Brothers Mario (left) and Levio Grosso helped Atlas Powder Company manufacture nitroglycerin-based explosives. Mario was twenty-feet from the Dynamite Building when a alarm sounded that the building was on fire.

Mario Grosso’s agreement book between the United Mine Workers and Atlas. “That was a real good union,” Levio Grosso said sarcastically. “We went on strike for six weeks and got a one penny increase.”

Handle of 50th anniversary letter opener with dummy blasting cap set in acrylic handle. The souvenir was issued on Oct. 6, 1990. The plant closed soon afterward.

South Tamaqua based Atlas Powder Company once employed 1,300 people producing nitroglycerin-based mining explosives.

Looking for work after returning from military service in WWII, Mario Grosso of Lehighton received two job offers on the same day—one from the State Police and the second from Atlas Powder Company, a manufacturer of nitroglycerin-based mining explosives. His mother advised him to take the safer job—at the Atlas factory.

On March 15, 1951, Grosso heard a quick blast of the emergency horn. Normally, an alarm signal was a long blast on the steam horn but, in his haste to signal a warning, Karl Dreisbach had ripped the chain that sounded the alarm from its moorings as he ran from the Dynamite Mix building.

Hearing the alarm, Grosso raised his eyes to see smoke coming from the building just the other side of the bunker. He ran downhill, getting about twenty feet when the two-story building blew, tossing him against a tree.

“I got up and continued running,” said Grosso. “At the bottom, the running had broken both my shoelaces.” He and three other employees hit by the blast were all unhurt. The company sent out for a fifth of whiskey, gave Grosso one shot and told him to get back to work.

Grossos at Atlas

Mario’s younger brother, Levio Grosso of Summit Hill, joined Atlas Powder after returning from the Navy in 1947, Mario joined a year later. Both started as a powder line helper,

While Levio worked in the Packaging Department, eventually becoming the lead man in the group that maintained the packaging machines, Mario spent much of his Atlas career manufacturing the explosives. 

After several years of training, Mario became an operator at the NG Hill building—where nitroglycerine was manufactured. 

Besides the constant stress of dealing with the  explosive hazard of nitroglycerine, simply being in the nitration plant caused deep persistent headaches. 

“You thought someone was hitting you on the back of the head with a sledge hammer,” said Mario. 

“You’d take a shower, thinking that would get rid of it, no way,” added Levio. “You went home with a headache that lasted for three to four hours.” 

Making Nitroglycerine

Nitroglycerine or more correctly called glycerol trinitrate is best know as the explosive. It is also used medically as a vasodilator to treat heart conditions. 

At Atlas Powder Company, nitric and sulfuric acids were manufactured, mixed and stored in stainless steel tanks. The plant was built on the side of a mountain so that liquids were transferred by gravity. 

When Mario Grosso became an operator, his job was to make the nitroglycerine. The first lesson he learned was, once you begin the process, you cannot stop. 

He began by cooling the mixing tank to –15 degrees F. and adding the acid mixture. Then glycol was slowly added as Grosso monitored that the temperature to make certain that it never exceeded 42 degrees. If all went according to plan, the operation took 45 minutes. 

Then, Grosso called the operator at the neutralizer tanks below, telling him that a batch was coming. One time, Grosso called saying, “A charge of 3,500 lbs. is coming over. Are you ready?” 

“I’m all set,” answered the operator. Then, the relatively new worker noticed the hose was on the wrong tank. He tried to quickly disconnect and reconnect the hose, spilling the load of nitroglycerine onto the separation building floor. The worker was fired and the spill washed into a water-filled drain sump. 

“We were taught three things about nitroglycerin,” Mario explained. “Don’t let it become acidic, don’t let it get warm,  and don’t jar it.” 

Atlas’ Rise and Fall

After nitroglycerin was discovered in 1846 by Ascanio Sobrero, Alfred Nobel, his father and younger brother, Emil, experimented to find a way to make it safe to handle as a mining explosive. Emil and several other people were killed in a laboratory explosion in 1864. 

Alfred Nobel discovered that if the nitroglycerin was absorbed by a second material, it would become stable. He called his invention “dynamite.”

 By the turn of the last century, the DuPont Company had taken over Nobel’s patent and gained a monopoly in the U.S. explosives market. In 1913, the DuPont monopoly was broken up into three companies: the Hercules Powder Company, the Atlas Powder Company, and the du Pont de Nemours Powder Company.

 Atlas Powder Company immediately purchased land in Reynolds, south of Tamaqua for its plant. In 1971, ICI Americas, Inc. purchased Atlas Powder Company and sold off most of the manufacturing operations in 1973. 

 ICI Americas repurchased the same Atlas Powder Company assets in 1990 and renamed the facility ICI Explosives USA Inc., in 1992.  The explosives manufacturing operations ceased in the mid-1990s. 

 In 2001, ICI Explosives USA Inc. changed its name to E-One Holdings Inc. and divested this property to a new subsidiary, Expert Management Inc.  In December 2002, EMI became a wholly owned subsidiary of ICI Americas Inc., and is no longer associated with E-One Holdings Inc.  EMI has been looking to sell the property. The property is currently under remediation.

 A 660-acre remediated area has been sold to Copperhead Chemical Company, a manufacturer of nitroglycerin used in the treatment of angina and congestive heart failure and explosive materials for use in propellants, fuel additives, and munitions.