The machine was filthy, dusty and battered, but when I saw the plunger I knew exactly what it was.
Anyone who’s seen Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner in the Looney Tunes animated series knows a dynamite blasting machine when they see one. The coyote used it in some of his many schemes to catch the fast-running bird, but it – along with his plan – always blew up in his face.
This blasting machine obviously had led a hard life in the real world, blasting away mountainous rocks, and seemed to have been doing it for a very long time. It was missing its second thumb screw, and the plunger handle was covered in dusty black tape. It sat at the auction house among other relics of our past, including an old red Coca Cola cooler, a tabletop tube radio and a wooden stool.
I’d never seen a dynamite blasting machine at auction before, so I was intrigued. I wasn’t the only one; someone had left a green absentee bid sticker on the device. I suspect that by the time it came up for sale, there would be other bidders because this machine still had its utilitarian patina.
Googling later, I found out that cleaned-up versions of these devices sold for $200 to $650 on eBay, and asking prices of up to $850 on the web. I even found one that sold at a Las Vegas auction in 2016 for nearly $3,500. For those who don’t want the real thing but only a prop, you can buy one on Amazon for about $250.
The blasting machine at auction apparently was a No.3 Regular or U.S. Standard Pushdown like those first made by Dupont just after the turn of the 20th century. It was advertised in a company catalog in 1911.
Dynamite blasting machines became a life-saver, literally. Early on, hard rock was removed by workers with hammers and chisels. By the 17th century, black powder or gunpowder was used for blasting, followed by nitroglycerin, which was both unstable and dangerous. Alfred Nobel – the man behind the Nobel Prize – invented a detonator that allowed the nitroglycerin to be set from a distance with a fuse. He manufactured nitroglycerin, and an explosion at one of his plants killed his brother Emil and several other workers.
The job didn’t become safer until Nobel invented dynamite in 1867 by mixing nitroglycerin with siliceous rocks, stabilizing it. The plunger-type blaster was invented in 1878 by Henry Julius Smith of New Jersey. Here’s a 20th-century blasting machine attributed to Nobel.
A Dupont blasting machine figured in a 1923 bank robbery in Oregon when the three D’Autremont brothers decided to rob a mail train that was supposed to be carrying $40,000 in gold (a video put the figure at $500,000 to $1 million). The men used too much dynamite, blowing up the train and killing the mail clerk. They also killed three other workers. There was no such bounty of gold on the train.
A reward for the men was set at $15,900 and there was a massive manhunt. The three were eventually captured, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The blasting machine is now in the collection at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington.
