President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser opens construction on the Aswan Dam by detonating ten tons of dynamite to demolish twenty tons of granite on the east bank of the Nile.

The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the executive head of state of Egypt and the de facto appointer of the official head of government under the Egyptian Constitution of 2014. Under the various iterations of the Constitution of Egypt following the Egyptian Revolution of 1952, the president is also the supreme commander of the Armed Forces, and head of the executive branch of the Egyptian government.

Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein was an Egyptian military officer and revolutionary who served as the second president of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970. Nasser led the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and introduced far-reaching land reforms the following year. Following a 1954 assassination attempt on his life by a Muslim Brotherhood member, he cracked down on the organization, put President Mohamed Naguib under house arrest and assumed executive office. He was formally elected president in June 1956.

The Aswan Dam, or Aswan High Dam, is one of the world's largest embankment dams, which was built between 1960 and 1970 across the Nile in Aswan, Egypt. The project was developed by the military regime that took power following the 1952 Egyptian revolution, to better control flooding, provide increased water storage for irrigation and generate hydroelectricity, the dam was seen as pivotal to the country's industrialization plans. Like the earlier implementation, the High Dam has had a significant effect on the economy and culture of Egypt.

Dynamite is an explosive made of nitroglycerin, sorbents, and stabilizers. It was invented by the Swedish chemist and engineer Alfred Nobel in Geesthacht, Northern Germany, and was patented in 1867. It rapidly gained wide-scale use as a more robust alternative to the traditional black powder explosives. It allows the use of nitroglycerine's favorable explosive properties while greatly reducing its risk of accidental detonation.