Understanding Fireworks – Obligatory Fourth of July Awesomeness
By Alex Batty, MHI Marketing Communications Coordinator |@mhi_alex
One of my favorite parts about the Fourth of July (besides food… ah… food) is FIREWORKS!!!
Growing up in the desert, there were like 4 days a year that you were legally allowed to light fireworks, and the weren’t even the good ones. But my little pyro heart was always so warmed (pun intended) by lighting fireworks each year.
This post is going to be SCIENCE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COUl4duuGhM
(I’m a nerd. We know this. Move on.)
But we have to supply it to supply chain so that my boss doesn’t get mad and fire me (and you wouldn’t want that, would you? Who would bring you these weird posts if I was gone…) so let’s get that out of the way.
Fireworks -> made of explosives and other sundry bits -> assembled one place -> moved to another safely (‘cuz explosives, duh) -> supply chain FTW (thank you for not blowing everybody up when moving this stuff).
Ahem. Now. *cracks knuckles* *puts on professor voice*
The big awesome fireworks that professional people shoot off into the sky are basically two of the most common fireworks: firecrackers and sparklers.
The same basic fireworks that kids always light up just get scaled up and scienced and mathed to become big booming awesomeness.
But let’s breakdown the basic ones first. Firecrackers are basically tiny gunpowder (black powder) bombs. Light the fuse, run, when it reaches the powder -> explosion. Just on a small enough scale to be (kind of) safe.
Sparklers are a bit more complex to make the effect last longer. The sparks are basically burning bits of metals that have a light effect when heated/melted, such as aluminum, iron, steel, zinc, or magnesium. The different metals give off different colors of light. (You can do cool things with a campfire, different metal pipes, and a garden hose. It looks like magical colored fire.)
So aerial fireworks are a combination of firecrackers and sparklers, and typically break down into four parts. 1 and 2, the container and fuse, are common to pretty much any firework that you can buy in the store. They keep all the explosives together and give you a chance to light it and run. Inside the big fireworks are a bursting charge (the firecracker part) which blows the stars (the sparkler part) apart to make the starburst shapes we’re all familiar with.
https://giphy.com/gifs/c1R3XcUXVWAFy
Aerial fireworks are basically two-stage rockets. The initial fuse is set on some black powder that will lift the tiny bomb into the sky, and that explosion light the second fuse, which sets off the firecracker/sparkler reaction.
To make the different shapes fireworks explode into, you just arrange the star shells into different shapes in the container (I mean, it’s a little more complex than that, and requires math and engineering, but that’s a little above the level of this blog).
If you want to see which metals make which colors, you can check out the Periodic Table of the Elements in Fireworks.
And of course, we can’t talk about fireworks without including the finale of the 1812 Overture. This piece is actually about the French invasion of Russia in 1812, but here in ‘Murica we’ve apparently co-opted it, thanks to a 1974 choice made by Arthur Fiedler for a performance of July 4 of the Boston Pops (yay… ‘Murica stealing other cultures. Actually… a pretty appropriate way to celebrate the Fourth *rolls eyes*).
Fun fact: the music has actually written into it over twenty cannon shots. CANNON SHOTS. AS AN INSTRUMENT. And church bells, but CANNON SHOTS. There are symphonies that use actual cannons when they perform it.
(Skip to about 10 minutes in to see the cannon part).
Happy 4th everybody.
(P.S. Good luck getting the 1812 Overture out of your head. I can’t, and now everyone in the office wants to strangle me.)
