From our 21st century vantage, most Americans view the advent of fireworks so interwoven with the fabric of our July 4 festivities as to take on the air of religious mandate. Or, more appropriately: A secular ritual.

​

The coupling has become, as goes the cliché, bound in stone.

​

But while this familiarity can cause one to take these little feats of human engineering for granted, the evolution of the fireworks we know and love today has been a long road.

​

Most scholars believe this journey began about 900 years ago. While the Chinese searched for the so-called ‘Elixir of Life,’ a Taoist alchemist made an unexpected discovery. By combining chemical elements considered to belong to the opposing energetic phylums of yin and yang (or feminine and masculine energies, respectively), rather than yield the secret of everlasting life, the mixture caught on fire, and gunpowder was born.

​

In his groundbreaking book, “Science and Civilization in China,” Joseph Needham, PhD writes: “We found early accounts of the haphazard practice of the Taoist alchemists in which they occasionally had their beards singed, hands and faces burnt, and even the houses where they worked burned down when they ignited certain mixtures!”

​

Some 200 years later, the invention began to be used as entertainment.

​

“Descriptions of [the first fireworks] are found in the Ch’in yeh-yu (Rustic Tales in Eastern Ch’i) by Chou Mi, dated to 1264,” Needham wrote. “So-called ‘earth-rats’ (ti lao shu) were described as self-propelled, ground-crawling fireworks.”

​

The earliest ancestor of modern recreational fireworks, the ‘earth-rat’ consisted of a bamboo tube jammed full of gunpowder that, according to Needham, “…when lit, shot about in all directions on the floor… [and were used] as part of festivals meant to ward off evil spirits.”

​

A century or so later, the Chinese utilized the ‘elixir’ for a more sinister application.

​

“By the year 1200, China had built the first rocket cannons, using gunpowder to aim and blast projectiles at their enemies,” said science-writer and historian Alexis Stempien. “Off the battlefield, however, this technology led to something beautiful: the first aerial fireworks.”

While scholars argue when and how the technology specifically came to Europe, by the culmination of the Renaissance (14th – 17th centuries), Europe’s taste for lavish pyrotechnic exhibitions had grown so much specialty schools formed throughout the continent to train the technicians necessary to satisfy demand. In fact, by the late 17th century, European monarchies took the art form so seriously they sought to symbolically shame their geographical peers by proffering the most extravagant display.

​

“Royal competition was fierce enough that in late England, in the late 17th century, King James II’s fire-master was awarded knighthood for his efforts on behalf of the crown,” said Stempien.

​

However, despite a thriving academic environment, color in fireworks was extremely limited up until the early 19th century--they were all orange. But this was soon to change. Italian innovators eventually produced, for the first time in history, the bright, multihued sparks and sunbursts seen in our contemporary extravaganzas.

​

What, exactly, did these advancements entail?

​

“Most modern fireworks displays use aerial shells, which resemble ice-cream cones,” said Smithsonian researcher Helen Thompson. “Developed by Italian pyro-technicians in 1830, the shells contained fuel in a cone bottom, while the “scoop” contained an outer layer of pyrotechnic stars, or tiny balls containing the chemicals needed to produce a desired color, as well as an inner bursting charge to fling them outward.”

​

In other words, when the Italian pyro-technicians developed the compartmentalized aerial shell, the technology provided them with a means of putting their recently gained knowledge of metallic powders to work, thereby allowing for the creation of specific colors (not to mention new visual and sonic effects as well).

​

“Firework color-concoctions are comprised of different metal elements,” explained Thompson. “When an element burns, its electrons get excited, and it releases energy in the form of light—different chemicals burn at different wavelengths of light.”

​

For example: Titanium and magnesium burn silver or white; strontium and lithium compounds produce deep reds; calcium creates an orange color; copper makes blues; sodium burns yellow; and, finally, barium leads to green. Additionally, by combining chlorine with barium or copper, neon-green and turquoise flames are created, respectively. 

​

Basically, when the fuel cylinder was spent and the rocket reached the desired altitude, the internal charge went off, both igniting and hurling outward the specialized ‘stars.’ Comprised of combinations of metallic powders, as the stars combusted, they in turn created the streams of color visible from the ground.

​

“After 1830, while of course the technology continued to advance,” said Thompson, “fireworks began to function more-or-less as they do today.”

​

Thus, this July 4, as we gather at public parks, stadiums and fields throughout the country’s vast 3.8 million square-miles of ‘fruited plains, spacious skies, purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain,’ when the first muffled blast propels the snaking trail of that first sparking rocket toward the dark sky where, ultimately, after a brief halting gasp, the disappeared projectile explodes—with the boom and flash of the expanding, multi-colored blossom of light, let us reflect upon the scientific innovation that has enabled us, through the symbolic, glittery and fantastic miracle of fireworks, to once again be reminded of that most basic principle of American-ness: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”