Dynamite Trivia
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46 free Dynamite trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This dynamite trivia quiz is mostly about the real thing: the nitroglycerin-soaked explosive that Alfred Nobel patented in 1867 and that blasted the tunnels, mines and railways of the modern world. The easy questions are the ones any science fan knows: who invented it, what it is made of, the Greek word behind the name, and why it is not the same as TNT. From there it moves into the chemistry and the history: the Italian who first made nitroglycerin and begged people not to use it, the explosion that killed Nobel's brother, the fossil algae that made nitro safe to carry, the blasting cap, and the shelf life of a stick. The harder end is for people who like the details: the percentages behind '40% dynamite', why boxes have to be turned over in storage, the South African gold-mine factories that once led the world, the DuPont breakup, the ammonium and military versions, and the myth of the 'merchant of death' obituary. Because the word has escaped the quarry, the last stretch covers dynamite in pop culture: the BTS and Taio Cruz hits, J.J.'s catchphrase on Good Times, the British Bulldog wrestler, and a nerdy kid from Preston, Idaho. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on dynamite, nitroglycerin, Alfred Nobel and the songs and shows named before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. For the inventor's whole life and the prizes, try our Alfred Nobel trivia quiz.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01About 90% of which American monument was carved with dynamite rather than chisels?
Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore's 'powdermen' cut their charges so exactly that they blasted to within a few inches of the finished faces. In 14 years of work on the cliff, not one worker was killed.
Q 02In which city was Alfred Nobel born in 1833?
Stockholm
Stockholm was no easy start: his father's business failed the very year Alfred was born, and his mother ran a small grocery shop to feed the family. The man who left a fortune grew up poor.
Q 03In which country was dynamite invented, at Geesthacht?
Germany
Germany, not his native Sweden: Nobel moved there in 1865 and built his works at Krümmel, outside Hamburg. It became the world's first dynamite factory and went on making explosives through two world wars.
Q 04What did Ascanio Sobrero make of his own discovery, nitroglycerin?
Too dangerous
Too dangerous to use, he warned anyone who would listen. Decades later, thinking of all the people it had killed, he said he was almost ashamed to admit he had discovered it.
Q 05What did Nobel find that finally stabilised nitroglycerin into a portable explosive?
Diatomaceous earth
Diatomaceous earth, or kieselguhr, a crumbly sediment of fossil diatom shells, soaked up about three times its weight of nitroglycerin and turned it into a paste that could be shaped into sticks.
Q 06Where did Nobel carry on his dynamite experiments after an 1866 blast wrecked his new factory?
On a raft on a river
On a raft on a river, moored well away from the works, he tried one additive after another through the autumn of 1866. By the new year his rebuilt factory was turning out dynamite.
Q 07Which device did Nobel invent to detonate nitroglycerin safely from a distance?
The blasting cap
The blasting cap, a small metal capsule of sensitive explosive lit by a fuse, set off the main charge by shock instead of flame. Introduced in 1865, it opened the modern age of high explosives.
Q 08Which member of Nobel's family died in the 1864 nitroglycerin explosion at Heleneborg?
His brother Emil
His brother Emil, the youngest of the family, died with several workers when the shed blew up in September 1864. The city promptly banned nitroglycerin work inside its limits, yet Alfred pressed on.
Q 09Glycerin, the sweet syrup Nobel turned into nitroglycerin, was a by-product of making which household product?
Soap
Soap makers boil fats with lye, which splits them into soap and a sweet, harmless syrup. In Nobel's day glycerin was a leftover of the soap and candle trades, so his explosive began as a washday by-product.
Q 10Alfred's brothers Ludvig and Robert Nobel made a fortune at Baku, on the Caspian Sea, in which industry?
Oil
Oil from the wells at Baku made Ludvig and Robert immensely rich, and Alfred held shares in their company. So part of the fortune behind his prizes came not from explosives but from petroleum.
Q 11Which explosive, used to blast rock in mines since the 1600s, did dynamite rapidly replace?
Black powder
Black powder merely burns very fast, while dynamite detonates, sending out a shock wave that shatters hard rock. It quickly took over in mines, quarries and tunnels.
Q 12Roughly how much energy does a standard 190-gram stick of dynamite contain?
1 megajoule
1 megajoule is about the food energy in a chocolate bar. The difference is speed: your body takes hours to burn through the bar, while the stick lets all of it go in a fraction of a second.
Q 13What does the 'dope' in dynamite refer to?
The absorbent medium mixed with stabiliser
Q 21In the Road Runner cartoons, which company sells Wile E. Coyote the dynamite and gadgets that always backfire?
Acme
Acme is Greek for 'highest point', and that is the joke: the gadgets and explosives Wile E. Coyote orders from the firm fail or blow up in his face every single time.
Q 22Why did dynamite never catch on as a filling for artillery shells?
The shock of firing set it off
The shock of firing set it off, so a shell could burst inside the gun. The US Navy's answer was the 'dynamite gun', which lobbed charges with compressed air, and one ship shelled Santiago that way in 1898.
Q 23What helped make TNT the standard filling for artillery shells?
It melts and pours
The absorbent medium mixed with stabiliser is the 'dope'. Nobel's first filler did nothing in the blast, but makers later switched to wood pulp and sodium nitrate, so the dope itself burned and added strength.
Q 14More than 60 million pounds of dynamite went into digging which waterway, opened in 1914?
The Panama Canal
The Panama Canal's Culebra Cut ran through solid rock, so crews drilled it and packed the holes with dynamite. Blasts were timed for the noon meal or the end of the shift, when the labourers had cleared out of the way.
Q 15Why do blasting manuals say cases of stored dynamite should be turned over regularly?
Liquid explosive sinks and pools
Liquid explosive sinks and pools as old sticks 'sweat' their nitroglycerin, and a puddle of it is as touchy as the raw liquid ever was. Turning the cases keeps it spread through the sticks.
Q 16In Breaking Bad, Walter White hurls which touchy explosive, long used to fire dynamite?
Mercury fulminate
Mercury fulminate explodes at a sharp knock or a little heat, which is why a pinch of it could fire a whole charge of far steadier dynamite. The one crystal Walt throws blows out a drug lord's windows.
Q 17Which country, whose deep gold mines devoured explosives, led the world in dynamite production for decades after the Second World War?
South Africa
South Africa's gold mines on the Witwatersrand needed so much blasting that factories were built beside them. One, at Modderfontein near Johannesburg, was by 1939 the largest explosives works in the world.
Q 18America's first dynamite factory opened in 1868 on a site that is now a park in which city?
San Francisco
San Francisco's Giant Powder Company made Nobel's explosive under licence on what is now Glen Canyon Park. The factory did not last long: late in 1869 an explosion destroyed it completely.
Q 19Which two companies were formed when DuPont's explosives monopoly was broken up?
Hercules and Atlas
Hercules and Atlas were carved out of DuPont in 1912. By buying up its rivals it had come to make about two-thirds of America's explosives, so the courts made it hand plants to two new competitors.
Q 20In 1886 a dynamite bomb thrown at police during a labour rally in Haymarket Square shook which American city?
Chicago
Chicago saw four anarchists hanged for the blast, although the bomber was never identified. In 1889 socialist parties chose 1 May as International Workers' Day in memory of the affair, and much of the world still marks it.
It melts and pours: TNT turns liquid at about 80 °C, far short of the heat needed to make it explode. Shell makers simply cast it into the casings and let it set.
Q 24Which Australian rock band named a 1975 album and its title song after the explosive TNT?
AC/DC
AC/DC put out T.N.T. in December 1975 for Australia and New Zealand only. The rest of the world first heard its songs the next year, when the pick of them went onto the international album High Voltage.
Q 25What did Russell Penniman's cheaper 1885 'Extra' dynamite substitute for nitroglycerin?
Ammonium nitrate
Ammonium nitrate, a salt better known as a fertiliser, took the place of part of the costly nitroglycerin. The result was a dynamite both cheaper and safer to handle.
Q 26What is odd about the US Army's 'military dynamite'?
No nitroglycerin
No nitroglycerin goes into it at all: the sticks are three-quarters RDX, a military explosive, which makes them far safer to store and carry. The Army kept the name and the familiar stick shape.
Q 27Which jelly-like explosive, stronger than dynamite, did Nobel invent in 1875?
Gelignite
Gelignite began, the story goes, with a cut finger: Nobel dressed the wound with collodion, a liquid bandage made from guncotton, and wondered what it would do to nitroglycerin. The two set into a tough jelly that even stood up to water.
Q 28Away from explosives, Nobel tried to make an artificial version of which fabric?
Silk
Silk was one of many sidelines for a man who died holding 355 patents. He travelled so often between factories in more than 20 countries that he was once called 'Europe's richest vagabond'.
Q 29According to the famous story, a French newspaper's premature obituary called Nobel what?
The merchant of death
The merchant of death is dead, the headline supposedly ran in 1888, when a French paper mistook his brother Ludvig's death for his. Historians have never found the article, and some call the whole tale a myth.
Q 30Nobel's will let Swedish institutions award four prizes, but which one went to a committee chosen by Norway's parliament?
Peace
Peace was the odd one out, and Nobel never explained the choice. Norway shared a king with Sweden at the time, and although that union ended in 1905 the prize is still presented in Oslo.