On Monday April 16, 1866, in San Francisco, an explosion in the Wells Fargo storeroom demolished everything in the immediate vicinity.
It was powerful enough to shake the ground, blowing out window panes hundreds of metres away.
Today, safety standards would not allow an extremely powerful, unstable substance anywhere near a population centre.
The crate of nitroglycerine was on its way to help blast a 506-metre tunnel through the Sierra Nevada Mountains as part of the Central Pacific Railroad.
The accident would have dismayed, but not surprised, the inventor of nitroglycerine. Ascanio Sobrero had already been badly injured in a nitroglycerine explosion during his work and was well aware of its enormous destructive potential.
"When I think of all the victims killed during nitroglycerine explosions, and the terrible havoc that has been wreaked," he said, " which in all probability will continue to occur in the future, I am almost ashamed to admit to be its discoverer."
Born in 1812, Sobrero came from a family business that sold explosives and other mining equipment.
After studying chemistry in Paris, he invented nitroglycerine in the mid-1840s, which he called "pyroglycerine".
Made from a combination of glycerol, nitric and sulphuric acids, he initially considered the oil that produced was far too volatile to be practical.
It wasn't until after 1864 when a explosion killed Emil Nobel and several others during an experiment with nitroglycerine that a practical solution was found.
Upset by his brother's death, Alfred Nobel blended nitroglycerine with diatomaceous earth (fossilised algae) to make it stable enough to be reasonably safe.
He called that product dynamite, from the Greek word dnamis, meaning "power".
Curiously, nitroglycerine also has medicinal uses, though not for its explosive effect.
It can be used to treat a person suffering chest pain, called "angina", that can be caused by restricted blood flow to the heart.
One thing that Sobrero and Alfred Nobel would not have anticipated, was the use of their invention for entertainment.
There's nothing like a good movie explosion, but there's one thing Hollywood cannot resist: it's not enough to have a puff of black smoke, so they almost always flash it up - literally - with barrels of petrol.
But then if we're going to start analysing the scientific accuracy of movies, this will become a long column. Sometimes it's better to just turn off the sceptical brain and enjoy.
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