TIL Alfred Nobel, who made nitroglycerin a commercially useful explosive (dynamite), was later prescribed nitroglycerin a few months before his death to alleviate a heart condition. He said: "Isn't it the irony of fate that I have been prescribed nitro-glycerin, to be taken internally!"

Nitroglycerin was later adopted as a commercially useful explosive by Alfred Nobel, who experimented with safer ways to handle the dangerous compound after his younger brother, Emil Oskar Nobel, and several factory workers were killed in an explosion at the Nobels' armaments factory in 1864 in Heleneborg, Sweden.

Liquid nitroglycerin was widely banned elsewhere as well, and these legal restrictions led to Alfred Nobel and his company's developing dynamite in 1867. This was made by mixing nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth ("kieselgur" in German) found in the Krümmel hills.

Following the discovery that amyl nitrite helped alleviate chest pain, Dr. William Murrell experimented with the use of nitroglycerin to alleviate angina pectoris and to reduce the blood pressure. He began treating his patients with small diluted doses of nitroglycerin in 1878, and this treatment was soon adopted into widespread use after Murrell published his results in the journal The Lancet in 1879. A few months before his death in 1896, Alfred Nobel was prescribed nitroglycerine for this heart condition, writing to a friend: "Isn't it the irony of fate that I have been prescribed nitro-glycerin, to be taken internally! They call it Trinitrin, so as not to scare the chemist and the public." The medical establishment also used the name "glyceryl trinitrate" for the same reason.

Here you can see the letter he wrote to his friend that the quote is taken from: https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/biographical/articles/ringertz/

/r/todayilearned Thread Link - en.wikipedia.org