We live in combustible times. Passenger planes explode mid-flight. Peaceable cities erupt in violence. Homemade bombs migrate from the dust of Afghanistan to the suburban asphalt of California.

One bulwark between us and greater chaos is Scintrex Trace Corp., a little-known Ottawa firm building some of the world's best bomb detectors. Founded in the 1980s, the company designs and manufactures explosives sniffers, ranging from hand-held devices to million-dollar drive-through units.

Among security nerds, however, the company is best known for the $26,000 EVD-3000, the world's first portable trace explosives detector. Roughly the size of a hand-held vacuum, the EVD-3000 can detect trace amounts of at least 15 different explosive agents, making it ideal for examining luggage, mail and vehicles. Even Scintrex doesn't know the full extent of the EVD-3000's success.

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"Our end user tends to be military bomb squads or airport security and they never disclose publicly what they find," says Dao Nguyen, vice-president, engineering and product development. "Not even to us."

The company has 20 employees in Ottawa. Another 50 are stationed in the United States with parent company Autoclear, which boasts 66,000 security installations in 170 countries, a figure that surges with every deadly attack in the world.

"After the events in Paris, our agents were overwhelmed," says Nguyen. "Our business tends to follow world events, unfortunately."