Drilling and blasting

For instance, an early 20th-century blasting manual compared the effects of black powder to that of a wedge, and dynamite to that of a hammer.

[1] The most commonly used explosives in mining today are ANFO based blends due to lower cost than dynamite.

The use of explosives in mining goes back to the year 1627,[3] when gunpowder was first used in place of mechanical tools in the Hungarian (now Slovak) town of Banská Štiavnica.

This train was ignited by a slow match, often consisting simply of brown paper smeared with grease, intended to burn long enough to allow the person who fires it enough time to reach a place of safety.

One was replacing the iron wire, by which the passage for the gunpowder is formed, with one of copper, to eliminate sparking that could ignite the powder prematurely.

The first to use this method for underwater blasting was Charles Pasley who employed it in 1839 to break up the wreck of the British warship HMS Royal George which had become a shipping hazard at Spithead.