonium-nitrate disasters -- such as the two ships that blew up at Texas City in 1947 -- were carelessness and lack of knowledge.

Traveling Wave Reactor: On the Move?

According to recent articles like this one, Bill Gates is v-e-r-y enthused about his investment in TerraPower, which hopes to put a breakthrough reactor on the market sometime around 2020 ... or maybe later.

Indeed Terrapower's proposal (and that's all it is at this point, with no reactor in operation) appears worth investigating.

A "traveling wave reactor" sounds like something out of the seventh dimension, but the general idea has been discussed since 1958. TerraPower worked out further details and filed for a patent. The company might be more easily understood by the general public if they had called it CandlePower.

About candles: When you buy a candle, the wax embedded in the new wick has so much surface area that a kitchen match can volatilize the wax to a flammable gas, which ignites. The wick's flame melts a pool of wax at the top of the candle; this liquid moves up into the wick's fibers by capillary action (aka "wicking") and the cycle continues smoothly and slowly. The wick carbonizes at the top, and the candle shortens until the last of the wax is smeared across the top of your candleholder. A candle works because a wave of heat travels across the body of the fuel and makes it available, a little bit of time, for the reaction to continue. A candle is a stable system: yes, a candle can start a house fire if it tips over, but it can't explode like a gasoline lantern.

A TerraPower wave reactor wouldn't get shorter over the years, but as with a candle, raw material would be converted to fuel slowly and continuously, as a wave of radiation moved very slowly through the reactor's volume. Imagine a long container with fuel rods filled with "depleted uranium," which is nearly all U-238 rather than fissionable U-235 (which is also A-bombable in high concentrations, if a critical mass can be brought together very quickly).

In between the fuel rods are coolant channels; a high-performance coolant is vital since the wave reactor would produce a lot of heat.

But it can't get going without help. That requires mounting a small conventional nuclear reactor at one end. This is necessary to get the fuel production going. The startup reactor's neutron radiation converts the nearby U-238 to plutonium-239 through a chain of reactions. Pu-239 is plenty fissionable, so much so that bomb designers can't use the simple methods that are suitable for U-235 bombs. The new plutonium fissions and that produces more neutrons, which converts more U-238 into plutonium fuel. According to TerraPower a wave reactor could turn out heat for a hundred years or more, depending on size, and most of the energy would come from relatively cheap U-238. About 99.3 percent of natural uranium mined from the earth is U-238, little of which is being used today.

Present-day reactors can do the same transmutation trick with U-238, if someone takes the trouble to chemically separate plutonium out of spent fuel rods. Once separated, the plutonium can be machined into fuel rods to go back in reactors. But reprocessing is highly controversial for the wastes produced, and some miscreants might be tempted to divert the separated plutonium for nuclear weapons rather than reactor fuel.

A principal talking point for wave-reactor advocates is that everything happens inside a big box, without the need to pull out extremely radioactive fuel rods and send them off to a robot-operated refinery. Another attraction is that a wave reactor will burn natural uranium, which is plentiful. Here's a video and animation with more detail.

These sound great! Building a working prototype is a good idea, along with tests of other promising new-generation reactors. But there will be special hurdles for the TerraPower machine to cross. One is handling the coolant safely. This is projected to be liquid sodium because of the high heat. This molten element reacts readily, even violently, with other chemicals like water. It might be possible to immerse the wave reactor in a bath of liquid sodium, avoiding problems with pipe malfunctions.

Will the extremely long-duration of the reactor cause unmanageable radiation damage to the metals used? At question here is what happens to metal atoms after getting whacked by neutrons, hundreds of times per atom. It might be okay, but there is little evidence one way or the other past 30 years of constant exposure. Will off-gassing of xenon (a reactor byproduct) be a problem? Uneven heat transfer?

Here's a link to a good Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article summarizing the work that will be needed to test out the safety of the traveling-wave and other off-beat reactors.

As one longtime observer of the nuclear field told me, "The wave reactor is revolutionary. Its new materials and features may all be faultless, leading to a reactor that operates more safely and economically than today's reactors." But if significant shortcomings appear along the way, he cautions, "the wave reactor can actually drop below the performance levels of today's reactors."

Finally, this bit of really ancient history to give perspective: two billion years ago, a dozen or so natural nuclear reactors ran for hundreds of thousands of years in present-day Gabon, Central Africa. The Oklo reactors could operate because uranium back then was four times richer in U-235 than today's uranium ore (some of today's reactors run at this low level of enrichment, 3 percent). Second reason it was possible: the rock formation was soaked in groundwater, which acted as a neutron moderator.

Using evidence from the unusual mix of isotopes in the rock, nuclear physicists surmise that a given reactor ran for about two and half hours, then stopped because the groundwater boiled away (probably making all kinds of weird underground noises if anybody had been around to listen). Then after everything cooled, water returned, and short-lived fission decay products broke down, each reactor cranked up for another short run. This went on for umpteen thousands of years. Heat output: somewhere around 100 kW, thermal. That's a tiny fraction of the thermal output of today's commercial reactors, but rather impressive for a reactor that started and ran, hands-off.

Google Book: Grist for the Historical Novel

After reading Jack Finney's Time and Again five years ago, I set myself the goal of writing an historical novel. He sets a high threshold. His book's setting alternates between 1970s tattered New York and 1880s gilded New York. It combines a gripping plot, science fiction, social commentary, keen observation of humanity, and "you are there" detail. The book earned a devoted fan base, and the audio-book version is even better. The sequel based in 1912 (From Time to Time) is good but I prefer the first book.

Finney spent many hours in libraries and newspaper morgues noodling out the details, such as the seating arrangements inside horse-drawn streetcars, the view across Central Park, and how police Chief Inspector Thomas Byrnes dressed and spoke. Finney makes Byrnes a scary, ambitious dude, which he was.

But what are Midwestern writers of the 2010s to do, who want to write about New York of long ago? Yes, we go and visit the libraries and cool legacy settings like Pomander Walk. But something we have that Jack Finney didn't is Google Book.

Authors, publishers, and my agent are all unhappy about the scope of Google's worldwide reach, but while they fight it out in the courts for the next decade, Google Book does much for the historical writer in search of information about how people lived, talked, and worked. Full text books, delivered free of charge to our PCs are an obvious benefit, but also valuable is its scanning of period magazines like Century, The Smart Set, and Railway Signal Engineer. Even the snippet view of copyrighted books is useful because it can be used as a sort of super-index, which saves me much time once in a library. And it's possible to do proximity searches with Google even though the function isn't as easy to use as in Proquest.

But Google's toolbox of wonders hasn't made doing a novel any faster. That's because there's such a mountain of scanned books and magazine volumes available for downloading. Skim one, and there are a few hundred more waiting to be read.

One that I decided to go all the way through was King's Photographic Views of New York (1895).

Using business-sponsored pages to cover much of his photographic and printing costs, Moses King's Boston-based printing business churned out many such city guides. The Googlized King books offer hundreds of photos, etchings and ads. The aerial drawings of New York are fascinating: they clearly show the "spine" of high buildings that ran down the wealthy center of the island, north to south, and that clustered around Wall Street.

Google Book started out keeping a low profile on its methods and even now there is not a lot of information how Google has been able to scan over 10 million books, many of which are too delicate to thunk down on scanner platen in the pursuit of lower costs. From what I can tell Google uses people to scan the delicate stuff (you can see their purple-plastic-gloved fingers in some book images) but is said to rely on automated, high-speed, page-turning scanners whenever possible.

Here's a video of what said to be a Google book scanner in action, the Kirtas APT 240. Humans load books, like feeding ammunition into a Bofors cannon, and the Kirtas does the rest.

With the help of Google Book, we can glean visual details about life back then that are likely to be missed in biographies, newspapers, or yearbooks. For example, every building owner of significance wanted a personalized pennant waving from a pole atop his building. The one decorating the Broadway Rouss department store appears to be longer than the building was high: see page 465. But the rest of the pennants look authentic and I make a note: if my character has paused at the corner of Broadway and 29th, and she's looking at Macy's up the street, if the wind is off the Meadowlands she's going to see plenty of department store pennants. They'll be blowing left to right, crossing Broadway like fairy bridges.

On page 509 is an excellent view in front of Crawford Shoe Store. The location is just off the south end of Union Square. This camera wasn't one of the “hold that pose!” models of the early years – these folks are caught in mid-stride, without blurring.

The men are all wearing hats, of course. The weather must have been seasonable since there are straw boaters among the derbies. Two policemen are standing in the street, wearing the bulbous helmets not yet made silly by Keystone Kops movies. Women are holding parasols to keep the sun off. The street is wide, paved with what appears to be brick or stone. No vehicles of any kind are in view. The sidewalks are amazingly spacious -- they look to be as wide as a street. Perched on the second floor are two oversized metal statues in niches, gazing over the shoe store's big flat sign. Roman shoe gods?

Although I'd come for the photos, I lingered for the ads. According to p. 474, when babies are fussy, mothers should give them Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, which the advertisement neglected to mention was a morphine cocktail.

Had you been a "brain worker" in 1895, and felt weak, broken down, and otherwise debilitated you could have benefited from Horsford's Acid Phosphate because It is the Best Remedy for Relieving Mental and Nervous Exhaustion (p. 482). The endorsing doctor heartily recommends it for curing "general derangement of the cerebral and nervous systems." An apt description of writers who have been spending too much time absorbing street-level history from Google Book ...

Leeroy's Call: Implications for Proto-Memers

Starting a new meme is a hard road! And it's probably a good thing. English is ridiculously complicated already.

While I was writing an article about the sub-genre of Steampunk in which the settings include giant, rigid, floating aircraft (think Miyazaki movies, Neil Gamin's Stardust), Youngest Son suggested I use the word HindenPunk, since the Hindenburg was the most notorious horse in that stable. It sounded good to me, and my editor helped out by making it the single-word title. I waited to see if it would start multiplying in Steampunk sites.

Not much!

The gold standard of modern Internet meme-hood could be Leeroy Jenkins' yell of "Let's Do This!", which has jumped via YouTube from gamers to television, songs, movies, and even the Armed Forces Journal.

An early electronic meme was the novelty song Mairzy Doats with this line:

Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey

It's not nonsense though it reads that way. It's phonetic for:

"Mares eat oats and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy."

The song's two-year run of success starting with airplay on the home front during World War II suggests that memes are more likely to catch hold if they start as an inside joke. American combat troops used snippets from the song as a challenge password because German spies had trouble coming up with the following lines as a countersign when trying to sneak through our checkpoints in France. While some of the enemy commandos had grown up in America and knew flawless colloquial English, they had no knowledge of a fad that hit the New York airwaves in 1943.

All I know that is that many new words and proto-memes are launched but few take flight. In a humor column for Smithsonian I wrote about early bachelor life with my brothers in an old farmhouse in Missouri. We built cabins from oak logs in the back lot of a sawmill and re-assembled them elsewhere. In describing guy-housekeeping I invented the word "messismo," a variation of machismo. As illustrations, I listed our use of high-explosives crates (empty ones) for bookshelves, and my oldest brother's habit of overhauling his Stihl chain saw on our kitchen table. Googling reveals my other new word never went viral either, with only minor appearances.

But even the most successful Internet memes are shelf-limited: viral one day, cliche the next. See Robert Frost ...

Part 2: Julia B. Rice vs. "Useless and Unnecessary Whistling"

In the last installment, we left Julia Rice's Manhattan mansion called “Villa Julia” semi-surrounded by angry, tooting tugboat captains. They didn't like the lobbying she had been doing for noise-limiting laws.

But Rice stuck to her plan of gathering evidence, both written and recorded, and playing her wax-cylinder recordings at public meetings in major cities, always at top volume. The tugboat captains’ counterattack only confirmed her claims that noise was out of control.

In time she roused Congress enough to pass a law authorizing the Inspector of Steamboats to enforce a whistle ban. At the city level, she succeeded cutting back the time during which church bells could summon the faithful on Sunday. "The majority of them are decidedly discordant,” she explained to reporters. In 1907 she took on the problem of children fighting and playing loud games just outside of hospitals and schools. Mark Twain agreed to serve as president of the society’s Children’s Auxiliary. The young members swore to hush up, at least near children’s hospitals.

Without action, Julia once said, the twentieth century would be the Age of Noise: hence the name of her group, the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise. After she retired from the field, city agencies made some additional headway but nobody could do much about the escalating noise from cars and trucks.

Her vast collection of ambient-noise recordings dropped out of sight sometime in the 1920s. If the wax cylinders of Julia Rice are ever located, they will be the earliest street recordings from New York. (On a side note, no verified recordings of Mark Twain's voice have survived either. But according to this website a professional actor by the name of William Gillette, who knew Twain well, once recorded an impersonation of Twain telling the Jumping Frog story. So that's close.)

If the Rice recordings ever turn up in a basement somewhere, they will give us new insight what life in New York was really like during this boisterous, optimistic pre-war era, what some observers called the Age of Energy.

Julia Rice Takes on the World: Early Noise Fights in NYC

If you live in a big city and noise gets on your nerves, it might make you feel better to know that Julia Barnett Rice (1859-1929) was one of the first to make the issue into a social crusade.

In 1905 she was living on Manhattan’s 89th Street and Riverside Drive, the wife of corporate lawyer and investor Isaac Rice. That summer, she decided enough was enough.

Her chalet-style mansion called Villa Julia overlooked the Hudson River. Though upscale the neighborhood was noisy due to river traffic on the west and street traffic on the east. Isaac had the same horror of noise but rather than look outward, he turned inward. He had contractors build a soundproof room in the basement of their house where he could concentrate on his long-distance chess game. He often played opponents in Britain, exchanging moves by telegraph. Down below the street, whiling away the quiet and happy hours, he invented a strategy called the Rice Gambit. He generously sponsored chess tournaments as long as the chessmasters promised to begin each game with his gambit.

Julia could have spent a bit of the family fortune to sound-proof the entire mansion, or to relocate to a quiet stretch of the Upper Hudson, but instead took on noisemakers with zeal and persistence. These were not pushovers. Her first targets were tugboat and scow captains who worked the waterfronts of the Hudson River (then called the North River). About two in the morning, every morning, these officers summoned their crews from the taverns by laying on the steam whistles. To pass the time, the captains also sent friendly messages to each other via steam-whistle.

Rice needed evidence for people who didn't live near the river, so she hired Columbia University students to go out with portable graphophones and dictographs to vacuum up all available boat sounds along with the screech and thump of wheels on the elevated railway, the clack of sticks on picket fences, factory whistles, and the banging of carriage-wheel repair shops. She had the students sidle into saloons and nickelodeons to record drunken brawls ("the boisterous sports of hoodlums," she called it).

Her hard-working students logged 3,000 tugboat signals a day. But steam-powered tooting did not break any law. The river was a “free soundway” under federal and common law. Nor did the noises on land trigger legal crackdowns, no matter how obnoxious, like organ grinders who stood under one's window on Rivington and screeched out "Hear Me Norma" and "Silver Threads Among the Gold" a few hundred times a day. Remember: in the summer everybody had to keep their windows open ... no air conditioning!

So the good-hearted Julia wrote articles, visited schools and offices, harried politicians, and marshaled her six children to hand out pamphlets and mail thousands of letters. She had a platform to press her views, since the Rices owned the magazine Forum. She did generate so much publicity that angry tugboat captains began gathering on the Hudson River near her house in the middle of the night. They yanked on whistle lanyards and shone their spotlights into the windows of Villa Julia.

Did she succeed? Stay tuned for the conclusion!

Crush Syndrome: A Mystery in Early Collapse Rescues

Following is information that the editor couldn't fit in my article on heavy rescue, published last year in Invention&Technology.

From the earliest days of building collapses, rescuers knew time was of the essence, but important details were elusive. One mystery: During the Blitz of London (September 1940 through May 1941), rescue parties took enormous risks to remove survivors from heavy rubble who, after extrication, appeared to be in good spirits and good shape. After receiving effusive thanks, the rescuers packed them off to the hospital. End of story?

No - within a day or so, the rescuers heard that the victims had died under care at the hospital. It was heartbreaking. A medical team at Hammersmith Hospital had two such cases in a single day in 1940. This coincidence raised the salience of the issue and triggered a wave of calls to other hospitals. More cases turned up. What was going on? Autopsies and experimental therapies followed.

By early 1941 the answer emerged: in a manner of speaking, the people were dying because they had been released from entombment. Massive wreckage had lain across muscle tissue for many hours, blocking circulation. In a typical situation, tissue of the large leg muscles began dying as the rescuers worked through the wreckage by hand, excavating a tunnel by pulling out bricks and sawing timbers. When help arrived and the crushing pressure came off, blood began flowing to and from the damaged tissue. This carried a wave of toxic byproducts through the circulatory system.

Kidneys went off line and survivors who looked quite healthy died of heart failure. Those with pelvic injuries were particularly at risk. Maddeningly, the British researchers discovered that a German physician by the name of Von Colmers (I couldn't find his first name -- does anyone know?) had figured out the problem while assisting at the Messina earthquake of 1908.

(People interested in the history of disaster response may find the case of Messina worth a look, because the big earthquake and tsunami triggered one of the first major international relief efforts. The King and Queen of Italy took such a strong interest in the recovery that they jumped into the work, hands-on. During an aftershock, Queen Elena came rather close to being trapped in a hospital collapse.)

After World War I German doctors published more journal papers on handling crush injuries, but the information never drew attention in England ... until the Blitz.

Today, heavy rescue crews know to expect cases of “crush syndrome.” Before any beams and timbers are lifted they begin medical treatment via intravenous fluids, which may mean an EMT crawling through a void with a medical kit. Those of us with a fear of confined spaces can be very grateful there are men and women with the courage to volunteer for such work.

Another lifesaver is an intravenous kit designed specifically for use on survivors so entrapped that nothing but one wrist is visible, and immobilization aids that allow a survivor to be sledded through a twisty tunnel while protecting the spine from further injury.