Jack Kelly writer
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PLAYING WITH FIRE
(American Heritage, July 1997)
A tugboat pushes us slowly past the waterfront of Fall
River, Massachusetts. Lined up on the steel decks of two
barges are twelve hundred mortars packed with explosive
charges. Overhead, evening sunlight drapes white
mountains of summer clouds.
“I get a few knots in my stomach about now,” says Frank
M. Coluccio, an easygoing mustached man of fifty who is
president of Legion Fireworks. He is sorting out the wires
that will connect his guns to an electric control panel. The
last-minute jitters are understandable. In an hour Coluccio
and his partner, Jennie Bradford, will take the stage in
front of tens of thousands of eager spectators for one of
the company’s biggest shows of the season. While they
mount their fireworks extravaganza to cap an annual city
celebration, the two will be stationed in the midst of a storm
of exploding gunpowder potent enough to heave shells the
size of a basketball a thousand feet into the air. It gives,
Coluccio says, “an adrenaline rush.”
Legion carries on a venerable craft tradition that has
permeated pyrotechnics since it arrived in Italy from China
five hundred years ago. Using methods that have changed
little over centuries and formulas passed down by word of
mouth, Coluccio and his people hand-fashion many of their
shells in small workshops. The well-known pyrotechnic
clans—the Gruccis of Long Island or the Zambellis of New
Castle, Pennsylvania—grab the glamour shows. But it’s the
smaller firms that decorate the Fourth of July in towns
across the country and provide the fiery, satisfying climax
to firefighters’ carnivals, ethnic fairs, and municipal
celebrations.
Man is the only animal that is afraid of the dark and the
only one that has mastered fire. Pyrotechnics is the art of
artificial fire, fire that is independent of the diluted oxygen
in the air. Fireworks mixtures include an oxidizer, a material
that gives up oxygen when heated. This chemical, typically
potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, must be purified, ground to
a powder, and mixed with equally pulverized fuel. The
resulting composition burns with astonishing rapidity and
vigor.
We can trace the roots of pyrotechnics to medieval China,
where alchemists experimented with purified chemicals in
search of an elixir of life. Perhaps having observed how
saltpeter lent energy to fire, around A.D. 850 they tried
combining the mineral with charcoal and sulfur. The result
proved magical. The mixture, which in the West came to be
known as gunpowder, was one of the discoveries,
according to the philosopher Francis Bacon, that
revolutionized the world.
Yet the invention did not révolutionize Chinese society.
The idea that the Chinese used gunpowder only for
celebration goes too far; in fact they invented flame-
throwing fire lances and incendiary war rockets early on.
But without a true gun the Chinese did not fundamentally
alter their method of making war. By the twelfth century
they were using huo yao, “fire drug,” for pleasurable
diversions.
When gunpowder reached Europe in the thirteenth
century, it inspired the cannon, which spelled the end of
aristocratic feudalism and shaped the modern nation-state.
At the same time, the awakening of knowledge that
followed the Dark Ages nurtured the birth of pyrotechnics,
which by the 1400s had begun to be incorporated into
pageants and celebrations across Europe, a flickering of
controlled fire to welcome the Renaissance.
At fall river, as we chug out to take our position before the
city’s riverside park, we pass the USS Massachusetts, now
part of a naval museum. The sight of the battleship’s
massive sixteen-inch guns invokes the connection between
pyrotechnics and warfare. Up until the eighteenth century,
armies commonly employed civilian fire masters to handle
their artillery. Their profession was closely associated with
alchemy, danger, and dark secrets. They supervised
cannon in combat and fired salutes to celebrate victories.
They also began to mount elaborate fireworks displays for
public festivities.
Early pyrotechnicians developed three basic gunpowder
tools that still provide most of the effects we see today.
First they contained the powder in a closed case. Light the
case with a fuse, and the sudden burning creates gas that
explodes the container. Thus the firecracker, the larger
“salute,” or the bursting shells of an aerial display.
When they packed powder into a tube closed at one end,
fire masters observed, hot gases, flame, and sparks
rushed out the other. The result was a fountain of fire.
Some of the earliest pyrotechnics, in fifteenth-century
Florence and Siena, involved large plaster figures that
spewed fire from their eyes and mouths. When the tube
was reversed, the expanding gas gave it forward
momentum, turning it into a rocket.
Finally, fire masters learned to ram a projectile down on
top of the powder in those same closed-end pipes. Tonight
that tool, the gun, in the form of hundreds of cardboard,
plastic, and steel mortars, will hurl aloft the thousands of
aerial fireworks we’ll be seeing.
A pyrotechnician’s work begins months before the summer
season. During the winter Frank Coluccio applies himself
to the exacting and repetitive work of constructing shells,
the innocuous-looking “bombs” that yield the color, sound,
and glitter of a display. Purchased shells can be more
economical, but Coluccio prefers to use traditional custom-
built ones in his shows.
“Five years ago we made 80 percent of our shells,”
explains Legion’s vice president, Jennie Bradford, a
compact and energetic woman of thirty-six. “Now, because
fireworks from Asia have gotten so cheap, probably 60
percent of our shows consist of highquality shells that we
purchase, mostly from China.”
The Legion plant is tucked unobtrusively into a seventeen-
acre site near the Hudson River, seventy miles north of
New York City. The work goes on in thirty-three small and
widely spaced buildings, which include storage magazines,
drying rooms, and workshops. Air-powered or hydraulic
presses are used for a few operations, but much of the
construction of fireworks is still carried out by hand. No
better method has been found.
Bradford and Coluccio are Legion’s only full-time
employees; they hire a cadre of experienced “shooters” to
help fire shows during the summer. They also buy shells
from master shell builders like David Datres, a fifty-two-
year-old railroad-communications cable splicer who has
long pursued pyrotechnics as a sideline.
One of Datres’s specialties is the charcoal “crossette,” or
splitting comet shell. He shows me how he packs comets,
small cylinders of charcoal-rich composition, into the
cardboard cylinder that will carry them aloft. Each comet
contains a tiny firecracker that will blow it apart, multiplying
the effect of golden trails of sparks. “This is really a labor
of love,” he says. “I make them the way the old Italians
used to.” The technology for shells of this type can be
traced back into the sixteenth century.
Timing is everything in fireworks. With each shell he
makes, Datres carefully measures and arranges the
ingredients to produce a calculated pattern in the sky. He
wraps the whole shell in glued paper and string, securing it
against the force of the explosion that will send it flying. “I
once put together a shell for a competition,” he says, ›that
took me sixty hours to construct. It went off in twelve
seconds.”
Mixing the volatile flash powder that gives salutes their
bang is the most dangerous task in any fireworks firm. At
Legion it’s carried out on humid days in the spring and fall
to minimize the threat from static electricity. “We realize the
danger,” Coluccio says. “That’s why we’re conscious of
safety every minute we’re working.”
In their beginnings fireworks were not the center of a
spectacle. They served as theatrical effects during
pageants involving dragons, giants, and enchanted
islands. The Italians, who first developed fireworks in
Europe and have maintained an affinity for the art ever
since, built elaborate facades—called temples or
machines— whose porticoes and columns served as
backdrops for the pyrotechnic fountains, rockets, and
Roman candles that illuminated saints’ days or other
religious festivals.
The eighteenth century ushered in the golden age of
classical fireworks. In the early 1700s the Ruggieri
brothers, whose name would become synonymous with the
craft, moved from their native Bologna to France and
became fire masters to the court of Louis XV, mounting
increasingly opulent spectacles at Versailles. During his
sojourn in Paris, Thomas Jefferson saw displays mounted
by the Ruggieris.
Fireworks arrived in America as early as 1608, when Capt.
John Smith “fired a few rockets” to impress the natives
during the difficult days of the Jamestown colony. At the
time of the Revolution John Adams, in a letter to his wife,
predicted that the signing of the Declaration of
Independence would be celebrated with “bonfires and
illuminations from this time forward forevermore.” While
“illuminations” is sometimes taken to mean fireworks, it’s
more likely that he was referring to the custom, before
streetlights were common, of illuminating buildings and
public squares with candles in windows and on walls. But
pyrotechnics soon did become a Fourth of July institution.
Skyrockets filled the air over Newport in 1781, and Boston
put on its first full-scale Independence Day fireworks
display in 1805.
By the end of the 1700s most of the effects we see today
were in common use. In the air, shells, known in those
days as balloons, burst into patterns of fire, sparks, and
darting “fisgigs.” Many types of rockets soared skyward,
including the caduceus, which left behind a spiral trail. On
the ground, fire masters set off fountains, suns, and trees
of flame. Spectators also witnessed rockets that leaped in
and out of the water like dolphins and wheels that
metamorphosed through fifteen patterns. An early treatise
gives directions for producing “silver and gold raine” by
filling thousands of goose quills with powder and packing
them into the head of a rocket.
What classical fireworks lacked was color. Granulated
charcoal left a trail of lingering orange sparks. Iron filings
glowed white. Chemical additions like amber could tint
flames with pastels, but the deep and varied colors that we
enjoy today were unknown.
During much of the early history of fireworks,
pyrotechnicians relied on skyrockets as a mainstay of their
shows. Rockets carry their fuel with them, leaving a brilliant
trail of sparks as they soar into the sky. When the fuel is
spent, the rocket’s “garniture” explodes, setting off reports
and a spray of stars or serpents. But skyrockets are not
often used in commercial shows today. They carry a
smaller payload than shells shot from a gun, and their
trajectory is less predictable. Moreover, they require the
weight of long wooden shafts to keep on course, and these
sticks present a danger as they fall.
Legion still fires smaller shows by hand, in the manner of
traditional fuochisti. I watched Frank Coluccio set off a
display in the little town of Coxsackie, on the edge of the
Hudson River. Some of the shells were loaded into mortars
in advance, including those for the finale, which filled a
long row of guns, the fuses chaining one shell to the next.
The rest were laid out under a fireproof tarp, ready to be
dropped singly into mortars.
Coluccio extracts one of the shells and lowers it by its fuse
down a steel tube about three and a half feet long. As he
lets it go, he touches the fuse to a flare. The fire races
down to a measured sack of gunpowder at the bottom of
the shell. This lift charge explodes with a hollow “thwomp!”
During the four seconds the shell takes to reach a height
of six hundred feet, a time fuse burns down, finally
reaching the burst charge inside. The shell explodes,
flinging stars outward in a spherical pattern. The stars are
nuggets of chemicals that burn with a colored flame,
sometimes changing hues before they die out.
The variety of rich colors that we know today began to
appear in the 1830s. Descendants of the Ruggieri
brothers were among the first to make stars using
potassium chlorate, which causes metal salts to glow with
distinctive hues. Salts of copper yield blue, those of
strontium red, barium green, and so on. Fire workers also
used newly refined metals to brighten their effects,
beginning with magnesium in the 1860s. By the end of the
century powdered aluminum was offering an inexpensive
brilliance. “Its advent opened a new era of the art,” wrote
the English pyrotechnician Alan St. Hill Brock.
Hand-firing a show has built-in dangers. Fuses burn
quickly, leaving the shooter little time to get away from the
mortar before the formidable explosion that lifts the shell.
Sometimes shells blow up before reaching their intended
height, a “low break” that sprays the ground with burning
stars. Shooters have been killed when a spark touched off
a shell they were preparing to drop into a mortar.
At Coxsackie, before half the shells have been fired, drops
of rain begin to splatter on the parking lot that separates
the spectators from the shooting area. In minutes it’s
pouring. The wet-dust smell of a summer shower mixes
with the tang of gunpowder. The show goes on. By the end
a crowd of soaked spectators cheers an ear-shattering
finale that challenges the storm itself.
Rain has always been a worry for fireworks artists. On the
Fourth of July in 1876 a massive display was slated for
Fairmont Park in Philadelphia to celebrate the nation’s
centennial. A huge crowd gathered in the sultry evening.
As darkness fell, a thunder-storm boiled over. The
pyrotechnicians knew they had no choice. According to a
contemporary account, “The whole range of fireworks,
including temples, gigantic portraits of Washington,
mounds, volcanoes, stars, patriotic mottoes, pyramids, and
other structures, all on a scale never before seen in
America, must be discharged at once or never discharged
at all.” The audience was “stilled and entranced” by the
short but stupendous spectacle.
Throughout the nineteenth century the re-enactment of
battles on both land and sea remained a pyrotechnic
staple, but pyrotechnicians also began to mount the first of
what might be called modern shows: fireworks with no
scenery whatever. There also arose a new fashion for set
pieces. These were wooden and bamboo frames covered
with pyrotechnic lances that created pictures in fire. The
Brock family of England were specialists in set pieces, and
during the 1880s visiting potentates such as the king of
the Maoris or the Shah of Persia marveled to see their own
portraits unfurled eighty feet high in colored fire. An
unfortunate malfunction on a Brock set piece once caused
the eye of Queen Victoria to wink lewdly at the astonished
crowd.
In America the English pyrotechnician Henry J. Pain
catered to a taste for historical vignettes using fireworks.
He operated an amphitheater at Brooklyn’s Manhattan
Beach, near Coney Island, for many years. Patrons
watched actors scurry around in togas as Mount Vesuvius
erupted, sending fire streaming onto Pompeii. In 1882 the
British fleet shelled the Egyptian port of Alexandria; a year
later Pain’s customers could view this “magnificent naval
and military spectacle” in a fiery re-enactment involving
350 players.
When he was five years old, Legion’s president, Frank
Coluccio, set a fire under a porch. Later he blew up a toilet
in a Catholic school and fired cherry bombs from a
slingshot. An early fascination with fire and explosions is
typical of many pyrotechnicians I’ve met.
Fireworks have also helped inspire many budding
scientists. “Fired cannon, pop, and firecrackers all day. In
the evening had five skyrockets,” reads a Fourth of July
entry in the diary of the fifteen-year-old Robert Goddard,
whose early work in rocketry put America on its path to the
moon.
Coluccio followed his father into the masonry trade and for
years satisfied his taste for gunpowder through
membership in a cannon club. While on a bricklaying job in
1975 he heard Legion workers testing salutes, tracked
down the company, and soon became a part-time shooter.
Legion had been founded in 1920 by Joseph Chiarella,
who followed a tradition of immigrants bringing
pyrotechnics to this country from Italy. He was noted for his
elaborate set pieces, such as “The Battle of Bunker Hill,”
“Flight of a Zeppelin,” and a topical “Spirits of 1933”—a
huge bottle outlined in fire to honor the repeal of
Prohibition.
“Grandpa” Chiarella died in an explosion at the Legion
plant in 1970. Coluccio began running the business eleven
years later. He continues to use formulas and methods
handed down from the company’s founder. He also has
followed fireworks tradition by involving his own family in
the business: His father, brothers, sister, and in-laws all
help out firing shows, especially during the busy Fourth of
July season.
Both Coluccio and his partner have the great fortune to
have merged vocation and avocation. “I was always
involved in the arts,” Jennie Bradford explains. “I drew
pictures, I worked in the graphic arts. But when I found
fireworks, I was home.” As the designer of Legion’s shows,
Bradford selects effects that will enhance one another and
surprise the audience. She works in multiple dimensions of
space and time and, as a show approaches, she
completes a detailed second-by-second script. For
electrically fired shows, she sometimes makes an
audiotape to cue the shooter and to help coordinate the
timing of the firing with any accompanying music.
When I first visited the Legion plant, Bradford, whose
enthusiasm about everything connected with fireworks is
irresistible, told me, “You have to go to the PGI. That’s
where you’ll meet the real pyros.”
The Pyrotechnic Guild International is an organization of
fireworks enthusiasts, many of them amateurs. They
maintain a deep sense of fireworks tradition; their symbol
is the sixteenth-century “Green Man,” who wore a foliage
outfit, carried a sparking torch, and assisted the fire
master in mounting displays.
The pyro clan gets together once a year to share
information, show off their latest fire-art creations, and
enjoy great fireworks. Freely exchanging formulas,
methods, and safety tips, PGI members have helped break
down the long tradition of secrecy surrounding
pyrotechnics. Last year their black-powder orgy drew more
than twenty-two hundred members and their families to
Muskegon, Michigan, a quiet Rust Belt town optimistically
dubbed the Riviera of the Midwest. One of this band of
amiable eccentrics was Jack Fielder, a machinist from the
Detroit area.
“To some people,” he says, “amateur pyrotechnician
sounds a little like amateur neurosurgeon.” Fielder laughs
through a thick beard and goes on to muse that if he
couldn’t continue making fireworks, he would take up
serious cooking, another pursuit that involves recipes and
mysterious transformations. In fact, the composition for
stars is rolled out in sheets like cookies, cut, and dusted
with gunpowder before being dried. Fielder even makes
his own charcoal, an ingredient that yields lush golden
sparks.
Amateur pyros have a long tradition. With the coming of
the Enlightenment, hobbyists began to experiment with
science. Pyrotechnics, Alan St. Hill Brock writes in his
History of Fireworks, “seemed to offer to the chemist a
means whereby he could demonstrate, publicly and
visually, his scientific proficiency.” Amateurs still play an
important role. “They’re a kind of informal research and
development arm of the industry,” Jennie Bradford says.
“They have the time to experiment with new effects and to
invent new varieties of shells.”
During the day, the convention spins around a range of
technical seminars and meetings about such topics as
“beginner fountain making,” “multibreak shell construction,”
and “the use of binary flash powders in proximate
pyrotechnics.” Late in the afternoon a fireworks bazaar
opens in a defunct cold-storage warehouse. Outside, a
rocket soars over the water with the sound of a skidding
tractor-trailer; a blast of flash powder sets off a car alarm a
quarter of a mile away. The air soon fills with the aroma of
brimstone. “Once you smell the smoke,” a pyro adage
holds, “you’ll never again be free.”
When darkness arrives, the PGI conventioneers, joined by
thousands of lawn-chair-toting Muskegonites, move to a
waterfront park for a no-holds-barred show. Members
compete in thirty-one categories of homemade
pyrotechnics, ranging from small rockets to elaborate
girandoles, which spin like infernal merry-go-rounds and
then go careering up into the zodiac. Michelangelo is said
to have constructed one of these devices more than four
hundred years ago.
I begin to learn some of the nuances of fireworks.
Spherical Chinese and Japanese shells burst into round
patterns of color resembling, and named for, flowers—
chrysanthemums and peonies. Italian or “salami” shells, so
called because of their cylindrical shape, usually achieve
their effects by means of multiple timed explosions, each
one spilling out colored stars, serpents, whistles, or other
effects. A spiderweb sprays charcoal streamers. Willows
leave trails of sparks weeping in the sky. “A twelve-inch
double-petal peony, outer petal blue to red mag, inner
petal pearl to silver flash, and a red mag pistil,” the
announcer says, introducing a sky-filling explosion.
What’s the point of it all? The essence of the convention is
that there is no point. Fireworks are about celebration and
beauty and childish delight, pure and simple. “People tell
me to act my age,” a graying pyro explains. “I just tell them
I’m no actor.”
Now, with the barges lashed to a mooring buoy and a
velvety darkness stretching above the river, the Fall River
show, which has taken two days to set up, is ready to go.
Two car batteries will provide the power to ignite the
electric matches. A warning beep announces that the
control panel is armed.
Coluccio and Bradford stay on the barge, sheltered from
sparks by a plywood framework, while the five crew
members scramble onto the tugboat to watch the show
from a couple of hundred yards away. “If anything
happens,” Bradford says, “we want to be the ones who are
on board.”
The flashing blue lights of Coast Guard cutters keep back
hundreds of pleasure boats. Spectators crowd the
shoreline. A few stars glimmer overhead. We’ve arrived at
one of the most delicious phases of any fireworks show,
the moment of intense anticipation that precedes the first
shell.
When they go home from their convention, PGI members
return to a quasilegal world. While self-preservation
pushes most to take reasonable precautions, few are in
complete compliance with the law. Defiance may be part of
the attraction of the hobby; pyros rate high on
insubordination.
The running battle between the promoters and detractors
of fireworks is an old one. As early as 1731 a law in Rhode
Island banned “the unnecessary firing of Guns, Pistols,
squibs, and other Fire-Works.” A phalanx of agencies
oversees the industry today: the Consumer Product Safety
Commission; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms; the U.S. Department of Transportation; and a
crazy quilt of state and local regulators. The result can be
maddening, especially for the smaller firms.
“We had a DOT inspector show up once,” Bradford tells
me. “Because of a printing error by our box company, this
guy was going to fine us two thousand dollars per box if we
had used any.” Professionals also complain about the five-
million-dollar insurance coverage required for all vehicles
carrying fireworks and the voluminous paper-work burden.
At the PGI I talked to a fireworks manufacturer named
Cameron Starr, a tall man from the Dakotas who’s a kind of
industry Billy Graham. In 1993 Starr founded the National
Fireworks Association, to give fireworks people a unified
voice—a formidable challenge in a fiercely competitive
industry that includes hundreds of retailers and display
companies that operate only a few weeks each year. “We
are not against regulations to make things safe,” says
Starr, who in 1947, as an eleven-year-old entrepreneur,
started a roadside fireworks stand. “We’re against the
ridiculous rules and the nitpicking.”
The display industry has an excellent safety record.
Professionals hardly need government reminders to
operate safely; insurance costs already eat up at least 20
percent of most companies’ gross revenues. “People in the
fireworks industry regulate themselves,” Starr points out,
“because they know they will die if they don’t.”
Punctuating the regulatory debate have been the
occasional horrific fireworks accidents. In 1902 William
Randolph Hearst, who had just been elected to Congress
from New York City in a walkaway, arranged for a massive
fireworks display in Madison Square to celebrate the
victory and to build momentum for a presidential bid. The
show was poorly planned. A mortar tipped over; the stack
of ten thousand shells waiting to go up caught fire, and the
ensuing explosion killed seventeen people, injured one
hundred, and blew out doors and windows on the square.
The use of fireworks by private citizens has also been a
frequent target of legislation. During the nineteenth
century serious carnage began to accompany the Fourth
of July rite. At a time when infections, especially tetanus,
could be lethal, injuries from even small fireworks
constituted a serious threat. As early as the 1880 the
press was lambasting “firecracker and torpedo patriotism.”
Public guardians soon began to impose restrictions.
Cleveland passed the first citywide ban on consumer
fireworks in 1908. During the Depression, Michigan took
the lead in enacting statewide restrictions. By the early
1950s, twenty-eight states had adopted legislation banning
all consumer fireworks, with fourteen others enforcing
serious restrictions. A loophole that allowed mischievous
children to order fireworks by mail was closed in 1954.
The federal government outlawed cherry bombs and
ashcans, or M-80s, in 1966. In the mid-1970s the
Consumer Product Safety Commission proposed a ban on
all firecrackers. Partly moved by protests from Chinese-
Americans, who use firecrackers in religious and cultural
celebrations, the commission relented. In a compromise, it
limited firecrackers to a finger-stinging fifty milligrams of
flash powder; a typical cherry bomb contains about thirty
times as much.
Pyro proponents try to shift the blame to negligent parents
who let their children set off fireworks unsupervised. They
also note that many injuries are caused not by legal
fireworks but by bootleg M-80s and other illicit devices.
The pro-fireworks faction has always resisted an
Independence Day marked only by parades and church
bells. Substitute “kindergarten mother-play” for the martial
spirit of rockets and salutes, a popular magazine warned in
1904, and “see how the tea will go overboard.”
The fact is, of course, that danger is an integral part of the
fascination with fireworks. Fire awakens a primordial fear
and enchantment. When the low break of a shell at a
display sends flaming stars sailing toward the crowd, the
cry is not of consternation but of delight; the show takes on
extra brio. And in spite of bureaucratic handwringing, the
popularity of fireworks has burgeoned since the 1976
Bicentennial. The reopening of trade with China a few
years earlier had given the industry a boost with a surge of
innovative and inexpensive fireworks.
Aerial shells form the mainstay of modern fireworks shows.
And the pace of shows has accelerated. What once might
have been a forty-five-minute display is now packed into
twenty relentless minutes. As late as the 1960s spectators
watched leisurely shows that combined shells with
imaginative setpieces: Niagara Falls, a tank battle, a
chariot race. Partly because of safety rules that push
viewers farther back, set pieces are less common now.
Even the fiery American flag at the end is be coming a
rarity.
Fireworks continue to evolve. Shaped shells have gained
popularity as they blast hearts, peace symbols, and even
“happy faces” into the sky. A new effect I saw at the PGI
convention was the “lampare,” or gas bomb, a kind of
antifirework that explodes with a sinister boom into a roiling
black and red fireball. Crowds love it. Electric firing and the
possibilities it opened for fireworks choreography have
made music a standard part of shows today. And fireworks
artists are beginning to use computers to control the firing
of displays, allowing for a more complex synchronization of
effects.
The Disney organization, probably the world’s largest user
of fireworks, is a leading pyrotechnic innovator. The
company developed a system to hurl shells skyward with
compressed air and to ignite them with electronic chips,
further increasing the precision and predictability of the
display. A Disney executive says that the company
considers fireworks “cost-effective,” an odd view of an
activity whose essence has always been joyful waste.
In spite of all the innovation, thousands of old-fashioned
small-scale fireworks shows continue to light up the Fourth.
A typical half-hour display costs from five to ten thousand
dollars. Some are still shot by volunteer firefighters who
buy “shipped shows” from manufacturers and take their
chances. Audiences can still smell the smoke, sense the
slight danger, become caught up in the genuine magic of
the event.
True fire masters share their passion with customers
rather than just sell a product. “We take such pride in our
shows,” Jennie Bradford says. “I know we spoil our
customers, but we just love fireworks. We can’t shoot a
show we’re not happy with.” And the craft continues.
Amateurs still toil in garages, professionals in small
workshops, struggling to perform the ancient alchemy, to
make base matter yield up happiness.
“Who doesn’t like fireworks?” a spectator remarks after a
Legion show. Pyrotechnics offer children and adults delight
in equal measure. Perhaps their enduring appeal is their
luminous perishability, their very evanescence, which
makes them at once so wondrous and so rare. Like
memory itself, one might say. Fireworks consistently evoke
nostalgia. Hardly a person I have talked to about them did
not begin by saying, “When I was a kid … ” and go on to
recite an account of mystery or mischief: shells blossoming
over some long-ago town park or firecrackers punctuating
a summer’s day in a summer without end.
In Fall River, Frank Coluccio flicks a switch. Both barges
erupt. Twenty-three-inch shells fly skyward simultaneously;
a row of mines sprays purple stars 150 feet into the air;
huge purple chrysanthemums burst overhead. The show
has begun.
For the next half-hour shells blossom overhead, reports
boom, serpents streak across the sky like fiery sperm.
Dave Datres’s charcoal crossette shells fill the night with
the spark trails of comets that then burst, flinging out yet
more trails. The choppy water fragments the colors into
jewels; the buildings onshore echo back the wrenching
blasts of the salutes. The spectators scream with delight.
The finale builds and builds, piling a heaving mass of fiery
flowers into a kaleidoscopic bouquet. Golden palm trees
materialize. Legion’s famous spider-web shells paint the
darkness with sparks. Three enormous diadem
chrysanthemums explode and hurl out long sparkling trails.
It all culminates in a cannonade that threatens to bring
down the vault of heaven, a mounting series of
concussions that we hear not with our ears but with our
bodies and even our souls.
And we drive home through the mild summer night,
satisfied.
# # #
(American Heritage, July 1997)
A tugboat pushes us slowly past the waterfront of Fall
River, Massachusetts. Lined up on the steel decks of two
barges are twelve hundred mortars packed with explosive
charges. Overhead, evening sunlight drapes white
mountains of summer clouds.
“I get a few knots in my stomach about now,” says Frank
M. Coluccio, an easygoing mustached man of fifty who is
president of Legion Fireworks. He is sorting out the wires
that will connect his guns to an electric control panel. The
last-minute jitters are understandable. In an hour Coluccio
and his partner, Jennie Bradford, will take the stage in
front of tens of thousands of eager spectators for one of
the company’s biggest shows of the season. While they
mount their fireworks extravaganza to cap an annual city
celebration, the two will be stationed in the midst of a storm
of exploding gunpowder potent enough to heave shells the
size of a basketball a thousand feet into the air. It gives,
Coluccio says, “an adrenaline rush.”
Legion carries on a venerable craft tradition that has
permeated pyrotechnics since it arrived in Italy from China
five hundred years ago. Using methods that have changed
little over centuries and formulas passed down by word of
mouth, Coluccio and his people hand-fashion many of their
shells in small workshops. The well-known pyrotechnic
clans—the Gruccis of Long Island or the Zambellis of New
Castle, Pennsylvania—grab the glamour shows. But it’s the
smaller firms that decorate the Fourth of July in towns
across the country and provide the fiery, satisfying climax
to firefighters’ carnivals, ethnic fairs, and municipal
celebrations.
Man is the only animal that is afraid of the dark and the
only one that has mastered fire. Pyrotechnics is the art of
artificial fire, fire that is independent of the diluted oxygen
in the air. Fireworks mixtures include an oxidizer, a material
that gives up oxygen when heated. This chemical, typically
potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, must be purified, ground to
a powder, and mixed with equally pulverized fuel. The
resulting composition burns with astonishing rapidity and
vigor.
We can trace the roots of pyrotechnics to medieval China,
where alchemists experimented with purified chemicals in
search of an elixir of life. Perhaps having observed how
saltpeter lent energy to fire, around A.D. 850 they tried
combining the mineral with charcoal and sulfur. The result
proved magical. The mixture, which in the West came to be
known as gunpowder, was one of the discoveries,
according to the philosopher Francis Bacon, that
revolutionized the world.
Yet the invention did not révolutionize Chinese society.
The idea that the Chinese used gunpowder only for
celebration goes too far; in fact they invented flame-
throwing fire lances and incendiary war rockets early on.
But without a true gun the Chinese did not fundamentally
alter their method of making war. By the twelfth century
they were using huo yao, “fire drug,” for pleasurable
diversions.
When gunpowder reached Europe in the thirteenth
century, it inspired the cannon, which spelled the end of
aristocratic feudalism and shaped the modern nation-state.
At the same time, the awakening of knowledge that
followed the Dark Ages nurtured the birth of pyrotechnics,
which by the 1400s had begun to be incorporated into
pageants and celebrations across Europe, a flickering of
controlled fire to welcome the Renaissance.
At fall river, as we chug out to take our position before the
city’s riverside park, we pass the USS Massachusetts, now
part of a naval museum. The sight of the battleship’s
massive sixteen-inch guns invokes the connection between
pyrotechnics and warfare. Up until the eighteenth century,
armies commonly employed civilian fire masters to handle
their artillery. Their profession was closely associated with
alchemy, danger, and dark secrets. They supervised
cannon in combat and fired salutes to celebrate victories.
They also began to mount elaborate fireworks displays for
public festivities.
Early pyrotechnicians developed three basic gunpowder
tools that still provide most of the effects we see today.
First they contained the powder in a closed case. Light the
case with a fuse, and the sudden burning creates gas that
explodes the container. Thus the firecracker, the larger
“salute,” or the bursting shells of an aerial display.
When they packed powder into a tube closed at one end,
fire masters observed, hot gases, flame, and sparks
rushed out the other. The result was a fountain of fire.
Some of the earliest pyrotechnics, in fifteenth-century
Florence and Siena, involved large plaster figures that
spewed fire from their eyes and mouths. When the tube
was reversed, the expanding gas gave it forward
momentum, turning it into a rocket.
Finally, fire masters learned to ram a projectile down on
top of the powder in those same closed-end pipes. Tonight
that tool, the gun, in the form of hundreds of cardboard,
plastic, and steel mortars, will hurl aloft the thousands of
aerial fireworks we’ll be seeing.
A pyrotechnician’s work begins months before the summer
season. During the winter Frank Coluccio applies himself
to the exacting and repetitive work of constructing shells,
the innocuous-looking “bombs” that yield the color, sound,
and glitter of a display. Purchased shells can be more
economical, but Coluccio prefers to use traditional custom-
built ones in his shows.
“Five years ago we made 80 percent of our shells,”
explains Legion’s vice president, Jennie Bradford, a
compact and energetic woman of thirty-six. “Now, because
fireworks from Asia have gotten so cheap, probably 60
percent of our shows consist of highquality shells that we
purchase, mostly from China.”
The Legion plant is tucked unobtrusively into a seventeen-
acre site near the Hudson River, seventy miles north of
New York City. The work goes on in thirty-three small and
widely spaced buildings, which include storage magazines,
drying rooms, and workshops. Air-powered or hydraulic
presses are used for a few operations, but much of the
construction of fireworks is still carried out by hand. No
better method has been found.
Bradford and Coluccio are Legion’s only full-time
employees; they hire a cadre of experienced “shooters” to
help fire shows during the summer. They also buy shells
from master shell builders like David Datres, a fifty-two-
year-old railroad-communications cable splicer who has
long pursued pyrotechnics as a sideline.
One of Datres’s specialties is the charcoal “crossette,” or
splitting comet shell. He shows me how he packs comets,
small cylinders of charcoal-rich composition, into the
cardboard cylinder that will carry them aloft. Each comet
contains a tiny firecracker that will blow it apart, multiplying
the effect of golden trails of sparks. “This is really a labor
of love,” he says. “I make them the way the old Italians
used to.” The technology for shells of this type can be
traced back into the sixteenth century.
Timing is everything in fireworks. With each shell he
makes, Datres carefully measures and arranges the
ingredients to produce a calculated pattern in the sky. He
wraps the whole shell in glued paper and string, securing it
against the force of the explosion that will send it flying. “I
once put together a shell for a competition,” he says, ›that
took me sixty hours to construct. It went off in twelve
seconds.”
Mixing the volatile flash powder that gives salutes their
bang is the most dangerous task in any fireworks firm. At
Legion it’s carried out on humid days in the spring and fall
to minimize the threat from static electricity. “We realize the
danger,” Coluccio says. “That’s why we’re conscious of
safety every minute we’re working.”
In their beginnings fireworks were not the center of a
spectacle. They served as theatrical effects during
pageants involving dragons, giants, and enchanted
islands. The Italians, who first developed fireworks in
Europe and have maintained an affinity for the art ever
since, built elaborate facades—called temples or
machines— whose porticoes and columns served as
backdrops for the pyrotechnic fountains, rockets, and
Roman candles that illuminated saints’ days or other
religious festivals.
The eighteenth century ushered in the golden age of
classical fireworks. In the early 1700s the Ruggieri
brothers, whose name would become synonymous with the
craft, moved from their native Bologna to France and
became fire masters to the court of Louis XV, mounting
increasingly opulent spectacles at Versailles. During his
sojourn in Paris, Thomas Jefferson saw displays mounted
by the Ruggieris.
Fireworks arrived in America as early as 1608, when Capt.
John Smith “fired a few rockets” to impress the natives
during the difficult days of the Jamestown colony. At the
time of the Revolution John Adams, in a letter to his wife,
predicted that the signing of the Declaration of
Independence would be celebrated with “bonfires and
illuminations from this time forward forevermore.” While
“illuminations” is sometimes taken to mean fireworks, it’s
more likely that he was referring to the custom, before
streetlights were common, of illuminating buildings and
public squares with candles in windows and on walls. But
pyrotechnics soon did become a Fourth of July institution.
Skyrockets filled the air over Newport in 1781, and Boston
put on its first full-scale Independence Day fireworks
display in 1805.
By the end of the 1700s most of the effects we see today
were in common use. In the air, shells, known in those
days as balloons, burst into patterns of fire, sparks, and
darting “fisgigs.” Many types of rockets soared skyward,
including the caduceus, which left behind a spiral trail. On
the ground, fire masters set off fountains, suns, and trees
of flame. Spectators also witnessed rockets that leaped in
and out of the water like dolphins and wheels that
metamorphosed through fifteen patterns. An early treatise
gives directions for producing “silver and gold raine” by
filling thousands of goose quills with powder and packing
them into the head of a rocket.
What classical fireworks lacked was color. Granulated
charcoal left a trail of lingering orange sparks. Iron filings
glowed white. Chemical additions like amber could tint
flames with pastels, but the deep and varied colors that we
enjoy today were unknown.
During much of the early history of fireworks,
pyrotechnicians relied on skyrockets as a mainstay of their
shows. Rockets carry their fuel with them, leaving a brilliant
trail of sparks as they soar into the sky. When the fuel is
spent, the rocket’s “garniture” explodes, setting off reports
and a spray of stars or serpents. But skyrockets are not
often used in commercial shows today. They carry a
smaller payload than shells shot from a gun, and their
trajectory is less predictable. Moreover, they require the
weight of long wooden shafts to keep on course, and these
sticks present a danger as they fall.
Legion still fires smaller shows by hand, in the manner of
traditional fuochisti. I watched Frank Coluccio set off a
display in the little town of Coxsackie, on the edge of the
Hudson River. Some of the shells were loaded into mortars
in advance, including those for the finale, which filled a
long row of guns, the fuses chaining one shell to the next.
The rest were laid out under a fireproof tarp, ready to be
dropped singly into mortars.
Coluccio extracts one of the shells and lowers it by its fuse
down a steel tube about three and a half feet long. As he
lets it go, he touches the fuse to a flare. The fire races
down to a measured sack of gunpowder at the bottom of
the shell. This lift charge explodes with a hollow “thwomp!”
During the four seconds the shell takes to reach a height
of six hundred feet, a time fuse burns down, finally
reaching the burst charge inside. The shell explodes,
flinging stars outward in a spherical pattern. The stars are
nuggets of chemicals that burn with a colored flame,
sometimes changing hues before they die out.
The variety of rich colors that we know today began to
appear in the 1830s. Descendants of the Ruggieri
brothers were among the first to make stars using
potassium chlorate, which causes metal salts to glow with
distinctive hues. Salts of copper yield blue, those of
strontium red, barium green, and so on. Fire workers also
used newly refined metals to brighten their effects,
beginning with magnesium in the 1860s. By the end of the
century powdered aluminum was offering an inexpensive
brilliance. “Its advent opened a new era of the art,” wrote
the English pyrotechnician Alan St. Hill Brock.
Hand-firing a show has built-in dangers. Fuses burn
quickly, leaving the shooter little time to get away from the
mortar before the formidable explosion that lifts the shell.
Sometimes shells blow up before reaching their intended
height, a “low break” that sprays the ground with burning
stars. Shooters have been killed when a spark touched off
a shell they were preparing to drop into a mortar.
At Coxsackie, before half the shells have been fired, drops
of rain begin to splatter on the parking lot that separates
the spectators from the shooting area. In minutes it’s
pouring. The wet-dust smell of a summer shower mixes
with the tang of gunpowder. The show goes on. By the end
a crowd of soaked spectators cheers an ear-shattering
finale that challenges the storm itself.
Rain has always been a worry for fireworks artists. On the
Fourth of July in 1876 a massive display was slated for
Fairmont Park in Philadelphia to celebrate the nation’s
centennial. A huge crowd gathered in the sultry evening.
As darkness fell, a thunder-storm boiled over. The
pyrotechnicians knew they had no choice. According to a
contemporary account, “The whole range of fireworks,
including temples, gigantic portraits of Washington,
mounds, volcanoes, stars, patriotic mottoes, pyramids, and
other structures, all on a scale never before seen in
America, must be discharged at once or never discharged
at all.” The audience was “stilled and entranced” by the
short but stupendous spectacle.
Throughout the nineteenth century the re-enactment of
battles on both land and sea remained a pyrotechnic
staple, but pyrotechnicians also began to mount the first of
what might be called modern shows: fireworks with no
scenery whatever. There also arose a new fashion for set
pieces. These were wooden and bamboo frames covered
with pyrotechnic lances that created pictures in fire. The
Brock family of England were specialists in set pieces, and
during the 1880s visiting potentates such as the king of
the Maoris or the Shah of Persia marveled to see their own
portraits unfurled eighty feet high in colored fire. An
unfortunate malfunction on a Brock set piece once caused
the eye of Queen Victoria to wink lewdly at the astonished
crowd.
In America the English pyrotechnician Henry J. Pain
catered to a taste for historical vignettes using fireworks.
He operated an amphitheater at Brooklyn’s Manhattan
Beach, near Coney Island, for many years. Patrons
watched actors scurry around in togas as Mount Vesuvius
erupted, sending fire streaming onto Pompeii. In 1882 the
British fleet shelled the Egyptian port of Alexandria; a year
later Pain’s customers could view this “magnificent naval
and military spectacle” in a fiery re-enactment involving
350 players.
When he was five years old, Legion’s president, Frank
Coluccio, set a fire under a porch. Later he blew up a toilet
in a Catholic school and fired cherry bombs from a
slingshot. An early fascination with fire and explosions is
typical of many pyrotechnicians I’ve met.
Fireworks have also helped inspire many budding
scientists. “Fired cannon, pop, and firecrackers all day. In
the evening had five skyrockets,” reads a Fourth of July
entry in the diary of the fifteen-year-old Robert Goddard,
whose early work in rocketry put America on its path to the
moon.
Coluccio followed his father into the masonry trade and for
years satisfied his taste for gunpowder through
membership in a cannon club. While on a bricklaying job in
1975 he heard Legion workers testing salutes, tracked
down the company, and soon became a part-time shooter.
Legion had been founded in 1920 by Joseph Chiarella,
who followed a tradition of immigrants bringing
pyrotechnics to this country from Italy. He was noted for his
elaborate set pieces, such as “The Battle of Bunker Hill,”
“Flight of a Zeppelin,” and a topical “Spirits of 1933”—a
huge bottle outlined in fire to honor the repeal of
Prohibition.
“Grandpa” Chiarella died in an explosion at the Legion
plant in 1970. Coluccio began running the business eleven
years later. He continues to use formulas and methods
handed down from the company’s founder. He also has
followed fireworks tradition by involving his own family in
the business: His father, brothers, sister, and in-laws all
help out firing shows, especially during the busy Fourth of
July season.
Both Coluccio and his partner have the great fortune to
have merged vocation and avocation. “I was always
involved in the arts,” Jennie Bradford explains. “I drew
pictures, I worked in the graphic arts. But when I found
fireworks, I was home.” As the designer of Legion’s shows,
Bradford selects effects that will enhance one another and
surprise the audience. She works in multiple dimensions of
space and time and, as a show approaches, she
completes a detailed second-by-second script. For
electrically fired shows, she sometimes makes an
audiotape to cue the shooter and to help coordinate the
timing of the firing with any accompanying music.
When I first visited the Legion plant, Bradford, whose
enthusiasm about everything connected with fireworks is
irresistible, told me, “You have to go to the PGI. That’s
where you’ll meet the real pyros.”
The Pyrotechnic Guild International is an organization of
fireworks enthusiasts, many of them amateurs. They
maintain a deep sense of fireworks tradition; their symbol
is the sixteenth-century “Green Man,” who wore a foliage
outfit, carried a sparking torch, and assisted the fire
master in mounting displays.
The pyro clan gets together once a year to share
information, show off their latest fire-art creations, and
enjoy great fireworks. Freely exchanging formulas,
methods, and safety tips, PGI members have helped break
down the long tradition of secrecy surrounding
pyrotechnics. Last year their black-powder orgy drew more
than twenty-two hundred members and their families to
Muskegon, Michigan, a quiet Rust Belt town optimistically
dubbed the Riviera of the Midwest. One of this band of
amiable eccentrics was Jack Fielder, a machinist from the
Detroit area.
“To some people,” he says, “amateur pyrotechnician
sounds a little like amateur neurosurgeon.” Fielder laughs
through a thick beard and goes on to muse that if he
couldn’t continue making fireworks, he would take up
serious cooking, another pursuit that involves recipes and
mysterious transformations. In fact, the composition for
stars is rolled out in sheets like cookies, cut, and dusted
with gunpowder before being dried. Fielder even makes
his own charcoal, an ingredient that yields lush golden
sparks.
Amateur pyros have a long tradition. With the coming of
the Enlightenment, hobbyists began to experiment with
science. Pyrotechnics, Alan St. Hill Brock writes in his
History of Fireworks, “seemed to offer to the chemist a
means whereby he could demonstrate, publicly and
visually, his scientific proficiency.” Amateurs still play an
important role. “They’re a kind of informal research and
development arm of the industry,” Jennie Bradford says.
“They have the time to experiment with new effects and to
invent new varieties of shells.”
During the day, the convention spins around a range of
technical seminars and meetings about such topics as
“beginner fountain making,” “multibreak shell construction,”
and “the use of binary flash powders in proximate
pyrotechnics.” Late in the afternoon a fireworks bazaar
opens in a defunct cold-storage warehouse. Outside, a
rocket soars over the water with the sound of a skidding
tractor-trailer; a blast of flash powder sets off a car alarm a
quarter of a mile away. The air soon fills with the aroma of
brimstone. “Once you smell the smoke,” a pyro adage
holds, “you’ll never again be free.”
When darkness arrives, the PGI conventioneers, joined by
thousands of lawn-chair-toting Muskegonites, move to a
waterfront park for a no-holds-barred show. Members
compete in thirty-one categories of homemade
pyrotechnics, ranging from small rockets to elaborate
girandoles, which spin like infernal merry-go-rounds and
then go careering up into the zodiac. Michelangelo is said
to have constructed one of these devices more than four
hundred years ago.
I begin to learn some of the nuances of fireworks.
Spherical Chinese and Japanese shells burst into round
patterns of color resembling, and named for, flowers—
chrysanthemums and peonies. Italian or “salami” shells, so
called because of their cylindrical shape, usually achieve
their effects by means of multiple timed explosions, each
one spilling out colored stars, serpents, whistles, or other
effects. A spiderweb sprays charcoal streamers. Willows
leave trails of sparks weeping in the sky. “A twelve-inch
double-petal peony, outer petal blue to red mag, inner
petal pearl to silver flash, and a red mag pistil,” the
announcer says, introducing a sky-filling explosion.
What’s the point of it all? The essence of the convention is
that there is no point. Fireworks are about celebration and
beauty and childish delight, pure and simple. “People tell
me to act my age,” a graying pyro explains. “I just tell them
I’m no actor.”
Now, with the barges lashed to a mooring buoy and a
velvety darkness stretching above the river, the Fall River
show, which has taken two days to set up, is ready to go.
Two car batteries will provide the power to ignite the
electric matches. A warning beep announces that the
control panel is armed.
Coluccio and Bradford stay on the barge, sheltered from
sparks by a plywood framework, while the five crew
members scramble onto the tugboat to watch the show
from a couple of hundred yards away. “If anything
happens,” Bradford says, “we want to be the ones who are
on board.”
The flashing blue lights of Coast Guard cutters keep back
hundreds of pleasure boats. Spectators crowd the
shoreline. A few stars glimmer overhead. We’ve arrived at
one of the most delicious phases of any fireworks show,
the moment of intense anticipation that precedes the first
shell.
When they go home from their convention, PGI members
return to a quasilegal world. While self-preservation
pushes most to take reasonable precautions, few are in
complete compliance with the law. Defiance may be part of
the attraction of the hobby; pyros rate high on
insubordination.
The running battle between the promoters and detractors
of fireworks is an old one. As early as 1731 a law in Rhode
Island banned “the unnecessary firing of Guns, Pistols,
squibs, and other Fire-Works.” A phalanx of agencies
oversees the industry today: the Consumer Product Safety
Commission; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms; the U.S. Department of Transportation; and a
crazy quilt of state and local regulators. The result can be
maddening, especially for the smaller firms.
“We had a DOT inspector show up once,” Bradford tells
me. “Because of a printing error by our box company, this
guy was going to fine us two thousand dollars per box if we
had used any.” Professionals also complain about the five-
million-dollar insurance coverage required for all vehicles
carrying fireworks and the voluminous paper-work burden.
At the PGI I talked to a fireworks manufacturer named
Cameron Starr, a tall man from the Dakotas who’s a kind of
industry Billy Graham. In 1993 Starr founded the National
Fireworks Association, to give fireworks people a unified
voice—a formidable challenge in a fiercely competitive
industry that includes hundreds of retailers and display
companies that operate only a few weeks each year. “We
are not against regulations to make things safe,” says
Starr, who in 1947, as an eleven-year-old entrepreneur,
started a roadside fireworks stand. “We’re against the
ridiculous rules and the nitpicking.”
The display industry has an excellent safety record.
Professionals hardly need government reminders to
operate safely; insurance costs already eat up at least 20
percent of most companies’ gross revenues. “People in the
fireworks industry regulate themselves,” Starr points out,
“because they know they will die if they don’t.”
Punctuating the regulatory debate have been the
occasional horrific fireworks accidents. In 1902 William
Randolph Hearst, who had just been elected to Congress
from New York City in a walkaway, arranged for a massive
fireworks display in Madison Square to celebrate the
victory and to build momentum for a presidential bid. The
show was poorly planned. A mortar tipped over; the stack
of ten thousand shells waiting to go up caught fire, and the
ensuing explosion killed seventeen people, injured one
hundred, and blew out doors and windows on the square.
The use of fireworks by private citizens has also been a
frequent target of legislation. During the nineteenth
century serious carnage began to accompany the Fourth
of July rite. At a time when infections, especially tetanus,
could be lethal, injuries from even small fireworks
constituted a serious threat. As early as the 1880 the
press was lambasting “firecracker and torpedo patriotism.”
Public guardians soon began to impose restrictions.
Cleveland passed the first citywide ban on consumer
fireworks in 1908. During the Depression, Michigan took
the lead in enacting statewide restrictions. By the early
1950s, twenty-eight states had adopted legislation banning
all consumer fireworks, with fourteen others enforcing
serious restrictions. A loophole that allowed mischievous
children to order fireworks by mail was closed in 1954.
The federal government outlawed cherry bombs and
ashcans, or M-80s, in 1966. In the mid-1970s the
Consumer Product Safety Commission proposed a ban on
all firecrackers. Partly moved by protests from Chinese-
Americans, who use firecrackers in religious and cultural
celebrations, the commission relented. In a compromise, it
limited firecrackers to a finger-stinging fifty milligrams of
flash powder; a typical cherry bomb contains about thirty
times as much.
Pyro proponents try to shift the blame to negligent parents
who let their children set off fireworks unsupervised. They
also note that many injuries are caused not by legal
fireworks but by bootleg M-80s and other illicit devices.
The pro-fireworks faction has always resisted an
Independence Day marked only by parades and church
bells. Substitute “kindergarten mother-play” for the martial
spirit of rockets and salutes, a popular magazine warned in
1904, and “see how the tea will go overboard.”
The fact is, of course, that danger is an integral part of the
fascination with fireworks. Fire awakens a primordial fear
and enchantment. When the low break of a shell at a
display sends flaming stars sailing toward the crowd, the
cry is not of consternation but of delight; the show takes on
extra brio. And in spite of bureaucratic handwringing, the
popularity of fireworks has burgeoned since the 1976
Bicentennial. The reopening of trade with China a few
years earlier had given the industry a boost with a surge of
innovative and inexpensive fireworks.
Aerial shells form the mainstay of modern fireworks shows.
And the pace of shows has accelerated. What once might
have been a forty-five-minute display is now packed into
twenty relentless minutes. As late as the 1960s spectators
watched leisurely shows that combined shells with
imaginative setpieces: Niagara Falls, a tank battle, a
chariot race. Partly because of safety rules that push
viewers farther back, set pieces are less common now.
Even the fiery American flag at the end is be coming a
rarity.
Fireworks continue to evolve. Shaped shells have gained
popularity as they blast hearts, peace symbols, and even
“happy faces” into the sky. A new effect I saw at the PGI
convention was the “lampare,” or gas bomb, a kind of
antifirework that explodes with a sinister boom into a roiling
black and red fireball. Crowds love it. Electric firing and the
possibilities it opened for fireworks choreography have
made music a standard part of shows today. And fireworks
artists are beginning to use computers to control the firing
of displays, allowing for a more complex synchronization of
effects.
The Disney organization, probably the world’s largest user
of fireworks, is a leading pyrotechnic innovator. The
company developed a system to hurl shells skyward with
compressed air and to ignite them with electronic chips,
further increasing the precision and predictability of the
display. A Disney executive says that the company
considers fireworks “cost-effective,” an odd view of an
activity whose essence has always been joyful waste.
In spite of all the innovation, thousands of old-fashioned
small-scale fireworks shows continue to light up the Fourth.
A typical half-hour display costs from five to ten thousand
dollars. Some are still shot by volunteer firefighters who
buy “shipped shows” from manufacturers and take their
chances. Audiences can still smell the smoke, sense the
slight danger, become caught up in the genuine magic of
the event.
True fire masters share their passion with customers
rather than just sell a product. “We take such pride in our
shows,” Jennie Bradford says. “I know we spoil our
customers, but we just love fireworks. We can’t shoot a
show we’re not happy with.” And the craft continues.
Amateurs still toil in garages, professionals in small
workshops, struggling to perform the ancient alchemy, to
make base matter yield up happiness.
“Who doesn’t like fireworks?” a spectator remarks after a
Legion show. Pyrotechnics offer children and adults delight
in equal measure. Perhaps their enduring appeal is their
luminous perishability, their very evanescence, which
makes them at once so wondrous and so rare. Like
memory itself, one might say. Fireworks consistently evoke
nostalgia. Hardly a person I have talked to about them did
not begin by saying, “When I was a kid … ” and go on to
recite an account of mystery or mischief: shells blossoming
over some long-ago town park or firecrackers punctuating
a summer’s day in a summer without end.
In Fall River, Frank Coluccio flicks a switch. Both barges
erupt. Twenty-three-inch shells fly skyward simultaneously;
a row of mines sprays purple stars 150 feet into the air;
huge purple chrysanthemums burst overhead. The show
has begun.
For the next half-hour shells blossom overhead, reports
boom, serpents streak across the sky like fiery sperm.
Dave Datres’s charcoal crossette shells fill the night with
the spark trails of comets that then burst, flinging out yet
more trails. The choppy water fragments the colors into
jewels; the buildings onshore echo back the wrenching
blasts of the salutes. The spectators scream with delight.
The finale builds and builds, piling a heaving mass of fiery
flowers into a kaleidoscopic bouquet. Golden palm trees
materialize. Legion’s famous spider-web shells paint the
darkness with sparks. Three enormous diadem
chrysanthemums explode and hurl out long sparkling trails.
It all culminates in a cannonade that threatens to bring
down the vault of heaven, a mounting series of
concussions that we hear not with our ears but with our
bodies and even our souls.
And we drive home through the mild summer night,
satisfied.
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