Nitroglycerin is made by nitrating glycerol, which is an oily colorless liquid that results from soap manufacture. You just mix the glycerol with nitric acid. But, as you say, it is very unstable and is the key ingredient in dynamite. What I have here, however, is nitrocellulose, which is made by mixing wood pulp with nitric acid. If you dry it out it becomes something called gun cotton, which is highly flammable, I grant you, but (turning again to LEFFERTS) doesn’t really explode. In the liquid form I am using, known as collodion, it does something rather interesting. Watch.
