Safety fuse

[1] Gunpowder did not reach Europe until the early 13th century, carried over from China by Middle Eastern traders and merchants along the old Silk Road.

[3] One of the problems miners faced when introducing gunpowder into their operations was that it was relatively easy to ignite when exposed to sparks, intense heat, or flames.

[5] A mill in England preparing the material wrote in its instructions, "Whosoever is at Labour within or without the powder magazines should execute his commission in such a respectful and revered silence as is seemly in such a place where (unless the Almighty in his Grace keeps a protective hand over the Labour) the least lack of care may not alone cause the loss of life of all present, but may even in a moment transform this place as well as its surroundings into a heap of stone.

However, early fuses, known as filled "quills", had a tendency to either burn irregularly, "flash off", or break—either by separation or by "pinching" in the shot hole due to the tamping process.

[6] If the main charge failed to ignite, this was known as a misfire or "hang fire", and the miners would need to wait before returning to the work face to set new fuses.

Increasingly, miners in Cornwall in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were becoming badly injured as a result of suspecting that there had been a misfire and returning to the work face just as a smouldering damp quill ignited the gunpowder charges.

[6] Bickford invented a machine which would thread and weave two layers of jute yarn (a shiny vegetable fibre), spun in opposite directions, over a small "tube" of gunpowder, the whole of which would then be "varnished" with tar to waterproof the product.

[6] It was supplied as a "rope" of about 0.375 to 0.5 inches (9.5 to 12.7 mm) diameter; and was sold at the time for about same price as its predecessor, quills, at three pence per fathom (6 ft, 1.8 m).

Alfred Nobel created dynamite in 1867, by moulding nitroglycerine and a mud-like compound found near his laboratories called kieselguhr into individual cylinders.