blasting powder
My great uncle was Italian. In his youth (that is the 1930s) he worked on the roads in the alps, blasting through rock to cut proper roads where once there had only been donkey paths. He died in the late 80s leaving a tumbledown farmhouse in a rather sweet alpine balley behind him.

Exploring it last year, we ventured into a small attic space we'd never found before (we've been in and about the place since we were kids, and never been up there before). Amongst the crap was a big wooden box full of 2kg paper sacks marked something like "Società esplosiva di Torino" and full of what looked like shiny gravel.

Not sure entirely what it was (but counting on haivng uncommon fun) we poured a small amount out on the ground and lit it (as you do) - it glowed white so bright it burned your eyes and then went out.

"Fucking great" we said - homemade fireworks - lets see what happens when we pour a rather large pile out and chuck a lump of glowing charcoal at it. What happened was (i) short pause (ii) brillaint white light (iii) the most monumental boom echoing down the valley (iv) bits of shit flying everwhere (thankfully there was a small wall to jump behind) (v) mushroom cloud about 40 ft in air (vi) hole in ground where tarmac had been.

We spent the next couple of hours shitting ourselves, paranoid that the Italian police would be down on us as some sort of mad alpine terrorists. And dumped the rest of the blasting granules into the river for safety. Thank goodness no-one had a fag lit when we found the box-full...what on earth he'd been doing stockpiling it for 50 years, I don't know...
( automatton52 Grumpy old goth, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 22:22, Reply)