Napoleon Dynamite’s Namesakes

You may know Napoleon Dynamite, but do you know Napoleon and Dynamite, his namesakes?

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769 on the island of Corsica. (Incidentally and unbeknown to Napoleon’s parents, thousands of miles away that same year a man by the name of James Watt built an 18 inches steam cylinder.) From his beginnings as a child, Napoleon was crazy for the military. Of course, every child that time dreamed of being a soldier. War, and war heroes were glorious in these days, when even minor explosives like dynamite (or the word “war crime”, for that matter) had yet to be invented. Napoleon was not just a fierce dreamer but also a bit of a realist overachiever, winning a scholarship to the French military academy.

Now ambition is good. But today, when somebody would tell you something like “I want to become the emperor of France,” surely you’d think he’d suffer the so-called Napoleon syndrome, a type of inferiority complex which is directly anti-proportional to a person’s height. Of course back then nobody would tell Napoleon he was suffering from the Napoleon syndrome, not because Napoleon wasn’t short (he was!), but of course because the name had yet to be invented. And usually, people don’t tell mean things straight to your face, unless you inject them a truth serum, or they write your paycheck.

As every great leader Napoleon had a great deal of delusion about him. He wouldn’t think of himself as a bullying conqueror but would always believe he’d be focusing on uniting the free peoples of old Europe, fighting war under a sort of gentleman’s agreement. Indeed Napoleon made sure that whatever land mass he could call his own would be spiced up with education and science institutions. Also, Napoleon wasn’t really the guy for democracy; though he believed that people should be governed well, he didn’t really trust them to know just how that could be achieved. Where Napoleon roamed you were not allowed to express your opinions without his approval, especially if your opinions were related to his short statue.

Now on to dynamite, an explosive based on nitroglycerin invented by Swedish Alfred Nobel (who in turn gave his name to the Nobel prize) in 1866, 45 years after Napoleon’s death, and usually packaged in short paper sticks. In a nut-shell, dynamite is used to blow things up. Humanity invented a multitude of excuses to blow things up, but in general it’s agreed on that blowing something up itself gives such great satisfaction to people that it serves its own needs. This is what the French call “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake), and that’s what the neighbor’s kid feels too when he burns an ant with his magnifying glass.

During its proud history, dynamite was used in mining, construction, war, tunnel construction, war, and underwater blasting. To trigger the dynamite explosion, a smaller explosion was needed in turn, and this became one of the greatest microcosm/macrocosm metaphors to this day. After a while people realized that the nitroglycerin used in dynamite had a big problem: when stored in warehouses for a long time, it will start to leak out of the dynamite. Now if there’s one thing warehouse owners don’t like it’s when things leak, so this greatly decreased the popularity of dynamite. “Nobel’s Safety Blasting Powder”, as it was first called, apparently wasn’t so safe after all – proving even back then, advertisements usually lied.

What would have happened to France, and the world at large, would Napoleon instead of Alfred have discovered dynamite is not known, and historians can only speculate. But it’s likely in that case, I wouldn’t be writing this post in English, and would probably be saying “au revoir” right about now.

Philipp Lenssen on Tuesday, Dec 6 2005 reg. Napoleon Dynamite.