In 1847, Ascanio Sobrero added glycerol to concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids, synthesizing nitroglycerin for the first time. He later lamented his discovery, fearing it was too dangerous for practical use.

In the 1860s, Alfred Nobel combined nitroglycerin with kieselguhr, a porous soil, rich in the shells of diatoms, turning the mixture into a paste he could shape and use for blasting.  

On Monday mornings in Nobel’s dynamite factories, workers complained of headaches that faded through the week and returned the following Monday. Others experienced weekend chest pains that subsided on Mondays. Both maladies, science would later learn, were caused by the vasodilating action of nitroglycerin adsorbed through the skin. Nitroglycerin is still administered topically for acute angina, and it still causes headaches.

“It is ironical,” Nobel wrote, after suffering chest pains himself, “that I am now ordered by my physician to eat nitroglycerin.” He initially refused, knowing it caused headaches. Before his death in 1896, he used his fortune to establish the Nobel Prize.

In 1977, Ferid Murad demonstrated nitric oxide (NO)—not nitrous oxide (N2O), otherwise known as laughing gas—was released from nitroglycerin, causing arteries to dilate. Over the next ten years, Robert Furchgott and Louis Ignarro further elucidated the biochemistry. In October 1998, Murad, Furchgott, and Ignarro received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. 

Worried about the destructive forces of nitroglycerine, Sobrero never knew the millions he would help. And Nobel couldn’t have imagined his earliest experiences would come around to touch so many lives more than a century later.

What we do matters, even if we don’t see it in the moment. Give it time.