The Explosionist (27 page)

T
HE VEHICLE HIRED FOR
the expedition was a bright maroon charabanc, its seats covered in a lurid bottle-green leather substitute. A green-and-yellow-striped fringed canopy had been raised to protect the ladies’ complexions from the Saturday morning sun. As president of the New Town Women’s Spiritualist Association, Great-aunt Tabitha had designated Heriot Row for the morning rendezvous, and as the driver leaned on the hood of the charabanc smoking a cigarette, she scanned the horizon for stragglers.

The ladies of the NTWSA were scheduled to arrive at the Nobel dynamite factory by midmorning—Sophie was particularly dreading this part of the trip, as it brought to mind her parents’ untimely deaths at the factory’s Russian
counterpart—then take a tour of the facilities, to be followed by a late lunch. In the afternoon they would pick wildflowers in the countryside, spending the night at the Ayrshire Temperance Hotel and visiting Culzean Castle and the Electric Brae the next day before returning home in time for Sunday afternoon tea.

As the last few ladies arrived, Peggy ran out the front door and pressed a packet of barley sugar into Sophie’s hand.

Tears came to Sophie’s eyes. Only Peggy ever remembered that Sophie got carsick.

“Thank you, Peggy,” she said, and wished the housekeeper a nice weekend, though the words seemed quite inadequate to her feelings.

Peggy snorted at the idea of herself having a nice weekend, but she stayed outside and waved at Sophie from the front doorstep until the bus turned the corner.

As they drove out of Edinburgh to the main road that ran west to the coast, Sophie found the movement of the charabanc distinctly sickness inducing. She popped a piece of barley sugar into her mouth and sank down low in her seat. She would have been quite interested to talk to Miss Grant again—she might know more by now about the minister and Nicko Mood, mightn’t she?—but Miss Grant sat in the front seat, sequestered in conversation with Great-aunt Tabitha.

Once they reached the main road, Sophie stopped feeling
so queasy, and when Miss Gillespie passed around the inevitable Kelvinsulated flasks of warm milky tea, Sophie accepted a cup and a shortbread biscuit. There was plenty to look at on the way, and she was surprised by how quickly they reached the tiny coastal station where they would board the train for the very last part of the journey to Ardeer.

The Nobel factory lay on an industrial estate served by a private road, but a narrow-gauge railway ran all the way in to the gates of the factory, where the private train station admitted workers and a few select visitors.

Sitting in the railway carriage as they traveled toward the compound, Sophie looked out over the isolated coastal landscape and remembered Alfred Nobel’s notorious loathing for this place. He had written of Ardeer to his brother, in a letter reprinted in the leaflets the train conductor gave them with their tickets:

But Sophie found it rather beautiful.

It was no accident, of course, that the factory had been built in such a desolate place. The English Explosives Acts of the 1860s made it impossible to build dynamite factories south of Hadrian’s Wall, but Scotland welcomed them, so long as they were built far from populated areas and in accordance with the provisions of the Carriage and Deposit of Dangerous Goods Act. The Ardeer factory was now owned and operated by the Nobel Consortium, the sophisticated transnational holding company that managed what had once been Nobel’s personal empire.

They got off the train at a platform lacking even the most basic railway-station amenities—no newspaper stall, no flower seller, not even a coin-operated chocolate machine—to find stringent security measures in place. Guards with Alsatians patrolled the barbed-wire perimeter, and the security officer at the gatehouse checked each woman’s national identity card against the names on the prearranged list of visitors. Fortunately Great-aunt Tabitha had telephoned ahead to add Sophie’s name to the list, or she would have been left under the supervision of the guards while the others took their tour.

They were all asked to deposit their bags in the gatehouse,
along with any personal items made of metal, which led to great indignation on the part of two ladies who had to retire and take off their steel-boned corsets and another one who didn’t want to put aside her cigarettes and lighter. Though smoking was not at all the thing in Great-aunt Tabitha’s circle, this lady was an old-fashioned Decadent who wore vegetable-dyed handwoven scarves and smoked a special mentholated tobacco to clear her airways. She left behind her smoking paraphernalia only after a serious dressing-down from Great-aunt Tabitha. They would be searched again, of course, before being allowed to enter the buildings where nitroglycerin was actually produced.

“We’ve got a very special lecturer for the occasion,” said Great-aunt Tabitha as she herded the ladies away from the gate to the building where the tour would begin. “He’ll be here any moment now. Sophie, I think you’ll enjoy this bit of the tour, I don’t know why you’re looking so sullen.”

In the minutes that followed, Sophie’s great-aunt checked her watch a few times, irritation growing.

When their guide finally appeared, Sophie almost fell over in shock. It was Mr. Petersen!

He greeted Great-aunt Tabitha with a firm handshake, apologizing profusely for keeping them all waiting. Great-aunt Tabitha introduced him to all the ladies and he shook everyone’s hand, including Sophie’s.

“Nice to see you, Sophie,” he said quietly.

Sophie couldn’t help the surge of pleasure that rose in her heart at finding him here. Now if only she could snag him for a few minutes of conversation, she could tell him she’d decided she must leave and ask for his help. It was progress, distinct progress!

“Mr. Petersen,” Great-aunt Tabitha told the others complacently, “is a research chemist in the employ of Mr. Alfred Nobel. He has kindly agreed to show us about today, and will take questions afterward.”

“The Nobel Consortium produces more than half the world’s dynamite,” said Mr. Petersen as they walked toward the first building. Oh, he was in his element here, all right! If ever a person loved talking about explosives, it was Mr. Petersen. “Dynamite is used most frequently for the purpose of demolition, as in mining and tunneling. It’s also used in bombs, warheads, and mines, but not in guns, as the rapidity and intensity of the blast would shatter a metal barrel. By the end of the last century, it had become illegal to manufacture nitroglycerin and dynamite in Europe and the Americas, and the production of dynamite has since then been almost exclusively the charge of the Hanseatic states.”

“Isn’t it awfully dangerous, though?”

The words came from Miss Grant, whose calm confidence made the question sound almost mocking.

“Well, it’s true that nitroglycerin’s immensely volatile,” said Mr. Petersen, “but we take every possible precaution. And the compound we call dynamite’s actually quite safe: it burns rather than exploding when it’s set on fire, and aside from deliberately detonating it with caps and fuses, the only way to ignite it involves compression and a high degree of heat. All the explosives manufactured here are tested for stability in two subsidiary departments known as India and Siberia; in India, as you might guess, the explosive material is subjected to extreme and protracted heat, whereas in Siberia, the temperature is kept very cold.”

“But there must be some risk?” said Great-aunt Tabitha. “It’s an immensely powerful explosive, after all, isn’t it?”

“Pound for pound, the explosive force of Dynamite Number One is four times that of gunpowder,” said Mr. Petersen, looking solemn, “and it’s also much denser, so that the same volume of explosive ends up being over seven times as powerful.”

Most of the ladies shivered. Sophie thought they were enjoying this measured flirtation with destruction.

Half an hour into the tour, Sophie was so stunned and impressed by what she was seeing that she’d temporarily forgotten the troubles pressing down upon her. The factory was self-contained, with steam provided by a central boiler house, and electricity and compressed air produced at the on-site
power station. Though the four-hundred-acre industrial compound was mostly open to the air, the clustering of tunnels and tramways and pipelines gave parts of it the semienclosed feel of a railway yard. It was quite extraordinary to think that only seventy years earlier, this had been a barren waste of sand dunes stretching down to the sea.

There were more than three hundred buildings, many of them with their own chimney stacks, and Mr. Petersen enumerated some of their functions: the acid works and acid-recovery plant, the mills for processing ammonia and potash and kieselguhr, the steam-and powerhouses, the departments for washing and carding and bleaching the fleecy fiber that would be nitrated into guncotton, the pulping mill and box factories, all connected to one another by the rather sweet little narrow-gauge railway.

The workers wore color-coded coveralls so that the factory superintendents could see at a glance whether a worker was out of place—dark blue for the runners and carriers, light blue for workers assigned to the smokeless powder factory, scarlet for the nitroglycerin house—and the pattern of the colors made the scene look like a modern painting when Sophie squinted a little. There were lots of other things to look at too, including a pond that was blown up once a week by a safety officer to destroy the dregs of nitroglycerin that drained into it and an armory attached to a shooting range where they
tested explosives for rifles and shotguns. Sophie stopped being sorry at having been made to come and started—amazingly—actually to enjoy herself.

At the acid works where the constituent parts of nitroglycerin were made, they learned that whereas glycerin—a natural byproduct of soap making, in which fats were boiled with wood ash or some other alkali—was quite safe to produce, nitric acid was extremely dangerous. It was manufactured in enormous steel retorts, six feet across and bricked up like ovens, from oil of vitriol shipped by canal from Laurieston and then combined with nitrate of soda. The acid was subsequently forced in the form of a suffocating reddish gas through an elaborate system of pipes to condense in jars on shelves. The liquid would then be pumped by compressed air into tanks at the top of the nitroglycerin hills, artificial grass-covered embankments (mostly conical, often sixty or seventy feet high) built to contain accidents.

The factory compound contained four of these hills, each with two separate nitrating houses, frail-looking white shingled cabins. The liquid nitroglycerin would flow back down the hill to the processing rooms, propelled only by the force of its own weight so as to minimize the risk of accidental detonation.

Security at the nitroglycerin hut was much tighter than anywhere they’d been so far. A guard at the entrance checked
their visitor’s passes for a second time, and a female searcher examined each of them.

Mr. Petersen told them that even workers who came in and out of the building three or four times a day would be searched every time they passed through the door. Sophie thought him naïve for believing this—it was human nature to become lax—but she hoped everyone had been checked properly today, at any rate. Thinking about it made her feel slightly sick, her parents’ fate at the forefront of her mind.

Several of the other women seemed to share Sophie’s worries.

“Are you really sure none of these workers break the rules?” one of them asked.

The female searcher laughed. “It’s hardly in their own interest to break the rules, now, is it?” she said. “They’re the ones who’ll be blown up if they do. There’s a long list of prohibitions. The young women aren’t allowed to wear pins in their hair, metal corsets, or metal buttons; you can see they’ve all got their hair plaited and the ends fastened with elastic. A few years ago, a band came to play at a factory dance, and one of the musicians lit up a cigarette without thinking. There was practically a riot! I thought the girls would tear him to pieces—they had him on the ground in a flash, with his arms pinned so he couldn’t endanger anyone.”

Once everyone had been checked, they stepped into
rubber overshoes provided by the company.
NO SHOE THAT TOUCHES THE GROUND OUTSIDE MAY TOUCH THE FLOOR OF A DANGER DEPARTMENT
, a sign warned, and Mr. Petersen explained that it was because the grit might produce friction and spark an explosion.

At the center of the nitroglycerin hut stood two lead cylinders, each five feet in diameter and six feet deep, sunk into the floor and protected with dome-shaped tops, the lead pipes curling in and out of them. By each tank, a scarlet-clad man watched the thermometer while sitting perched on one of the strangest contraptions Sophie had ever seen, a one-legged stool that would topple to the ground if the watcher relaxed his attention even for a second. Mr. Petersen explained that the special stools had been designed as a safety measure to stop the watchers from falling asleep and missing the kind of temperature fluctuation that would merit an evacuation.

What really caught Sophie’s imagination and made her skin crawl was the sheer volume of the liquid nitroglycerin. Thousands and thousands of gallons of it ran throughout the building in pipes that spewed out
waterfalls
of nitroglycerin, cream-colored streams shooting out of lead gutters into enormous tanks where the explosive rose to the surface to be skimmed off by young women wielding gigantic aluminum ladles like washbasins with handles. From there it was poured into tanks to be rinsed, first with cold water and then with
warm water mixed with carbonate of soda.