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•146 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time
Idea 84 – Explosives
A multi-purpose product, explosives have a wide range of possibilities for making
money. You can sell them as ammunition, the consumable of war Idea 72, as a
method of blasting in mines and quarries, to build tunnels, or if all else fails to crack
a safe.
One of the major quarrying companies in Australia, for example, has just placed
a five-year contract for the supply of dynamite at a total price of $1 billion Austral-
ian.
‘An explosive is any substance or device that can be made to produce a volume
of rapidly expanding gas in an extremely brief period. There are three fundamental
types: mechanical, nuclear and chemical.’
A mechanical explosion is the sort that occurs when a container is overloaded
with compressed gas of some sort. This occurs more by accident than by application
in the businesses mentioned above.
A nuclear explosion is one in which a huge amount of energy is released by
sustaining nuclear reaction with almost instant rapidity.
Chemical reactions come in two types. Warriors use very large amounts of deto-
nating or high explosive such as TNT or dynamite. The originating explosive, how-
ever, is the other type of chemical reaction – deflagrating or low explosives.
There is a strong case for the first use of black powder, a low explosive, being
initiated by the Chinese although there are counter-claims favouring the Arabs.
Originally used in China for fireworks and signals in the tenth century, it is likely
that they moved quickly onto using it to make bombs. Certainly by 1300 the Arabs
had invented the first real gun, a bamboo tube reinforced by iron to fire an arrow.
Use of explosives in engineering was, to begin with, a very dangerous business.
Small quantities of black powder were lit in various containers, such as the goose
quill. These were unreliable and burnt erratically. William Bickford, who lived in
the tin-mining district of Cornwall, is credited with the invention of the safety fuse.
The present day version is not much different from the original, which was a core of
