Fireworks are essential to many of today’s celebrations – from national holidays and sporting events to musical concerts and the gatherings held on Bonfire Night (5 November) in Britain each year. Once upon a time, though, fireworks were serious scientific business. Designing the rocket and preparing the propellant and coloured fire required, after all, a detailed knowledge of chemistry and physics (see “Whizz-bang science” by Pierre Thebault, December 2018). Mounting effective firework displays required other skills too, including architecture, artillery, ballistics and even poetry.

Fireworks, it turns out, also played a critical role in the complex and evolving relations between science, the public and the state. That, at least, is the intriguing argument in a book by Simon Werrett, a science historian at University College London, entitled Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (University of Chicago Press 2010). Previous histories of fireworks had ignored this connection. As Werrett put it, the true history of fireworks has “gone up in smoke”. His book brings it back.

Up in smoke

Fireworks originated in China, where by the 12th century they were routinely used in public spectacles. Werrett, though, focuses on the European story, which started in around the 14th century, when gunners began to develop a new genre of spectacle – “artificial fireworks” – for a general audience. The spectacles were called “artificial” because they were specially crafted for non-military purposes, and “fireworks” because they used gunpowder to produce fiery effects. The people who made the fireworks, meanwhile, were known as “artificers” and worked in spaces called “laboratories” (a name also used by alchemists) well before the modern scientific use of the term.

The first grand firework display over the Thames took place in 1613. Indeed, in his novel New Atlantis, published in 1620, one of the crucial tasks that the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon assigned the scientists in his utopian world was to produce fireworks. Fireworks were on the way to becoming an important undertaking of nations, not so much because they demonstrated knowledge of military capital such as explosives and rockets, but because they symoblized power and authority.

“In a world without electric light,” Werrett writes, “fire was a powerful medium, a source of light and heat whose divine and magical connotations were strong”. Indeed, the ability to control, tame and exploit fire in spectacular and artistic displays seemed to demonstrate an ability to bring the divine and celestial down to Earth and under human control.

The ability to control, tame and exploit fire in spectacular and artistic displays seemed to demonstrate an ability to bring the divine and celestial down to Earth and under human control

By the end of the 17th century, fireworks had become an important element in public displays and extravaganzas in several European states. Monarchs gave resources to those who could manufacture them and stage their displays, and supported the institutions where they worked. Fireworks makers were encouraged to invent new and more dramatic effects, fostering a culture of innovation. Power and prestige came to those who could successfully innovate.

One of Werrett’s unusual stories involves the quest to create green fireworks. While artificers could produce most colours, green was difficult and in the early 18th century the ability to produce it became the subject of quests at Imperial courts – rather like the modern hunt for blue light-emitting diodes. Scientists at the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences eventually succeeded, and for a time were able to keep their knowledge a trade secret. The Russians, typically, attributed the discovery of green fireworks to Peter the Great himself. But the key breakthrough occurred at the St Petersburg Academy, when its scientists began treating fireworks as based on a chemical rather than a mechanical process.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Werrett writes, Britain, France, Italy, Russia and other nations sought to outdo each other in the grandeur and scale of the fireworks displays they staged, with the manufacture of fireworks serving to promote science. How precisely this occurred depended on local conditions. At the time of the restoration of the monarchy in England, for instance, fireworks were sometimes associated with Catholic plotting and religious zeal, provoking a counter-reaction – but English philosophers and natural scientists also debated the significance of fireworks for understanding nature. In Russia fireworks appealed chiefly to the Imperial Court’s thirst for spectacle, which fostered its support for the country’s first generation of Western-style scientists.

In Russia fireworks appealed chiefly to the Imperial Court’s thirst for spectacle, which fostered its support for the country’s first generation of Western-style scientists

“With no scientific tradition in Russia,” Werrett writes, “academicians found that experimental lectures failed to interest the Russian nobility, whose support was critical to the survival of the academy. Simultaneously, academicians learned that the design or ‘invention’ of allegorical fireworks could improve their fortunes as spectacles appealing to the Russian court.” Werrett’s book opens, for instance, with a description of a firework display intended to symbolize the incremental but inexorable growth of the power and prosperity of the Russian state.

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Whizz-bang science

In the 1750s, seeking to exploit competition amongst their academicians, the St Petersburg Academy commissioned two of its prominent scientists – Mikhail Lomonosov and Jacob Stählin – to work separately on fireworks displays, with the intention of choosing whoever was better. Lomonosov was offended when Stählin’s was chosen, and announced that he was giving up firework-making. Fireworks were not only an important activity of the young academy, but also elevated its position and prestige, as well as of Russian science itself.

The critical point

The lesson I draw from Werrett’s book is that producing fireworks was not a hobby or side occupation that scientists tacked on to their “real” work. Scientists who produced fireworks were simply carrying on the practice of science, not trying to promote themselves or curry favour. A modern-day equivalent would be researchers consulting on governmental projects. Such activity is not only an integral part of the work of science, but it also bolsters the confidence of legislators and the public in science and their awareness of its value.

Science today needs more fireworks.