Notifiblog: How Stuff Works Thursday! (On Tuesday!) (Why Not, Eh!)

I'm taking this Friday off, so today is, in effect, my Thursday. So, I'm going to treat it like a Thursday all the way! This week: How Fireworks Work!
According to the www.howstuffworks.com article referenced for this posting, aerial fireworks represent two types of pyrotechnic activity:

"Firecrackers have been around for hundreds of years. They consist of either black powder (also known as gunpowder) or flash powder in a tight paper tube with a fuse to light the powder. Black powder, discussed briefly in How Rocket Engines Work, contains charcoal, sulfur and potassium nitrate. A composition used in a firecracker might have aluminum instead of or in addition to charcoal in order to brighten the explosion.

"Sparklers are very different from firecrackers. A sparkler burns over a long period of time (up to a minute) and produces extremely bright and showery light. Sparklers are often referred to as "snowball sparklers" because of the ball of sparks that surrounds the burning portion of the sparkler. If you look at Patent #3,862,865: Sparkler composition, you can see that a sparkler consists of several different compounds:

• A fuel
• An oxidizer
• Iron or steel powder
• A binder

"An aerial firework is normally formed as a shell that consists of four parts:

• Container - Usually pasted paper and string formed into a cylinder
• Stars - Spheres, cubes or cylinders of a sparkler-like composition
• Bursting charge - Firecracker-like charge at the center of the shell
• Fuse - Provides a time delay so the shell explodes at the right altitude"

­"T­he pattern that an aerial shell paints in the sky depends on the arrangement of star pellets inside the shell. For example, if the pellets are equally spaced in a circle, with black powder inside the circle, you will see an aerial display of smaller star explosions equally spaced in a circle. To create a specific figure in the sky, you create an outline of the figure in star pellets, surround them as a group with a layer of break charge to separate them simultaneously from the rest of the contents of the shell, and place explosive charges inside those pellets to blow them outward into a large figure."

Couldn't have said it better myself. There is more to the article, of course. There is a lot to appreciate about the work that goes into creating an aerial fireworks show. Way to go Chinese people who invented gunpowder, eh!

Bonus: The Japanese word for fireworks is hanabi (hana: flower + hi [or bi for a pleasant sound]: fire). Hanabiko (花火子) is the full name of the world-famous signing gorilla we call Koko--whose birthday is right on July 4th.