The Infernal Machine

For most of history there was only one way to blow things up. You could pack a bunch of gunpowder in one place and set it on fire. But then in the 1800s one scientist named Alfred Nobel dedicated himself to taming the incredibly volatile substance that was nitroglycerine. 

After lots of tinkering and plenty of unintended explosions- one of which killed his brother- Nobel managed to control the explosions and create what we know today as dynamite. The invention of dynamite changed the way we were building the modern world. Dynamite gave civil engineers the ability to blast through rocks and earth from a safe distance. 

That level of destructive power caught the attention of the burgeoning anarchist movement in New York City. Dynamite gave them the explosive capability of a small army in a small portable canister. For decades there were hundreds of bombings at the hands of the anarchist party and the city needed to respond.

This led to the beginning of many surveillance technologies that allowed the NYPD and federal government to keep track of criminals who up until this point could stay largely anonymous. This era saw the rise of fingerprint technology as a means of identification. 

Steven Johnson’s new book The Infernal Machine tells the story of how the government’s ability to organize the chaos led to the downfall of the anarchist movement and ushered in a new era of surveillance that would go to its own extreme.