Light 05: Fireworks

By Circe -

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

A small family of rats, seated on a wall, watching a fireworks display.
Fireworks are one of the few uses to which I think gunpowder should actually be put. The earliest known fireworks date back about a thousand years, to the Song dynasty in China, by which point they had already got the hang of it so well that "pyrotechnician" was a viable career option. They'd already figured out how to make fire burn in fun colors several hundred years before that, so Chinese firework displays, known as 爆仗 (bàozhang, literally "explode weapon", since they were basically prettier bombs), knocked the proverbial socks off of Western observers who stumbled into local festivals.

The colors of modern fireworks are achieved pretty much the same way as the old ones: by adding metal to the combustibles. You might recognize a pure yellow as sodium, the same color as sodium-bulb streetlights. Copper burns a bluey-green. The more emerald color is usually barium. Strontium produces red, and the same titanium/magnesium blend used in emergency flares gives you a bright silvery white. These can be mixed like paint pigments to get oranges, purples, or pinks, and creating rockets with multiple fuses and compartments gets you the multi-stage starbursts so characteristic of fireworks displays today.

A lot of places use fireworks for a lot of festivals, but locally, the biggest one is Independence Day, celebrated in the US on the 4th of July. Boston takes it especially seriously, as this place was a hotbed of colonial revolution. Sensibly enough, we set off our giant explody fireworks over the water of Boston Harbor, thus minimizing the chances of setting anything important alight. More southern areas of the US, where it's far more comfortable to sit outside in December than July, set them off for Christmas. Two of the more famous ones belong to the House of Mouse -- Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and Walt Disney World/EPCOT Center, located in a tiny universe of its own in central Florida. 

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