Dynamite is traditionally associated with the name of Alfred Nobel, who gained worldwide fame and significant income from this invention. However, there is an opinion that the idea may have been borrowed from the Russian chemist Nikolai Zinin.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Zinin showed outstanding abilities even in gymnasium and then entered Kazan University, where one of his professors was Lobachevsky. By the age of 25, Zinin had made numerous scientific discoveries, and during an internship in London, he worked with Faraday. The peak of his scientific career came in the 1840s and 1850s. Zinin trained a whole generation of famous Russian chemists, such as Butlerov, Beketov, Shishkov, and Borodin. One of his significant achievements was the discovery of a method for synthesizing nitroglycerin from glycerin using concentrated nitric acid and low temperatures, developed together with his graduate student Petrushevsky. During the Crimean War, Zinin proposed using nitroglycerin for artillery shells, but his ideas did not find support among the military. It was only from 1863 that nitroglycerin began to be used for underground and underwater explosions.

However, the story of dynamite began when Zinin, while conversing with his dacha neighbor Nobel, shared his experiments on creating a safe explosive for transportation. A few years later, when one of the bottles of nitroglycerin broke during transport and the liquid soaked into infusorial earth, Nobel recalled Zinin's stories about soaking powdered substances with nitroglycerin. He quickly assessed the properties of the resulting mixture, which led to the invention of dynamite, bringing significant profits to Nobel. Upon learning of this, Zinin merely remarked: 'That Alfred Nobel snatched dynamite from under our noses.'