2007sep05. Excerpts from the book Fireworks: A History and Celebration by George Plimpton (1984).
Apparently, [Charles V] simply loved noise. He dined in the blare of military bands. Once, when Catherine, his consort, had secretly built a country home for him fifteen miles from St. Petersburg, she arranged that when she raised her glass to toast the master of the new house, at the exact second the glass touched his lips, eleven cannons hidden in the garden would suddenly boom out just beyond the french windows. She knew he would like that. (pg 29)
The Ruggieris have been in France for centuries. Originally from Bologna, the family settled itself in Monteux. The patriarch of the family, Claude-Fortune Ruggieri, was an early experimenter with rockets. In Paris he staged a number of displays in which mice and rats were sent aloft by rockets and came down under little parachute canopies. [ ... ] Ruggieri even had plans to send up a small boy attached to a rocket cluster; he too was to be equipped with a parachute, Ruggieri was careful to point out to the authorities, but the French police intervened and this particular experiment was never carried out. (pg 34)
According to Vasari’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci, the artist created a great lion which was designed to walk a few steps, roar, and then out of its chest a display of flowers and birds would burst – all of this done largely with the use of various types of fireworks. (pg 48)
[ ... ] I have always thought that would be a wonderful position to retire to -- thinking up names for Oriental fireworks shells. You’d become a specialist and travel around to different fireworks factories in China; at night you’d sit in a bamboo chair in the middle of a field with a notebook on your knee and they’d send up these great chrysanthemums for you to name. You’d say, “I’m not inspired. Send up another one just like the last.” So they’d do that, and after some pondering you’d write down “The Great Frog Leaps Off the Lily Pad and Frightens Ten Silver Minnows” or “The Blue Ox Comes Down the Turnpike.” (pg 49)
Well, I was thinking especially of Hollywood directors, who have on occasion used fireworks to illustrate the consummation of a love affair. Do you remember Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, their union symbolized by a great crash of fireworks outside their balcony overlooking the harbor of Monte Carlo? The only thing wrong with that scenario, it has always seemed to me, is that any normal couple would be out on the balcony enjoying the fireworks, and not inside tumbling around on a bed. (pg 50)
The complex is typical of the fireworks compounds I have seen. It consists of twenty-five separate workshops. For safety’s sake the workshops stand apart from each other by thirty yards or so, each brightly painted in white with red trimming. At the side of every entrance is a copper plate set in the outside wall which everyone who enters the building must touch in order to ground themselves and thus eliminate the chance that a spark might jump from one’s person to the worktables. The procedure becomes an ingrained habit. In winter, of course, the danger of static electricity increases sharply. Apparently, women tend to carry more electricity than men. They are never allowed to brush or comb their hair on the job. The rules at the Grucci compound are that no one can ever wear silk underwear. (pg 60)
An extraordinary incident took place on the occasion of [the fireworks display celebrating the self-coronation of Napoleon (1804)]. The show ended with the ascent of a vast hydrogen balloon. Unmanned (un ballon perdu), it was built by Jacques Garnerin and carried a huge golden crown hung with three thousand colored lights. A freak storm carried the balloon all the way to Rome by the morning of the second day, where it finally came to earth, the crown breaking up against the ruins of Nero’s tomb – of all places – and what was left tumbled into Lake Bracciano. The newly-crowned Emperor, a very suspicious man, and short-tempered as well, became extremely upset by the incident – to the point of firing the balloon maker, Jacques Garnerin, and thereafter forbidding all mention of this odd occurrence. (pg 81)
I did quite a lot of research to see if any mortar (much less the firework it was about to fire) could equal ours. I even checked out a large mortar I had read about as a child in Philip Gosse’s History of Piracy. Large enough in the mouth to contain a man, it indeed had one in there; the illustration in the book showed a man stuffed in up to his shoulders. He was (as one read with eyes popping) the French consul in Algiers who in the Pirate Wars of 1830 was captured by the pirates and, in an act of horrid derision, fired at the French fleet. For years the mortar graced the walls of Algiers (it is now in the Musée de la Marine in Paris) and in honor of the man who was fired out of it was named as only the French would have the flare to do: La Consuliére. (pg 84)
Neither of the Grucci brothers thought much of having chemists around a fireworks compound. “They’re more hazardous to work with than someone who doesn’t know anything,” Jimmy once told me. “They’re always fooling around with their little bottles, trying a little of this, a little of that, usually trying for a better color or a faster burning effect, and suddenly they haven’t got any hands.” (pg 104)
[ ... ] The first firecrackers (p’ao chu) did not have black powder in them. They were simply joints of bamboo thrown on a fire. The noise of the their exploding is graphically described by Marco Polo, who reports that if the young green canes are put on a campfire “they burn with such a dreadful noise that it can be heard for ten miles at night, and anyone who was not used to it could easily go into a swoon and easily die. Hence the ears are stopped with cotton wool and the clothes drawn over the head, and horses are fettered on all four feet and their feet padded and the ears and eyes covered, for it is the most terrible thing in the world to hear for the first time.” (pg 164)
Perhaps the most infamous mishap was during a fireworks celebration of Queen Victoria’s Silver Jubilee. A huge portrait (it was 200 feet long and 180 feet high) of the Queen and the Royal Family had a small but devastating technical problem: the right eye of the Queen began to blink uncontrollably, as if she were winking at the enormous throng. (pg 176)
In Philadelphia’s baseball park, with a huge crowd on hand in anticipation of Pete Rose’s surpassing Stan Musial’s total of 3,630 lifetime hits, the Phillies’ executive vice president, Bill Giles, who was to give the signal for a considerable fireworks celebration when it happened, shouted “No! No! No!” as a roar went up in the first inning when Rose’s ground ball was boggled by the Cardinal shortstop. The fireworks people out beyond the ballpark’s walls heard the roar and thought Giles had said “Go! Go! Go!” They sent up the display – without doubt, the largest response ever produced by a shortstop’s miscue. (pg 177)
In 1886 a man named Wilson P. Foss, the manager at the Plattsburgh, New York, plant of the Clinton Dynamite Company was standing twelve feet from nine hundred pounds of nitro-glycerin sitting in a wash tank when it exploded, set off by an accidental gush of live steam from a faucet. The building in which Foss was standing completely disappeared, leaving behind a crater thirty feet deep. Mr. Foss himself ended up around the bend of the Saranac River on the ice. When the plant employees hurried to the site of the detonation they assumed they were not likely to find more of Mr. Foss than perhaps a bit of shoelace. To their astonishment Foss appeared, striding around the river bend. All of his clothes below the waistline had disappeared. He had approximately two hundred spruce splinters in him. According to witnesses his first remark was, “What’s the matter?” (pg 193)
One of the particular lethal firecrackers of the time was a foot-and-a-half-long cardboard casing filled with saltpeter, carbon, and sulfur that went off with a blast that shivered the leaves on trees for an acre around. Because of such devices, nearly as many people died celebrating independence – around four thousand over the years -- as actually died fighting in the War of Independence itself. The glorious Fourth became known as the “Bloody Fourth” and, because of the large number of severe infections from burns, the “Carnival of Lockjaw.” (pg 194)
Every firework shot up along the length of the Rhine is purportedly German-made. The reason for this is that Herr Moog, the official pyrotechnician to the Nazi regime, once ordered a whole shipment of shells from Japan which were supposed to contain swastika flags suspended from parachutes. Instead, with Adolf Hitler on hand at some vast ceremonial occasion, the shells popping open high above the stadium displayed hundreds of Japanese Rising Suns. Hitler was apparently furious as the parachutes drifted down. Ever since, so it is said, no fireworks have been imported into Germany. (pg 228)
I have listed twelve of the largest major fireworks companies below – whose offices would most likely give out the locations of the next scheduled show worth traveling to watch. If this does not work – as mentioned, fireworks people sometimes tend to be cagey about their schedules – you can always call me. I am in the Manhattan telephone directory. I would always direct someone to a good fireworks show. It would make me feel as if I had accomplished a good deed for the day. (pg 264)
