A Brief History of Fireworks

Warm summer skies were lit up this weekend by the rocket's red glare as Americans once again celebrated our Independence Day. Watching red and green fireballs bloom in front of a fat, low hanging moon last night, I remarked to Mrs. DS that those brilliant fireworks had come a long way, since they remade the world. Alas, she wasn’t interested in soiling a patriotic moment with the science and history of pyrotechnics. But I gather you will be!

Way back in the gloomy days of the 13th century, tales of a wondrous substance reached the ears of European Nobility by way of the Oriental Silk Trails. It was called blackpowder. The top-secret formula soon worked its way into the hands of alchemists and their warring feudal benefactors to the West. And it didn't them long to realize that if the precious powder could be ignited in a rigid tube of some kind, they might be able to fire red-hot iron missiles much farther than a catapult could sling them.

After playing around with various metals and techniques for turning them into big thick barrels that could take the firing stress, many of which undoubtedly malfunctioned in spectacularly gruesome ways, the emerging craft of metallurgy began producing massive, high-quality, one piece cylinders. And as if that terrible weapon wasn't nasty enough, a great deal of work was done perfecting a rapid firing hand-held version so that individual combatants could shoot smaller holes in one another.

It wasn't long before some of those enterprising weapon designers figured out that if exploding powder could throw big hunks of iron out of the new guns at high speed over and over, maybe a variation on the device could do the same for a piston attached to a wheel or lever with a rod. It took decades of work, but over time the projectile became a piston, blackpowder was replaced with steam, the cannon became an engine and the industrial revolution was on.

Some engine designers, now called 'engineers,' speculated that if a mechanical system could turn heat input into work output, maybe the cycle could be reversed. Maybe room temperature gas could be cooled off by drawing the piston back. And if that cooled gas was circulated through a closed, insulated container, it would chill the contents. It took a lot of trial and error, but eventually the piston became a compressor, steam was replaced with better and better refrigerants, and, viola, the engine became a heat pump, better known as a refrigerator.

It’s almost impossible to overstate how much the reciprocating engine and commercial refrigeration changed America. The dawn of the industrial revolution marks the beginning of a broad based abolitionist movement that led inexorably to a showdown between industrial and agrarian economies and the ultimate the end of slavery. After the Civil War, first train tracks, then roads, grew hungrily up and down the eastern seaboard and across the Great Plains and over Rocky Mountains like moldy filaments over rotten fruit, spreading pioneers and towns like spores. The southern sons of former slaves and former slave owners migrated to the great factories of the north to build steamships and locomotives. Their children domesticated lightning and electrified the nation, a new generation flowed back in planes, trains, and automobiles to the air conditioned homes and sleek office buildings of the Deep South and desert southwest. Today, thanks in large part to engines and heat pumps, we enjoy fresh tropical fruit with Christmas dinner, or a bowl of ice-cream on the Fourth of July, in climate controlled houses perched on flat inhospitable tundra or nestled among steamy groves of palm trees.  

But some of the more visionary scientists and engineers set loose by ancient Chinese fireworks thought beyond guns and engines. They had greater ideas gleaming in their eyes, some so ambitious they could barely speak of them in public without being ridiculed. Tsiolkovsky, Pelterie, and Goddard wouldn't live to see a young President take up their vision:

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it -- we mean to lead it. John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

For a brief, precious moment, blackpowder's greatest spin-off united the human race like nothing before or since. On July 16, 9:32 AM EDT, balanced precariously between fiery disaster and Newton’s Third on five massive nozzles belching 7.5 million pounds of thrust, a Saturn V booster successfully hurled one of mankind’s ancient dreams out of the pages of science-fiction and into the annals of history. By the time the first stage shut down 150 seconds later, the giant rocket was traveling 5,000 mph and had burned enough oxygen to lend every American watching a breath of air. Kennedy would have loved the fireworks. I know I did.

Four days later, at the tender age of 7, I was plopped down wearing a hastily fashioned spaceman costume in front of a black and white TV peering through a camera lens a quarter million miles away, as a tiny spacecraft pitched and rolled and finally sat down on a plume of fire at Tranquility Base. Forty years ago this month my family joined a billion people who watched or listened, transfixed by grainy images and scratchy, beeping audio, as two men from planet earth emerged from the Eagle, took one small step off a narrow ladder, and danced on the moon.