99% Invisible - The Infernal Machine

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

The unexpected story of how Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite—designed to build the world—was co-opted by anarchists to bring about its destruction. From revolutionizing infrastructure to arming political radicals, dynamite shaped the rise of both terrorism and modern law enforcement.The Infernal Machine Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. For most of history, there's really only been one way to blow things up. Basically, gunpowder was invented sometime around 800 A.D. and you packed a bunch of gunpowder in as small a location as you could and you set fire to it and blew it up. And that was basically the state of the art for a millennium. That's Stephen Johnson. He writes about science, technology and the history of innovation. And he explained how the second half of the 1800s forever changed how we make explosives.

First came the discovery of nitroglycerin. Basically this extraordinarily unstable substance that just jostling could cause an explosion. You know, you didn't need to kind of light a match to set it off. You could just shake it and it would blow up in your face. Nitroglycerin was just too volatile to use. It literally blew up in people's faces all the time. And so one scientist named Alfred Nobel wanted to figure out how to create a controlled explosion. Eventually he had upon this idea, which he referred to as the blasting cap, where you

would use basically just a little bit of gunpowder to trigger a small little explosion which would then set off the big shockwave explosion of nitroglycerin detonating. However, working with these materials led to lots of unwanted explosions, including one which hit too close to home. There was an accidental explosion at the lab that he had set up on his family's property in Stockholm, and his brother was blown to bits in this explosion. To avoid these premature detonations, Nobel needed to figure out a way to safely work with and transport this compound.

And while tinkering in one of his labs off the river Elbe, he realized that the solution was in the dunes all around him. And eventually he realizes that the sand that is a very specific, unusual kind of sand, if you mix it with nitroglycerin, it forms this paste, and it stabilizes the nitroglycerin, so that if you move it or shake it a little bit, it doesn't explode. He named the product dynamite after the dynamite powder. Basically, he named it after sand.

And dynamite changed the way people were building the infrastructure of the modern world, from sewers to subways to skyscrapers. Those were slow, arduous processes. If you did them with a pickaxe, structure of the modern world, from sewers to subways to skyscrapers. Those were slow, arduous processes. If you did them with a pickaxe, and they were a little bit faster if you did them with a large trove of gunpowder that you could use to explode.

But if you had this enormously compact and efficient explosive power in the form of canisters of dynamite, you can improve the productivity of canisters of dynamite. You can improve the, and sense the productivity of building out these spaces by blowing them up, you know, by a factor of five or 10. It was an enormous leap forward. That level of destructive power wasn't just intriguing to the civil engineers of the world.

Governments, criminal gangs, and political groups also saw the potential in having the destructive power of an army in the palm of your hand. Dynamite especially caught the attention of New York City's burgeoning anarchist movement in the early 20th century. The anarchists had a lot of different ideas, but for complicated reasons, they fell in to this strategy

of what we would now call terrorism. You could just literally like carry a stick of dynamite in your coat pocket and walk into a cafe and throw it into the crowd and blow it up. It was portable, it could be concealed very easily, and it was basically a force amplifier. And if you were interested in strategic displays of violence, either targeting wealthy people,

people in power, leaders of countries or corporate icons. Dynamite gave you a tool that simply didn't exist before. Steven Johnson's new book is called The Infernal Machine, a true story of dynamite, terror, and the rise of the modern detective. And he tells this story about how the anarchist movement in the U. the US gets wooed by dynamite, forever shaping how we think about making political change.

In this strange twist of history, Nobel's invention designed for one purpose gets co-opted by a whole different set of people who are intent on a set of objectives that completely go against everything that Nobel was trying to do. And they get locked in this kind of tragic embrace for 40 years. While the anarchists used dynamite to spur chaos against the oppressive state, the police embraced and developed their own technology to combat them. And the police's weapon of choice was surveillance technology. Stephen tells the story of the tension between these two technologies and what we can learn from one of the most explosive periods in American history.

So let's talk about the anarchists. What is it that they believed in? I mean, the contemporary meaning of anarchy that comes to mind, the connotation of it, is negative chaos, right? It was literally the Greek of anarchos, which means like no rulers. But the truth of the matter is that anarchism was a very interesting philosophy at that moment in time, particularly in the middle of the kind of,

in early days of the Industrial Revolution, when the body count from the factory system was empirically just much higher than any of the terrorist attacks set off by the anarchists. People were just dying these, like, brutal deaths every single day in factories all around the world. And so, you know, there was this idea that was there in the early days of anarchism

that humans had actually lived in much more stable and seemingly sustainable forms in earlier points in history where you had people working and doing technologically advanced work, but they weren't doing it inside of these large corporate systems and they didn't have large armies and they didn't have large governments. They were able to live in a pleasant and productive way of life. And the anarchists were saying, hey, it's not too late to go back to that. Right.

So they're sort of anti-capitalism and anti-government and in the early 20th century, they used dynamite to get their message across. Yeah, in fact some of the first real kind of terrorist acts, the first suicide bombing, the first civilian terrorist attack, were perpetrated by anarchists in this period and in both those cases and in many other cases, the weapon of choice was dynamite. And by the way, it's worth mentioning, dynamite is so integrated into the worldview

and political posturing of the anarchists that they're often referred to as the dynamite club. And you'll see just quote after quote from these radicals saying like, you know, we can counter the guns of the state with dynamite. This is our best way to fight back. So the way they justified it was that there was so much more violence at the hands of big government and big capital.

And you did, in fact, have things like the Ludlow Massacre and other labor strikes that ended in terrible violence, with the perpetrators of the violence largely being Croatians and sometimes assisted by the government. And so how widespread were these bombings at the time? I'm curious how present the threat of bombing was for people in this era. One of the first facts that got me into this project, actually, is there was a guy named Owen Egan.

He was technically a fireman, but he worked very closely with the New York Police Department. I think his title was something like Chief of Combustibles or something like that. He was basically the number one and arguably only bomb diffuser and bomb analyst on the staff of the fire department slash NYPD for about 30 years, from about 1896 into the early 20s. He died on the job of indigestion, apparently. He lived this incredibly dangerous life and somehow survived it all. He lost a couple of fingers over those years. But the thing that struck me so early on

was that over those 30 years, Owen Egan either diffused or analyzed the wreckage from over 7,000 bombs in New York City. And some of those bombs were actually mob related. It was basically a mechanism for extortion So if you didn't pay up, you know they would put a small bomb in front of your storefront and just show you that you know, you had to obey the local mafia, but a number of them were political and

Having lived in New York City most my life having lived through 9-eleven I just tried to imagine what it would have been like to be through 9-11. I just tried to imagine what it would have been like to be living in New York City in a period where over three decades 7,000 bombs had gone off. I spent so much time in the kind of newspaper archives and almost, you know, you just pick a random edition of a New York paper from that period and look at the front page and like it's pretty likely there'll be a mention of a bomb going off somewhere. I mean just statistically it was just happening all the time. And how much of this destruction was tied to the anarchists in the public mind? Like how looming a threat was the anarchist movement?

Yeah, a lot of it was. There is a kind of a blurring of lines between the socialists and the communists and the IWW and the anarchists and they were, you know, bedfellows and in some ways and in some ways not, largely disagreeing about the role of the state. Right. They were equally opposed to big capitalism, but the anarchists also felt that big government was as much of a problem. So there was a general sense of radicals were causing this political violence. Right. And one of those radicals that you talk about in the book is Emma Goldman.

Could you tell me about her and what her role in the anarchist movement was? Emma Goldman, you know, is one of the most endlessly fascinating figures of this period. A Russian emigre came over without much actual education, came over as a teenager to the United States, somehow was giving lectures on radical politics within a couple of years of her arrival here, became the leading figure of the anarchist movement, arguably worldwide by the first decades of the 20th century, and had a very complicated relationship to political violence. She had had this long time partnership, really what turned out to be a lifelong partnership,

with Alexander Berkman, who had a much less complicated relationship to political violence, and had notoriously attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick in the early 1890s, gone to prison for more than a decade. But those early experiences, which Goldman had been largely supportive of, had kind of turned her against the use of political violence in in her writings in her public statements this is right around the time that Gandhi is

Kind of formalizing the principles of nonviolent protest and if if Goldman had really in a full-throated way Embraced those or had hit upon them independently the whole history of the anarchist movement might have played out differently Right since the anarchists did not opt for nonviolent protest, what happened next? And how did they essentially become public enemy number one? So after McKinley is assassinated by an anarchist in 1901, and a complicated set of events,

Goldman is incorrectly blamed for it, Teddy Roosevelt ascends to the presidency, and he delivers a speech and basically the speech is saying that the number one threat in the world is anarchism. He refers to the anarchist as the enemy of all mankind. But just the idea that the President of the United States would address Congress and say this is our biggest problem right now is fighting the anarchist threat. That tells you just how significant it was at that moment in time.

fighting the anarchist threat. That tells you just how significant it was at that moment in time. Wow, so anarchism and these bomb plots are really front of mind for much of the country. And one of the most dramatic parts of the book is an anarchist bomb plot where the bombs were sent in the mail. Could you tell me that story? So you have this period in the first two decades

of the 20th century where these bombings just increase in regularity in the United States. It the 20th century, where these bombings just increase in regularity in the United States. It kind of swept across Europe. And then they come to the United States and really are concentrated initially in New York. And then they start spreading across the rest of the country.

And one of the most extraordinary events that happens in the spring of 1919 is a series of bombing attacks, male bombing attacks, that begin with a bombing in Seattle, an attempted bombing in Seattle, that is accidentally foiled, basically. The package is opened upside down, and so the bomb doesn't go off. And then the next day, a package is opened at the home of a Georgia senator by his wife and a servant.

And that does explode. The servant loses both of her hands and the wife is injured in this. The senator isn't home at the point. And the news reports mention that the package had a very distinctive kind of marking and was wrapped from Gimbels, the department store. And that night, a postal clerk in New York is riding the subway home at midnight from his kind of late shift at the post office. And he happens to read a story about these mail bombs.

And he realizes that he has seen that exact wrapping in the main central post office in New York. In fact, he has seen 16 identical packages with that exact wrapping. And what's happened basically is that the packages had been sent out by anarchists, but they had slightly messed up the postage. And so there was some question about whether,

I think it's just something about it being a kind of a novelty item And so there was some question about whether, I think it's something about it being a kind of a novelty item, and there was some question whether you got this cheaper postage rate with novelty items as opposed to other things. And so this clerk had put the packages aside, all 16 of them, and was waiting for his superior to basically deliver a ruling whether these things had to be sent back or not. So this postal clerk who notices these 16 identical packages, what does he end up doing? He realizes that, you know, he potentially these bombs are just sitting down there at the post office.

And so he jumps off the train, goes all the way back down to 34th Street, calls in his boss, they identify the packages and say that, yeah, these do fit the description. And so then they call Owen Egan, chief of combustibles, and he goes in and diffuses one of these bombs. And the whole plot is largely avoided. And so it's one of these things where literally, I mean, on some level, like the course of American political history could have been changed. If they had just decided to, you know, spend an extra like 10 cents on the postage for these bombs that they were sending out. When we come back, Steven Johnson tells us about how the state tried to organize and contain the chaos. Okay, so we're in these decades where the anarchist movement is really active. There are these bombs going off all over the city, and there's this real fear of the anarchist

movement and what these so-called radicals can do. And at the same time all this is going on, you've got the police and the government trying to figure out how to regain some kind of control of the situation. But they don't exactly have the tools to do it. Could you tell me more about this? So up until the late 1880s, the idea of true detective work being done with scientific tools,

like for instance, fingerprint science, and done in a formal way with complex records, histories of people convicted of crimes, identification systems including fingerprints. All that stuff just didn't exist. And crucially, this is another thing that I think is so important to this story, there was really no federal investigative force. There was no FBI.

There was a Bureau of Investigation that was chronically kind of underfunded. There had generally been a suspicion, kind of an old-school American suspicion, of consolidating too much power, particularly kind of investigative power, in the federal government. If you were charged with a federal crime, like you could be charged with a crime, but it was very hard to prove it because there was no system, there were no people on payroll, basically, who could kind of marshal the evidence together to prove that you were guilty. But soon, fingerprint science develops alongside all these other technologies that we'd call

biometrics today. Yeah, and because there was no national institution in the United States to use these new advances in confronting the threat of anarchism, The real pioneers in adopting these new techniques happened on a city level and particularly happened in New York. And so how did the police start using these new tools and techniques? Yeah, New York between 1900 and 1920 really reinvents itself as a state-of-the-art police department led by a few people like Joseph Ferro and Arthur Woods,

who adopt these new tools. In many cases, they travel over to Europe to kind of find out about them and come back. And, you know, one of the things that I think is just so extraordinary is the basic lack of identification systems. Throughout the 19th century, like, people didn't largely have passports or driver's licenses or obviously or any kind of biometric evidence for who they were. So if you were arrested for a crime, you could just say they'd be like, what's your name? And you could say, my name is Bill Jones. And there was on some level, there's no way to prove that you were not Bill Jones, even if you've just been arrested three days ago under another name. And so just the basic ability to capture people's identity and prove that they

were that person. And that they were the person who had been convicted of a crime or suspected of a crime two years ago or five years ago was an enormous leap forward. And biometrics and fingerprinting and photography and all that really introduced that. And the power of something like fingerprint technology takes a little while to gain popularity. And there's this incredible court case that you read about

that really shepherds in this era of forensic science. Could you tell us that story? Yeah, it's a case against a burglar named Charles Crispy who had broken into a Soho loft and stolen some, I believe, undergarments. I think it was kind of a ladies' undergarment store. And he left behind a fingerprint and it matched a previous fingerprint

and the fingerprint evidence was really central to the case, but no one had ever been successfully convicted of a crime based on fingerprint evidence before that. So what does Fereau end up doing? Fereau, who has kind of built up this against a lot of resistance internally at the NYPD, he's built up this small identification bureau and he's pretty much the fingerprint guy inside the NYPD.

This is like 1911. And he is called in as pretty much the only witness for the prosecution because they really don't have any other evidence other than this fingerprint. And so Ferro is testifying and he's asked to explain his method witness for the prosecution because they really don't have any other evidence other than this fingerprint and so froze is Testifying and he's asked to explain his method and he just like rolls out this crazy explanation that clearly just bombs in the room So what is the prosecution do that? So they come back and they basically are like we'd like to do an experiment we'd like to do a demo in a sense of this technology for the jury so that

they can understand it. And they basically have Farrow leave the room and the jurors come through and one of the jurors presses his finger against a pane of glass simulating what Charles Crispi, the accused criminal, had done. And then all the other jurors, including the one who pressed his finger on the glass, do a traditional fingerprint impression. And they bring Ferro back, and then Ferro is basically seated in front of the jury and he has to identify which juror has put their finger on the glass and he nails it.

He goes through and he picks it out and he's like, it's this juror right here. And the juror is like, what is this witchcraft? You know, like just blown away. It is just a credible display of his scientific power. And almost instantly, Crispy changes his plea to guilty. He just sees the fire, the scientific firepower that's off against him and he gives in.

Right, because before this, someone who committed a crime could really just essentially disappear. Like an anarchist could throw a stick of dynamite into a church or something and then disappear into the crowd. But the advent of these new technologies really takes away that anonymity. Yeah, and so the tide starts to turn inside the NYPD

and then this Arthur Woods figure becomes commissioner, who's very interested in these things. They build up the information architecture that allows them to kind of track criminals, and they increasingly are using that to investigate the anarchists and other political attacks in New York in that period. And that infrastructure then becomes

the basis of what leads to the consolidation of this kind of investigatory power on a federal level. And as the police departments and the federal government are gathering all this information, they need a way to organize all of it. And this is where another key historical figure comes into the picture, and that's J. Edgar Hoover. Could you tell me about Hoover's contribution here

and how this all collides with the history of the anarchists? Yeah, Hoover had basically moonlit in D.C. when he was in high school and in college as a library clerk. And he was organizing, helping to organize the Library of Congress's voluminous collections. And there had been a new system that had been introduced around this period by the former director of the Library of Congress, whose name was Putnam. And Putnam had introduced something similar to the Dewey Decimal System. It was basically like, hey, we have all these books and they're in different categories and they have authors, so we'll figure out a systematic way of taking this information so that you can explore, it was really on some level like what

we would now call a search algorithm. He then goes to work for the Justice Department and it's, you know, World War I is still evolving, the United States is not yet involved in the war, but countries moving in that direction and there's serious concern about German nationals inside of the United States who are also actually setting off bombs on their own during this period. And there's serious concern about German nationals inside of the United States, who are also actually setting off bombs on their own during this period. And so Hoover gets assigned to run the New York branch of the big push to register all the German nationals living in the United States, which is arguably like the largest kind of

identification management roundup in United States history at that point. And Hoover's really good at it. He's something like 23 or 24. And he, you know, wins the praise of his superiors. And so shortly after that, after these bombs are starting to go off in 1918 and 1919, the Bureau of Investigation opens up a new division called the Radical Division. And the Radical Division is going to be charged with rounding up these dangerous anarchists and communists that are setting off these bombs all across the country using these new

state-of-the-art information science, crime-fighting techniques. And they put J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the Radical Division. And Hoover's first guiding quest is to use this new information science to see that Emma Goldman is deported from the United States of America. She and Berkman had been sent to jail for encouraging draft resistance, leading up into World War I. So in this period, Goldman has been released from prison, but the mood in the country is very much kind of turning against these radicals, the kind of endless bombing campaigns that have happened. There have been many more. And so Hoover, in really his first act as

head of the Radical Division, collects just an enormous amount of information on Goldman and on Alexander Berkman. Just going through, I've seen all these files and it's just extraordinary how much, it's a whole book basically of information, of speeches she'd given. And he's organized it all systematically, he's kind of annotated everything. And it's precisely the kind of information gathering and management that the federal government just had been incapable of doing before. It's just a case that could not have been made before. And Hoover for the first time has kind of

marshaled all this information. And so there's a kind of really intense moment where there's a deportation hearing on Ellis Island and Goldman is there and Hoover shows up and Goldman looks over, and Hoover just has these stacks of paper on his desk. And it's all the evidence that he's put together to finally make the case that Emma Goldman needs to leave the country for good.

And she kind of looks over there and she says to herself, I'm not going to be able to fight this. She kind of looks over there and she says to herself, I'm not gonna be able to fight this. So Hoover ends up successfully deporting her and Berkman along with a number of other radicals. They leave in one of the last days of 1919 aboard a ship that the press dubbed the Red Ark. And they sail out through the New York Harbor

and end up in Leninist Russia, where they are instantly disillusioned with everything that is happening there. It's interesting that this whole story is taking place in the backdrop of these two designs, which work in opposite directions. Like if you simplify them to their most basic concepts, dynamite is this destructive power that creates chaos,

and information science is basically trying to order everything, to put everything back together. And ultimately, what you see is this sequence of events where dynamite supercharges the anarchist movement, which leads to the supercharging of the forensic sciences, and that ultimately snuffs out the anarchist movement. And then the surveillance state ascends and it has its own destructive and pernicious power. Well, I think one of the things is how long it took me to see it that way. But they were kind of invisible, I think, you know, not to be too on brand here, I don't know, like high level clash between technologies or approaches or designs that come into being slowly over time. Yeah.

It's almost like a very slow motion film that nothing seems to be happening when you watch it at that at that slow speed. When you're watching it over like 40 years, it seems like there's just little isolated things happening. But then when you speed it up, you realize, oh, this is really a crash between these two different forces. But once you see it that way, it is very illuminating. Steve Johnson, thank you so much for being on 99% of this. It was a real pleasure to talk to you. Oh, Roman, I love the show and it's such an honor to be on it.

Stephen Johnson's new book is called The Infernal Machine, a true story of dynamite, terror and the rise of the modern detective. You can find a link to the book in our show notes and you can also just go to a store or go online and just buy every Stephen Johnson book because they're all so, so good. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Jacob Maldonado Medina and edited by Nina Potuck, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real. Cally Too is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Taylor Shedrick is our intern.

The rest of the team includes Chris Berrupe, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Ley, Lashma Don, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. Home of the Oakland Roots Soccer Club, of which I am a proud community owner.

Other teams may come and go, but the Roots are Oakland first, always. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our brand new Discord server. There's like 5,000 beautiful nerds there talking about architecture, talking about the power broker, talking about all kinds of things. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.