Today I

Found Out

Today I found out that one Calorie (note the capital “C”) is equivalent to one gram of TNT in terms of the energy.  It is important to note the capital “C” in calorie because this traditional implies a kilo-calorie, also known as a “food calorie” because the value listed on food labels are typically in kilo-calories.

This Calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.  One Calorie is approximately 4.184 kilojoules or about a continuous 1.16 watts for an hour

TNT is yet another method for quantifying energy released, but this time the energy released during an explosion.  Unlike a Calorie though, TNT is also an actual thing, namely Trinitrotoluene.

Trinitoiojnsdfniodjfsdo, from now on just “TNT” because seriously, is a yellow colored substance that has some interesting properties for an explosive; these particular properties end up making it great for bombs and somewhat make up for its low yield explosive energy.  The biggest advantage to TNT is that it doesn’t explode easily.  You can drop it, scrape it, even melt it to a certain point (melts at 176 degrees F), which is far below the temperature it would detonate at.   This makes it handy for pouring into shells and other bomb casings.  It also neither absorbs nor dissolves water, so it works well even in wet environments and is easily mixed with a variety of other, often more powerful, explosive compounds.

So even though it has somewhat of a low explosive energy release potential, these afore mentioned benefits make it the explosive of choice for a variety of military applications.  Although, generally TNT ends up getting mixed with other explosive compounds creating various blends suited to a variety of purposes.  But TNT’s stability and versatility make it an ideal base of many bombs.

The explosive yield of TNT is considered the standard measure for strength of bombs and other explosives with 1 ton of TNT equaling 4.184 gigajoules. So 1 kg of TNT = 4.6 megajoules, thus a gram of TNT is equivalent in energy to 1 Calorie.

For further comparison, 1 kg of gunpowder will produce 3 megajoules of energy when exploding; 1 kg of dynamite contains 7.5 megajoules when exploding; 1 kg of gasoline produces 47.2 megajoules, though of course requires an oxidant.

Bonus Factoids:

• TNT and dynamite are not at all the same thing, contrary to what the Road Runner and Wiley coyote would have you believe.  Dynamite doesn’t actually contain TNT, but rather is an absorbent mixture soaked in nitroglycerin, which is extremely sensitive to shock unlike TNT; this is then wrapped in paper and vuala, dynamite.
• Calories are one of the few units of measurement that tend to be referred to as a concrete noun.  For instance you wouldn’t say “It’s 20 Fahrenheit’s” you would say “It’s 20 degrees Fahrenheit”.  But on the flip-side you would say “It’s 20 Calories”.
• TNT was originally created in 1863 and used as a yellow dye.  Because it was so difficult to detonate along with being a lot less powerful than many available alternatives, it wasn’t used as an explosive for many years.
• Because of the ease of melting and pouring TNT into shells, the German armed forces started filling their shells with TNT in 1902.  These shells were designed to pierce through armor, then explode.  This caused a lot more damage than British shells that just exploded on the surface.  By 1907 the British caught on to this and were now using TNT in the same fashion.
• TNT is poisonous and skin exposure will generally cause irritation and your skin will turn bright yellow or orange.
• During WWI, munitions workers who handled TNT were called “canary girls” or “canaries” because their skin that was exposed to the TNT turned yellow.  Not only did they have a girly nickname, but prolonged exposure to TNT causes liver, blood, spleen, and immune system problems among others.  Sort of kicking them while they are down.
• If you eat TNT, your pee will turn red and look like blood, though it is not.
• The Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, exploded with approximately 15 kilotons of TNT.
• Most of the current nuclear bombs the U.S. has in its arsenal are only equivalent to .3-1.2 kilotons of TNT
• The biggest bomb the U.S. ever made had a theoretical yield of 25 megatons of TNT.  The Soviet Union however, developed one that was tested as large as 50 megatons of TNT with a maximum theoretical yield of 100 megatons.
• Amazingly, if we were actually able to convert matter perfectly to energy with 1 kg of matter being annihilated by 1 kg of antimatter, the energy produced from just that small amount of matter is about 42.95 mega tons of TNT.  So an adult male weighing in at around 200 pounds has somewhere in the vicinity of 4000 megatons of TNT potential in their matter if completely annihilated.
• To put how much power this is in perspective, 1 megaton of TNT, when converted to kilowatt hours, makes enough electricity to power an average American home for over 100,000 years.  It is also enough to power the entire United States for a little over 3 days.  So 1 kg of some matter being completely annihilated by 1 kg of  antimatter would be able to power the entire United States for about four months.
• On a completely baffling scale, a typical supernova explosion will give off about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 megatons of TNT.

Sources:

• Energy in a Ton of TNT
• Calorie
• TNT Equivalent
• Trinitrotoluene