Dynamite Factory at Ardeer Scotland in 1897

The great dynamite factory at Ardeer in Scotland, the largest of its kind, is one of the most picturesque places in the world.

Nitroglycerin, a teaspoonful of which would blow you to fragments, surrounds you in hundreds and thousands of gallons. It is making itself in huge tanks, gurgling merrily along open leaden gutters, falling ten feet in brown waterfalls, so to speak, into tanks of soda solution, and bubbling so furiously in other cylinders, through the in-rush of cold air from below, that it seems to be boiling.

All around you are big cotton mills and storehouses as full of fleecy, white cotton as ordinary cotton mills and storehouses, but every pinch of the cotton, still white and fleecy, has been nitrated into guncotton, and would suffice, if exploded, to cut you off in the beauty of your youth. Death, instantaneous and pulverizing, encircles you, in fact, by the ton; but the man and the thermometer surround you also. The man's eyes never leave the instrument. Both are chosen for their perfect reliability; and endless precautions, innumerable rules, and the strictest discipline maintain Ardeer in a state of busy and peaceful security, and prevent it from being scattered periodically over the calm blue sea.

To enter the "Danger Area" you must pass the "searcher." He stands in front of his cabin, and you will find one of him always blocking the way at the four en¬trances to the explosive district. He is a tall, military-looking man in a blue uni¬form faced with red, and he takes from you all metallic objects—your watch, money, penknife, scarf-pin, match-case, matches, and keys. None of these are allowed to be where nitroglycerin is. He searches every man who enters, no matter how often the man may come and go. The girls, 200 of whom are employed, are not permitted to wear pins, hair-pins, shoe-buttons, or metal pegs in their shoes, or carry knitting, crochet, or other needles.

At half-past six on the morning of the 24th of February, one week after the writer's visit to this house, it was the scene of a very disastrous explosion. Twenty-four hundred pounds of nitroglycerin was collected here, in the tanks and boxes mentioned, and from some cause which may never be known it exploded, killing six people—a chemist, a foreman, and four workmen. A few other employees were slightly hurt by flying debris. The sound was of course tremendous, and the effects of the explosion, which were very clear at Irvine, three and one-half miles away, are said to have been so strong in a town ten miles away that the gas-lamps were extinguished by the air concussion. A disaster such as this, whose suddenness is not its least painful characteristic, cannot of course be minimized in its tragic importance. At the same time, it serves as the best possible testimony to the value of the system of protection employed. That over a ton of nitroglycerin can explode in the heart of a factory where 1,300 people are at work, and only the six men, within a few feet of it, lose their lives, shows better than any other evidence the meaning and value of the Ardeer mounds.