Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making

The utility of fireworks and the number of purposes to which they have been applied are far greater than most people imagine, both at sea, where possibly their usefulness is mos...

Firework displays were looked upon as a necessary item in the programme of a place of public entertainment. So ambitious did these displays become, owing to keen rivalry existin...

The manufacture of fireworks in this country, as an industry distinct from mere firework making, dates from the early part of the eighteenth century. Before that period displays...

In the preceding chapters we have been dealing with displays of fireworks, that is to say; fireworks in the mass. We will now turn our attention to the firework units composing...

The use of pyrotechnic mixtures for military purposes is the basis of artillery, and one might almost say the foundation of chemistry. Before the age of the alchemist men were a...

The record of firework accidents until the date of the Explosives Act, 1875, is very meagre, not in subject matter, as reference to Chapter VI will show, for the history of the...

The outbreak of the great war, whatever may have been the case as regards other branches, found the Service badly equipped pyrotechnically. The great and almost frantic interest...

Pyrotechnic compositions and gunpowder are inextricably mixed together in early European records; for our inquiries it will serve no useful purpose to disentangle them, the latt...

Compound fireworks are those which are composed of a number of simple fireworks or units fixed to a framework or other device so that they produce a more elaborate effect than d...

During the later part of the seventeenth century, and subsequently, many prints appeared depicting firework displays; their number seems quite out of proportion to the total num...

The reason for this is two-fold: primarily, as we have seen in the chapter on rockets, the proportion of the ingredients of a firework varies in accordance with its size. So tha...

Ruggieri may be regarded as the last of the ancients. It is true that his book shows a marked advance on anything that had gone before, also that he appears to have been one of...

During the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries the Pleasure Gardens filled a position in the lives of a large proportion of the public comparable with that of...

We now come to a distinct class of fireworks, those whose functioning depends on the propulsion of gunpowder. The first and parent of this class is the shell or bomb.

Pyrotechny undoubtedly had its genesis in the East, and for that reason we will deal with its development there first. As he has intended to convey, the writer is strongly of op...

To-day a mine consists of a quantity of small effects such as stars, crackers, squibs, etc., blown simultaneously from a case, or in display work—from a mortar. In the latter ev...

2. Vertical Wheels. He illustrates a vertical wheel exactly as made to-day under that name. It has, however, been elaborated by the addition of colour cases on the spokes and ce...

The fireworks which form a class by themselves are the Saxon or Chinese flyer, and the tourbillion. Both of these consist of a single case made to revolve in the plane of its ax...

Order in Council No. 4 deals with small Firework Factories, the total contents of which, either finished or in course of construction, do not exceed 500 lbs. This class of facto...

The word “fireworks” as a metaphor, used either to describe the higher flights of oratory, of literature, or of human strife, whether it be in Parliament or the Parish Hall, or...

Pyrotechny, or the Art of Firework-making, is of great antiquity, and the date of its origin is quite unknown; indeed, it would be impossible to define with any degree of exacti...