Yes, there is enough evidence that many people’s teeth exploded like bomb in their mouth. It was in 19th century and it’s still a mystery; no one knows why it happened.
The dental cosmos was the first major journal for American dentists, in this journal a Pennsylvania dentist WH Atkinson documented an outbreak of this type of incidents. Patients with dental filling complained continuous severe pain and at the end some of their teeth exploded which relieved their pain immediately.
Till date there is no explanation of that. But some argue that maybe it was exaggerated description. Well what about the explosion inside mouth?
A professor of inorganic chemistry at University College London, Andrea Sell has an explanation, now we use mercury amalgam for dental filling. But before that, various metals like lead, tin, silver and alloys were used for dental filling. Two different metals can create small electrochemical cell there and these low voltage batteries can trigger electrolysis. As we know water can be separated into oxygen and hydrogen, those electrochemical cells created hydrogen and trapped there.
Weakened tooth may explode because of high pressure or maybe hydrogen was ignited because of smoking. There is no hope that this mystery will be solved but luckily we are not using those type of dental filling anymore.
