It may not be a coincidence that the inventor of dynamite was a Swede; Alfred Nobel. In Sweden, the road towards industrialization was highly dependent on rock blasting, not only for the building of roads in a physical sense, but also, e.g., for use in the mine industry.
An important milestone on the road " in a metaphorical sense " is the building of railroads, and especially the railroad from the iron mine in Kiruna over the rocky mountain ridge to the ice-free Atlantic shipping port at Narvik in Norway. This gigantic undertaking around the turn of the previous century was facilitated by the fact that Sweden and Norway, until 1905, constituted a union under Swedish supremacy.
Projects like this boosted the Swedish explosives industry, and engaged many skilful engineers, chemists, and physicists in the area of what is referred to today as "energetic materials".
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