The Braamfontein Explosion

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I’m not sure why but I expected Simon’s son to be a little bald man with glasses…basically just a mini Simon 😂

I am from South Africa. I enjoy that you regularly cover stories from here. I never heard about this accident before now.

Nitroglycerine will "weep" out of the dynamite over time. This usually takes about a year or more when properly stored. The dynamite in the trucks (boxcars) in the hot South African sun could approach 190 degrees F (88 degrees C.) That temperature could cause a significant amount of nitroglycerine to migrate out of the dynamite, and pure nitroglycerine is extremely sensitive to shock, like a train hitting the truck that it is in.

Simons kids approving of the sponsor is so cute I love it

Your Family Arc is legit the coolest thing in the world, man. You're a super awesome Dad, and it's super fun to see! Keep on blazin' Factboy. Wait, I mean Shadowman. Wrong channel.

Thank you for this. I'm a South African, and l love learning the history of my country. A lot of really interesting stories have been obscured by time. Sadly, our history has been repeatedly sanitised to create a political narrative..

Thank you for this Simon, I love all of your channels. I live in Pretoria, South Africa and over the years I have visited the Braamfontein station and surrounding suburbs like Fordsburg, Newtown, Mayfair and the Witwatersrand University precinct on numerous occasions. I am quite knowledgeable about local history, but I must confess I knew nothing about the Braamfontein explosion, and I know if I were to ask, I doubt if any of my family, friends and acquaintances, would know much if anything at all about this. Mark me down as delighted to have learnt about this tragic yet fascinating bit of local history from you. Remarkably well researched and your detailed presentation and description of the events is exceptional. A quick calculation as follows: 2300 cases x 27.8kg each x 1.25 (relative effectiveness of dynamite when compared to TNT) puts the power of this explosion equivalent to about 80 tons of TNT, which is truly shocking. Of course the fact that this explosion occurred at ground level limited the size of the devastated area, but on the other hand caused the vast crater that formed. There are no visible signs of the explosion or crater today, but then the gold mining industry upon which Johannesburg was founded, is very good at moving and relocating vast amounts of earth, so I expect the crater would have been filled in in a relatively short period of time. Of course I don't believe this is the largest non nuclear explosion, as the 2020 Beirut explosion (perhaps a topic for a future video) was in region of 1.1 kiloton (1100 tons) of TNT (14 times more powerful). Lastly, you have lovely children, thanks for sharing this with us, your fans.

I lived in Nevada as a kid. You could still find boxes of hundred year old dynamite abandoned in mines. When it gets hot it sweats nitroglycerin and that stuff didn't need a detonator. You'd find a rock and put a spot of nitro on another rock hit the spot and got a nice small explosion.

You should do one of these on the Halifax, Nova Scoria, Canada explosion - 6 December 1917 - The largest accidental non-nuclear explosion in history, when two ships (one carrying 3 kilotons of TNT equivalent explosives) collided. 1,782 people were killed, the town of Halifax almost completely destroyed.

One thing that's generally worth noting about explosives that are considered safe, like blasting gel, is that when stored in large quantities, they can behave in ways that are not expected by those who handle it in smaller quantities. A notable example of this is Ammonium nitrate and ANFO (same stuff with a bit of fuel oil added, which turns it from fertilizer into a bulk explosive), most recently demonstrated by the explosion in Beirut. Take a hundred pounds of this stuff, throw it in the biggest bonfire you can build...it'll burn up before it has a chance to explode. Take a warehouse of, say, 2750 tonnes (ie: the one in Beirut), light it on fire, and it'll burn furiously for quite some time...getting hotter and hotter and hotter and then it explodes and obliterates everything within a...rather substantial radius. When stored properly according to regulations, Ammonium nitrate and especially ANFO (because that added bit of fuel oil takes an already fairly intense chemical and makes it a lot worse) is stored in fairly small, distributed quantities across a housing facility, so that if a pile of it ignites, it will burn away before reaching detonation temperature. Given the long, long history told in Wikipedia's "List of Ammonium Nitrate Disasters" over the last century and change, it's pretty obvious that it took us rather a long time to cotton onto this fact and we still have people who violate the safe storage rules. Modern blasting gel is an emulsion of ANFO, which was developed in the 1950s and thus definitely not available to mining operations in the 1890s. What we're talking about here is probably Gelignite, another of Nobel's explosive inventions alongside dynamite. Ideally, it burns slowly and does not explode without a detonator, but...ANFO needs not only a detonator but also a primer (something that can be detonated with just a detonator to provide substantially more energy than a detonator alone will provide) and, well, see above regarding large quantities of ANFO. Another notable factor: Gelignite shares a key property of dynamite: it's a nitroglycerine based explosive that is capable of sweating...which is to say, having that nitroglycerine leach out of its stablizing agent, and then you've just got some liquid nitroglycerine next to some other material (for dynamite it's compressed wood flour, for gelignite it's something else). Under proper storage conditions, dynamite (and probably also gelignite) can be stored for months if not years without being subject to sweating. Unfortunately for the people of 1890s Johannasberg, the interior of a boxcar left exposed to direct sunlight in one of the hotter parts of the world for 3 days straight is very far from what would be considered proper storage conditions. Given the reported low speed of the empty train that collided with boxcar containing the explosives, I would strongly lean towards the latter explanation. Unlike literally any explosive that remotely sane people operate with, liquid nitroglycerine is extremely shock sensitive. If you were to swirl a beaker of nitroglycerine the way you might swirl a glass of rum & eggnog to mix your drink (ie: not sufficiently energetic to spill it), you are taking a major risk. If you were to then carry it across a room without being aware of the danger, it would almost certainly explode. This is one of the chemicals that belongs on the never-make-this list alongside stuff like Chlorine triflluoride, liquid ozone, dimethyl mercury, etc. Even a low speed train collision will provide more than enough of a shock to detonate pure nitroglycerine, and once the nitroglycerine is exploding, it is functionally a particularly powerful detonator for the large amount of gelignite also sitting in that boxcar. At which point you definitely have enough explosive force to render it impossible to determine what the hell caused this massive explosion and to eliminate the majority of witnesses. For those who don't recognize the names, those other examples of chemicals not to make are candidate rocket fuels that have not been used, the first two because they're too good at being on fire to be useful as rocket fuel (chlorine trifluoride is notably described as catching fire when in contact with most oxidizers, but also "cloth, wood, and test engineers"). Dimethyl mercury on the other hand will merely give you mercury poisioning if you spill a drop of it on your latex glove clad hand. Nitroglycerine is tame compared to these things, but when spilling a beaker literally blows up the building you're in, it's definitely a thing you don't want to have around. It's also what we had for high energy explosive work like blasting rock for railway tunnels before Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. There's a reason that invention made him super fucking rich, it's basically what took mining from either pickaxe work that would very very slowly work through the rock or highly dangerous explosive use that could easily kill workers, cause cave ins and generally fuck everything up to something approaching the efficiency of the modern blast-and-shovel mining cycle we use today. It was also very useful in creating explosive devices like artillery shells, and the guilt resulting from giving the world modern artillery is what led to Nobel spending much of his fortune establishing the Nobel prizes that recognize those who work towards a peaceful feature, as well as advancements in science and culture.

Thanks for the video! I am South African and I never knew this. This has never been taught to us in any history class or even mentioned by grandparents or anything. Wish there was more photos to go with this story as I am struggling to find any myself. This is really interesting! Thank you for teaching me something I never knew about my own country. Ps: the sound was a bit muffled and I struggled to hear some of the audio.

Seeing Simone’s kids enjoy the Galaxy Lamp is so wholesome. He’s not only an amazing YouTuber but a wonderful dad.

The best part about listening to this as a South African is hearing how Simon pronounces all the names. I was born in Klerksdorp, and I did a double take hearing it's name.

Thanks so much for this video. In the 1970s, I commuted daily from Roodepoort to Braamfontein for about eight years [worked at Wits University] and don't recall having heard about this, which is interesting, as my Oupa was a railway man and my Dad was in mining. Both my Oupa and Dad had a huge interest in history, which in turn sparked my interest. One note about the houses built out of corrugated iron - this was common in mining towns like Pilgrim's Rest and many mining towns on the Reef, where there was an expectation that the gold reef would soon be exhausted and that the miners would have to move to the next gold-rush - the houses would be dismantled and transported by ox wagon from one town to the next. As a child in Roodepoort, there were still a few of these old house in the centre of the town in the 1960s - I think that brick walls had been built on the inside of the corrugated iron walls. Mining played a huge role in our lives, and schooling included a demonstration of the dangers of dynamite. I suspect that the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer war in October 1899 overshadowed this event and this is why we did not learn about it in our history classes.

That sponsorship portion was truly amazing. I would have expected Simon's kids to all be bald.

Dynamite comes with a shelf life as the binder (originally diatomaceous earth) breaks down due to the NG eventually leaching out. While TNT is significantly safer including the binders used, gelatin still has a expiration date and stored in high heat (>100F) would break down significantly faster, especially if it was humid.

Is the audio kinda weird? Or am i going crazy?

A South African here and love history from home and all over the world. Never heard of this one. Thanks for all the great shows, and your great pronunciation of our city names, well done.

Thanks Simon as someone who loves History and has spent most of his life in Johannesburg I have never heard about this. Your channels are truly excellent