The Science History Institute presents Flash! Bang! Boom! A History of Fireworks

Pyrotechnics have worldwide roots and date back centuries. In war, explosives were employed to spook horses and assault enemy encampments, and the knowledge gained was soon put to more beautiful uses. Royals used displays to demonstrate power: with a wave, a queen could set off a colorful cacophony.

The Italian connection

Italy was an early pyrotechnic center. In De La Pirotechnia (On the Art of Fire, 1540), Vannoccio Biringuccio witnessed celebrations in Tuscany and wrote: “I have never seen anything so festive.” Italian pyrotechnicians designed stages for complex displays. Ignited by a single fuse, the macchines all’uso Italiano enabled technicians to refine orchestration and timing. Italian immigrants also brought the first aerial fireworks to the United States.

Bavarian Johann Schmidlap, a 16th-century firework maker and rocketry pioneer, sketched staged devices that look just like the rockets NASA used three centuries later to explore space and go to the moon. In Schmidlap’s design, the base fires to lift the firework assembly, then falls away, enabling the remaining sections to explode at higher altitudes, exactly the approach used to lift astronauts and payloads beyond Earth’s orbit.

From artillery to party

As celebratory applications of pyrotechnics expanded in the 17th and 18th centuries, kings needed fireworks experts, which is why the French court appointed Francis Malthus its artificier, fireworks artisan. Malthus, an army engineer, had written A treatise of artificial fire-works for both warres and recreation (1629).

The Catherine wheel, a spinning flaming pinwheel popular in Malta’s Catholic festivals, took its name from a torture device that St. Catherine of Alexandria was said to have shattered with a mere touch. Though no longer used in the United States, a vintage brochure of Catherine wheels once sold by American Fireworks of Hudson, Ohio is among marketing materials in the exhibit. Founded in 1902 by Vincenzo Sorgi, an Italian immigrant, American Fireworks is still family owned and operated.

Writing with fire

Original books and papers are also among the artifacts on view, including Kazimierz Siemienowicz’s Artis Magnae Artilleriae (The Great Art of Artillery, 1650). A valued reference into the 19th century, the Polish-Lithuanian artillery general’s book is open to a royal illumination that inscribed Vive Le Roy across the sky.

Lances, pyrotechnic tubes producing a stream of sparks, enabled artisans to write and draw with vials of explosives set in latticed wooden boxes. The same principle would be used in the 20th and 21st centuries to power large stadium displays with mortars launched from tubes colloquially called “flowerpots.”

A lance-making machine from Pennsylvania’s Zambelli Fireworks, which enabled the preparation of several tubes at once, is among the first items visitors encounter. This is the sort of pyrotechnic used in 1964 to create a 30-foot portrait of President Lyndon Johnson over the Atlantic City Boardwalk, hailing his nomination for President.

The rockets’ red glare

The science behind the oohs and ahhs is simple: 75 percent saltpeter (potassium nitrate), plus 15 percent charcoal and 10 percent sulfur. This “black powder” recipe was used everywhere, including DuPont Chemical of Wilmington, Delaware, which in 1802 became one of the nation’s first gunpowder manufacturers. Though DuPont never marketed fireworks, quantities were produced for private use.

Saltpeter produced an explosion the color of smoldering embers, but when potash (potassium chlorate) was substituted in the 1830s, the palette expanded. A higher burning point also provided richer colors and louder explosions. In the mid-19th century, New Jerseyan Isaac Edge, Jr. kept handwritten notebooks with key chemical formulae. Edge’s plant on the outskirts of Jersey City became a pyrotechnic training center.

“Green fire” was the calling card of Madame Sarah Hengle, a British firework maker who achieved the shade with potassium chlorate and barium nitrate. The exhibit reports that Hengle alternated firework production with tightrope walking, which makes perfect sense.

Besides color, chemical composition determines how fireworks sound: black powder explodes with a bang, potassium chromate sizzles and crackles, and sodium salicylate yields an arcing whistle that makes onlookers flinch and duck.

Selling the vision

Drawings used to market fireworks are plentiful, and though the works on view seem subdued, imagine them in context, before visual imagery saturated daily life. Soft pastels from the 1920s tout flowering set pieces by Berthier & Cie. of Monteux, France, creations with names like “Les Cascades Aériennes” (Aerial Stunts) and “Les Girandoles Diamantíes” (Diamond Chandeliers).

Conti Fireworks Manufacturing Company of New Castle, Pennsylvania commissioned paintings. The company, founded by Jake Conti, an Italian immigrant operated from 1902 to 1964, and gave New Castle the nickname “fireworks capital of America.”

Today, sales and show design rely on software. Fireworks can be selected, sequenced, and choreographed by computer. Costs can be tracked as plans proceed, and the whole creation can be simulated in advance for client approval.

Taking care

Almost 400 years ago, Kazimierz Siemienowicz cautioned pyrotechnicians to be “sober, considerate, and virtuous” because an accidental spark “may be the death of you.” Pyrotechnical safety has been a concern forever, both for makers and their understandably nervous neighbors. The exhibition enumerates regulatory measures, beginning with a 1698 British royal ban and a 1706 Parisian ordinance prohibiting pyrotechnic sales and manufacture in the city.

The American Pyrotechnic Association, founded in 1948, establishes standards and advocates for the industry. Governmental regulation abounds, with aspects controlled by various agencies, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Department of Transportation, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (the bureau’s full name).

In consideration of increasing overseas production, particularly in China, in 1989 the American Fireworks Testing Laboratory was established to institute rigorous testing abroad, before products are exported here.

Every July 4, no matter the state of the nation, Americans light up the skies. We look up in wonder, marking Independence Day exactly as John Adams predicted in 1776: “...with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”

At top: Gouache painting of CT Brock & Co.’s Crystal Palace Fireworks, c. 1890. (Image courtesy of the Science History Institute.)

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