Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with text stuff from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com cabin Welcome to Text Stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren bok Obam and uh see
Speaker 1: was looking at the topic here. Yeah, we got this
Speaker 1: one from where did we had a tough job? Well, Lauren,
Speaker 1: I believe that would be from listen. I really hope
Speaker 1: that Nolan has sound staked that so that it was
Speaker 1: not as loud as it was here in the studio. I, however,
Speaker 1: hope he brought the Clackson back, because it's been a
Speaker 1: long time since we've done that. Maybe a nice gentle
Speaker 1: clack Yes, a sweet tinder Clackson carring Clackson. To be fair, though,
Speaker 1: being loud and tacky is what this episode is going
Speaker 1: to be all about. Right, that is true because our
Speaker 1: friend cyber Knight, whose name I'm guessing is not actually
Speaker 1: cyber Knight though if it is, congratulations, that is an
Speaker 1: amazing name. Yeah, all I can say is that's all
Speaker 1: that came with the email. Rode into us via email
Speaker 1: and said, Uh, here's something I wondered as we were
Speaker 1: watching the traditional Independence Day festivities. What kind of tech
Speaker 1: goes into a professional fireworks display? What do they use
Speaker 1: to sink up the fireworks with music? Is their fancy
Speaker 1: tech that goes into the creation of fireworks. Most of
Speaker 1: the ones I saw tonight were the standard fair starbursts
Speaker 1: that could change their colors. They burned, uh, though some
Speaker 1: twinkled like little Christmas lights, flashing on and off in
Speaker 1: a way I wouldn't expect from just a chemical burn.
Speaker 1: I also remember years ago seeing some explode into a
Speaker 1: smiley face, though I haven't seen as many of those recently.
Speaker 1: I also wondered if there's anything that makes them safer,
Speaker 1: though I'm not sure how safe you could ever make
Speaker 1: something that's designed to explode if it hasn't been done already.
Speaker 1: It might be cool to hear about how fireworks work.
Speaker 1: And Cyber Knight, we are totally going to meet your expectations.
Speaker 1: We are going to exceed them actually because they're all
Speaker 1: attempt There's a lot of science there is. There's much,
Speaker 1: many much sciences. In fact, I would say more science
Speaker 1: than tech when you get down to it. However, it's
Speaker 1: a technology of chemistry. Yeah that it is applied chemistry.
Speaker 1: So there is and we have demonstrated on the show
Speaker 1: previously that we like fire yeah, we did a full episode.
Speaker 1: By the way, Sorry we didn't talk about compression fire starters.
Speaker 1: I had it in my notes, did not fill it out,
Speaker 1: and then we were taken to task for it rightfully,
Speaker 1: So I would say, but we're gonna we're gonna be
Speaker 1: very thorough as it turns out with fireworks, because while
Speaker 1: I was thinking about it, you know, just covering the basics,
Speaker 1: the more I got into the chemistry, the more exciting
Speaker 1: it was, the more interesting it was, and the more
Speaker 1: I was like, well, I'm in for opinion for a pound.
Speaker 1: If the government's going to see how I'm looking about,
Speaker 1: you know, how to make gunpowder, might as well go
Speaker 1: all in. So we're going to talk all about it.
Speaker 1: Definitely one of those that were like, okay, what interesting
Speaker 1: watch lists are we on? At least three or four more?
Speaker 1: So we should probably define what a firework is for
Speaker 1: just just the purposes of framing the discussion, right, sure, Well,
Speaker 1: you know, at its base, I suppose it's something that
Speaker 1: explodes for fun. Yes, that's pretty much it. A firework
Speaker 1: is something that is explosive or combustible, and it's meant
Speaker 1: for display purposes, to to create an impressive light display.
Speaker 1: Or exactly. Yeah, you could get a firecracker, which is
Speaker 1: really meant to make a lot of noise, or your
Speaker 1: you might get a Roman candle, which doesn't make a
Speaker 1: lot of noise, but it is very impressive light show. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course then there's all the stuff that also
Speaker 1: falls into the fireworks category, including things like sparklers, that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. We're mostly gonna be focusing on your
Speaker 1: traditional fireworks, the stuff that you would go and look
Speaker 1: up into the sky and see that that are launched
Speaker 1: from something into the air exactly, so your your common
Speaker 1: basic ingredients and fireworks are well. It's black powder, also
Speaker 1: known as gunpowder, you know, pretty pretty simple, relatively simple. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's traditionally made from sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate, which
Speaker 1: back in ye old days was called saltpeter. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: back in the old days, he mostly got it from India,
Speaker 1: at least if you were in the Western hemisphere, you
Speaker 1: got it from India. Uh. In fact, I read an
Speaker 1: interesting article published in eighteen sixty one by the New
Speaker 1: York Times about the various powder mills, which we'll talk
Speaker 1: about a little bit, uh in the United States, and
Speaker 1: essentially it was running down how the South didn't have
Speaker 1: enough powder mills for this Civil War thing to be
Speaker 1: a big deal. As it turns out, four more years later,
Speaker 1: they probably felt like that was maybe a little premature.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, that that turned out to be less correct.
Speaker 1: I had hoped it was a certainly, you know, I
Speaker 1: think it was an optimistic take on what ended up
Speaker 1: being a very trying time in US history. But we're
Speaker 1: going to focus on the fireworks. So speaking of history,
Speaker 1: looking at the history of fireworks, this is stuff of legend.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, Oh, certainly, because I mean, guess
Speaker 1: what neither of us were around two to three thousand
Speaker 1: years ago to observe and we don't have a real
Speaker 1: way back machine. Yeah, I'm really sorry, guys, we have
Speaker 1: been lying to you. It's just a special effect. It's
Speaker 1: a really special effect. It is. It is very special. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: if someone has not actually documented it in a way
Speaker 1: that is verifiable, we cannot in fact go back and
Speaker 1: say exactly what happened. But we can tell you what
Speaker 1: the legends are. Yes, there's a legend that over two
Speaker 1: thousand years ago in China, a chef, a chef was
Speaker 1: mixing together some charcoal, some sulfur and some saltpeter, and
Speaker 1: those were all ingredients that were found in field kitchens. Okay,
Speaker 1: so yeah, apparently just accidentally happened to measure these in
Speaker 1: the or or mix these in the right amounts, because
Speaker 1: it's not like you have equal parts of each ingredient.
Speaker 1: It's actually more precise than that. We are going to
Speaker 1: talk about that because I don't want you guys making gunpowder,
Speaker 1: so don't try that at home. But this chef happened
Speaker 1: upon this recipe, Yeah, discovered that if you compress it,
Speaker 1: like if you put it into a container of some sort,
Speaker 1: and then if it were too I don't know, come
Speaker 1: into contact with any kind of flame, it blows up.
Speaker 1: I don't know if that chefs survived this discovery because
Speaker 1: I don't even know if the chef's existed, So it's
Speaker 1: all up in the air really literally possibly depending upon
Speaker 1: where the gunpowder was. Now, if you look up the
Speaker 1: history of fireworks online, like if you were to actually
Speaker 1: go and put into your favorite search engine history of fireworks,
Speaker 1: you're going to find a particular story told repeatedly throughout
Speaker 1: numerous links, most of which go to like fireworks manufacturers
Speaker 1: and as like many other research topics on the internet.
Speaker 1: They all tell basically the same story and basically the
Speaker 1: same wording without any particular reference to any real Yeah
Speaker 1: there's no citation, right, yeah, so that so what the
Speaker 1: legend is is that there was a monk in China
Speaker 1: named le Chian who lived around quote a thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: That is always the way it's put. By the way,
Speaker 1: around a thousand years ago. It's never given a date.
Speaker 1: It just as a round a thousand years ago. And
Speaker 1: so depending upon when this was written, you know, and anyway,
Speaker 1: so much so many different sources use the exact wording.
Speaker 1: I expect they all took their information from either the
Speaker 1: same source or they're just borrowing it from each other.
Speaker 1: It's just this big circle of people borrowing the same stuff.
Speaker 1: But the best scholarly source I could find simply said
Speaker 1: that the first firecracker was made sometime around eleventh century
Speaker 1: Common era in China, so eleventh century a d if
Speaker 1: you prefer, in China. And this was the time when
Speaker 1: Chinese alchemists were searching for something called the elixir of life.
Speaker 1: And along the way, while trying to find this elixir
Speaker 1: of life, they they mixed a bunch of different kinds
Speaker 1: of stuff together and found lots of interesting things. Not
Speaker 1: the their life, but as it turns out, they found
Speaker 1: out about gunpowder. Just kind of like an lixer of death.
Speaker 1: When you think about it, you can be certainly with
Speaker 1: the with the incorrect application. So the first firecracker was
Speaker 1: probably a parchment tube loosely filled with this mixture of saltpeter, sulfur,
Speaker 1: and willow charcoal. Willow charcoal, by the way, one of
Speaker 1: the more popular forms. As it turns out, you want
Speaker 1: to use softer woods to create the charcoal because the
Speaker 1: harder woulds tend to create too much ash. I learned
Speaker 1: that while I was doing all this research. Now, once
Speaker 1: these things were invented, they started to spread throughout the
Speaker 1: world gradually, usually through trade. Uh. Sometime between twelve thirty
Speaker 1: five and twelve nine, d Roger Bacon began to experiment
Speaker 1: with an early form of black powder. This was again
Speaker 1: stuff that had probably been brought to the Western world
Speaker 1: through trade, yeah, mostly through Arabic traders. Most likely the
Speaker 1: story goes that Marco Polo brought some over, but it's
Speaker 1: much more likely that it was Arabic traders well before
Speaker 1: Marco Polo's journeys. But at any rate Bacon's work would
Speaker 1: lead to the development of what we know as gunpowder today.
Speaker 1: Yes he would. He would sort of refine this mixture,
Speaker 1: finding the right proportions of mixing these ingredients together to
Speaker 1: get something that would work very well if you wanted to, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, launch something at somebody, like say a cannon ball. Sure,
Speaker 1: because if you mix all of these things together, you
Speaker 1: get a good bright flash, and if you compress them beforehand,
Speaker 1: you get a big boom as well. Yep, yep. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: like if you've ever seen those videos of or films
Speaker 1: of people taking the old timey photographs with the flash powder,
Speaker 1: where it just it just lights up, and that was
Speaker 1: how they created a flash since they didn't have the
Speaker 1: capacitors to make up a flashing light bulb. That's what
Speaker 1: gunpowder does. If it's just out in the open. You've
Speaker 1: probably seen this. It's you know, it's also really popular
Speaker 1: in like cartoons and stuff. You see the long trail
Speaker 1: of gunpowder and exactly so that really is how it
Speaker 1: just burns really really quickly. Now, the gunpowder industry and
Speaker 1: fireworks industry are very closely linked together. Improvements in developing
Speaker 1: gunpowder and the methodology for producing it were ported over
Speaker 1: to work in fireworks as well, and early fireworks displays
Speaker 1: were developed in China and India for religious festivals. Uh,
Speaker 1: there aren't really written accounts of how these fireworks spread
Speaker 1: throughout the world. But again we think that Arabic traders
Speaker 1: probably brought this stuff over into Europe and the Europeans said, Wow,
Speaker 1: that's amazing, that's awesome, let's bloss stuff up here too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in fact, for a long time they were importing
Speaker 1: this stuff from the East, and in fact would even
Speaker 1: higher experts from the East to come and do the
Speaker 1: displays in in Europe. It would only be in the
Speaker 1: late Middle Ages early Renaissance when you started seeing Europeans
Speaker 1: try and take on this responsibility themselves. Now, by the
Speaker 1: Italian Renaissance, fireworks creators began to experiment with adding extra
Speaker 1: ingredients to mixtures to produce different colors of light, so
Speaker 1: for example, adding copper to create blue light. We'll talk
Speaker 1: more about adding color to fireworks a bit later. So
Speaker 1: the thing is, if you want to learn more about
Speaker 1: what the displays back in the Middle Ages were like,
Speaker 1: there are only a few accounts, a lot of them
Speaker 1: though come from England, because it turns out the English
Speaker 1: were bananas over this stuff. The Italians and Germans were
Speaker 1: working really hard on improving fireworks technology, and the English
Speaker 1: were enjoying the heck out of it. So one of
Speaker 1: the accounts says that during the wedding of Henry the
Speaker 1: Seventh also known as Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York
Speaker 1: in four six, there were fireworks displays. Others talk more
Speaker 1: about Elizabeth's coronation, so there's a little bit of a
Speaker 1: argument there. The same is true for Henry the eighth
Speaker 1: wedding uh and Boleyn, which was a wife number two.
Speaker 1: I think I think she had a good head on
Speaker 1: her shoulders. Uh not for long spoiler art James Anthony
Speaker 1: Froud wrote that there were quote wild men and casting
Speaker 1: fire and making a hideous noise end quote, which I
Speaker 1: think is a fantastic description of fireworks. When I was
Speaker 1: a kid, I hated them because I didn't like loud noise,
Speaker 1: and even just seeing the fireworks burst in the sky
Speaker 1: made me my anxiety levels go up because I knew
Speaker 1: a loud noise was coming right. I remember having one
Speaker 1: year where I was really upset by them. Like I
Speaker 1: had loved them and then suddenly was like that's loud
Speaker 1: and I'm against it. Yeah, I've come back around now,
Speaker 1: but for a long time I was. I was certainly
Speaker 1: the person who was like, I don't want to be
Speaker 1: here when the fireworks start anyway the record, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: most dogs I've encountered shared my feeling. I think I
Speaker 1: finally evolved beyond dog stage. So Henry the eighth and
Speaker 1: Anne berleyn had a daughter, Elizabeth, Yeah, somewhat famous. Yes,
Speaker 1: it became Queen of England and uh sat on her
Speaker 1: thorn for many years throne throne. Sorry, it was just
Speaker 1: misreading my notes. But no, Liz with obviously one of
Speaker 1: the most influential monarchs of all time, really, and she
Speaker 1: she loved the sparklies. She did she she she created
Speaker 1: a position for its Firemaster of England. Um, it would
Speaker 1: be I think it was after in the ruling of
Speaker 1: James the First when that position came along with a knighthood.
Speaker 1: At any rate, you had people who suddenly really wanted
Speaker 1: to pursue the craft, to become the best at it
Speaker 1: in order to land this cushy job of being the
Speaker 1: fire Master of England, Because you would imagine that comes
Speaker 1: with some sweet you know, bonuses like money. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so a lot of people were trying new and different
Speaker 1: things to kind of impress the queen. Yeah. Yeah. According
Speaker 1: to some accounts, one of the things you might expect
Speaker 1: to see at a truly outrageous display would be a
Speaker 1: dragon with paper mache scales that was loaded up with
Speaker 1: fireworks so that it would breathe fire. It would have
Speaker 1: here to be breathing fire, and sometimes they would have
Speaker 1: more than one, and then you would have dragon fights. Yes,
Speaker 1: and then maybe one of the women's up catching on
Speaker 1: fire and the other one is slightly less on fire,
Speaker 1: and so that's the one that wins. Um. But they
Speaker 1: would battle one another. And so you read about this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, you're like, wow, these these had to
Speaker 1: be pretty spectacular. And then you also think, remember they
Speaker 1: had no automated way of doing this. There was probably
Speaker 1: some poor jerk who had a match stick or some
Speaker 1: form of torture something that was lighting this stuff manually
Speaker 1: and then trying to get the heck away from it
Speaker 1: before he burnt up. Yeah, or possibly a couple of
Speaker 1: guys on the ground like with sticks holding these things up.
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit terrified about the entire concept. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, no, they were very impressive. Shakespeare even wrote
Speaker 1: wrote about them in some of his plays, Right, Romeo
Speaker 1: and juliet There is a quote that says, these violent
Speaker 1: delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die like
Speaker 1: fire and powder, which as they kiss consume. Now, in
Speaker 1: that case, of course, he's referring to the lover's Romeo
Speaker 1: and Juliette, and the passion they have for one another,
Speaker 1: and he's likening it to a fireworks display, which you know,
Speaker 1: has been a pretty powerful image that has been repeated
Speaker 1: at nauseum ever since. The whole thing where the two
Speaker 1: lovers kiss and then you see the fireworks going off
Speaker 1: in the background very much. It's interesting that it seems
Speaker 1: to have originated with Shakespeare as many so many things
Speaker 1: have also, fireworks were deemed to be an illegal possession
Speaker 1: for regular citizens right around Uh yeah, that that's about
Speaker 1: when a certain persona now publicly known because of a
Speaker 1: certain movie in comic book series. Yes, guy Fox got
Speaker 1: into some trouble with the gunpowder plot. Yes, he was
Speaker 1: part of a conspiracy to blow up the houses of
Speaker 1: Parliament by storing something like thirty something casks of gunpowder
Speaker 1: underneath the We're gonna tunnel underneath the Houses of Parliament
Speaker 1: that stuff in there and then light it and blow
Speaker 1: it up. And the conspirators were caught before they could
Speaker 1: execute their plan. And Guy Fox himself, who was not
Speaker 1: necessarily the ringleader, he was one of the members um,
Speaker 1: was really made an example of in some of the
Speaker 1: most horrifying ways you can imagine. Now, granted he was
Speaker 1: planning on committing a terrible act, but they did a
Speaker 1: really terrible act to him and drawn quartered. And of
Speaker 1: course they had Guy Fox Day for you know, the
Speaker 1: early Guy Fox days involved lots of burning of Guy
Speaker 1: Fox and effigy um. And then there there's a whole
Speaker 1: story there that's amazing, but stuff you missed in history
Speaker 1: class would really be the best place to cover that.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure they have actually, I mean, I feel
Speaker 1: like it's likely. Yeah, these these days we have the
Speaker 1: charming anonymous masks, Yes, based off exactly. So at that
Speaker 1: point it was made illegal for the common citizen to
Speaker 1: possess fireworks. The only people who are allowed were specifically
Speaker 1: given that that responsibility by the crown. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of the early early history. But let's talk about what's
Speaker 1: actually going on inside of firework, what is what is
Speaker 1: making it work? Well, this is mostly chemistry, but let's
Speaker 1: let's talk about black powder, since that is that is
Speaker 1: the basic what is going on here. So we talked
Speaker 1: about sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter or potassium nitrate. Uh, you
Speaker 1: might wonder what are these things actually doing within gunpowders.
Speaker 1: So sulfur and charcoal are acting as fuel, right, and
Speaker 1: the potassium nitrate is acting as an oxidizer. So oxidizers
Speaker 1: in this sense are the chemicals that fuel requires in
Speaker 1: order to burn. If you remember the great triangle of
Speaker 1: what was required to make fire, you have to have fuel,
Speaker 1: you have to have oxygen, and you have to have heat.
Speaker 1: Those are the three things that together will allow you
Speaker 1: to have fire. And if you're lacking any of those,
Speaker 1: you're not going to get it. If you have just
Speaker 1: oxygen and fuel and but not heat, it's not going
Speaker 1: to happen. Same thing with just oxygen and fire. You've
Speaker 1: got to have some fuel there. So oxidizers are chemicals
Speaker 1: that are really good at getting oxygen into the mixing. Yes,
Speaker 1: and in fact, potassium nitrate is incredibly good at this.
Speaker 1: So let's look at these ingredients each on their own.
Speaker 1: If you look at just charcoal, which is essentially carbon
Speaker 1: and you want to try and burn it, if you
Speaker 1: were to light a match and just hold it to charcoal,
Speaker 1: it doesn't really ignite very well, yeah, kind of. It
Speaker 1: kind of smolders and smokes, and and if you get
Speaker 1: it hot enough, like it will start to burn. Certainly
Speaker 1: they'll start to glow, doesn't. You don't get a lot
Speaker 1: of flame out of it. You've probably done this at home,
Speaker 1: perhaps on a charcoal grill, or when you have burned
Speaker 1: a log down to the coals. Yeah, you've got those
Speaker 1: those coals are that's charcoal that's just glowing because of
Speaker 1: the heat that's coming through. We'll talk about the actual
Speaker 1: mechanism of glowing a little bit later too. So again,
Speaker 1: you don't get a lot of ignition, not not in
Speaker 1: a lot of flame, and certainly not explosive ignition yet
Speaker 1: probably unless you've done something very strange, right, unless unless
Speaker 1: your charcoal has got some other funky ingredients in it,
Speaker 1: or I guess you've compressed it a lot. Maybe, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be incredible. Eventually you would get a diamond. So,
Speaker 1: but sulfur it burns at a lower temperature than charcoal
Speaker 1: does that carbon does. It ignites more easily, but not
Speaker 1: really at room temperature. So if you had a little crucible,
Speaker 1: let's say, a little ceramic crucible filled with some some sulfur,
Speaker 1: and you put a match to it, it wouldn't really
Speaker 1: light up. But again, if you were to heat it,
Speaker 1: it will start to melt, and then it will burn
Speaker 1: if exposed to even higher temperatures, and that gives off
Speaker 1: sulfur dioxide, which, by the way, not good to breathe in.
Speaker 1: It can irritate your lung. One of the many reasons
Speaker 1: why you shouldn't melt sulfur at home. Yeah. Yeah, these
Speaker 1: these things like charcoal that's fairly fairly benign as things go.
Speaker 1: Sulfur a little bit less so, potassium nitrate less so
Speaker 1: than either of the other two. Yeah, this is what
Speaker 1: increases that rate of combustion significantly when it's added to
Speaker 1: a mixture of carbon and sulfur, again in the correct amounts.
Speaker 1: So when it's mixed properly, that combination willing nite and
Speaker 1: burn really really quickly. Um. And it is it is,
Speaker 1: the of course, the traditional oxidizer in this combination of
Speaker 1: stuff that goes into black powder, but lots of other
Speaker 1: things can be used, for example, potassium chlorate, potassium perchlorate,
Speaker 1: or barium nitrate and UH. As of twenty eleven, organizations
Speaker 1: from like Walt Disney Company to the US Department of
Speaker 1: Defense have started looking at green alternatives to all of
Speaker 1: these oxidizers. UH and I say green, and you go, like,
Speaker 1: what you're making stuff explode? How green does it need
Speaker 1: to be? But the thing is is that um okay.
Speaker 1: So it turns out the dangerous chemicals can present health
Speaker 1: and environmental hazards. UM and potassium nitrate specifically is a
Speaker 1: really common ingredient in herbsides. Potassium chlorate is a hearsh
Speaker 1: ingredient in disinfectants. Potassium perchlorate can disrupt the production of
Speaker 1: hormones and the thyroid and harmon born babies, and a
Speaker 1: barium nitrate can interfere with heart and breathing functions. So
Speaker 1: none of that is good fun times and and so
Speaker 1: a lot of research has been put in recent years
Speaker 1: into trying to figure out better ways of burning stuff
Speaker 1: that isn't releasing these chemicals into the environment and showering
Speaker 1: them over crowds of fawning onlookers or you know, into
Speaker 1: your water supply, or for example, potassium chlorate is a
Speaker 1: great example. Potassium chlorate is this stuff a great example
Speaker 1: of a bad, bad ingredient as as opposed to one
Speaker 1: that's green. Potassium chlorate ends up creating a more explosive
Speaker 1: burn than say potassium nitrate does. Potassium nitrate is already
Speaker 1: pretty impressive, but if you ever watch someone create potassium
Speaker 1: chlorate a mixture of sulfur, charcoal and potassium chlorate in
Speaker 1: the right amounts and then light it, it lights even.
Speaker 1: It burns even faster than the regular black powder mixture,
Speaker 1: and so it's often used in something called a burst charge,
Speaker 1: which we'll talk about later. But like you said, it
Speaker 1: leaves some pretty nasty stuff behind chlorate. If you look
Speaker 1: at that word chlorate, you realize that chlorine is one
Speaker 1: of those things that's involved in this and that's one
Speaker 1: of the byproducts as you get this chlorine released as
Speaker 1: as one of the the remnants after the chemical reaction
Speaker 1: that happens when you ignite this stuff. Chlorine is not
Speaker 1: good stuff, folks. You don't don't want just pure chlorine
Speaker 1: all over the place. It's it's toxic. So you know,
Speaker 1: that's one of those things where uh a lot more
Speaker 1: research needs to be done in order to make the
Speaker 1: stuff really safe. Right now, two things, sodium parietate and
Speaker 1: potassium parietate are starting to move into use as substitutes,
Speaker 1: more clean substitute for the traditional one, because the trick
Speaker 1: is that you have to find something that's going to
Speaker 1: facilitate this rapid burning. If you don't have that, then
Speaker 1: obviously you can't do the fireworks, at least not the
Speaker 1: way we're accustomed to. Um. So we'll we'll, you know,
Speaker 1: hope that that kind of stuff gets further distributed throughout
Speaker 1: the entire industry so that we have a less uh
Speaker 1: you know, negative impact on the environment and potentially on
Speaker 1: on the viewers of fireworks displays or just the people
Speaker 1: who happen to live around those areas. Oh yeah, this
Speaker 1: this also goes into I mean, the Department of Defense
Speaker 1: wasn't involved in that because of the fireworks displays necessarily,
Speaker 1: so much as this is useful also for anything else
Speaker 1: that you're using gunpowder for, which for the Department of
Speaker 1: Defense as many things, and you know, trying to protect
Speaker 1: the lives of our munitions workers and also our our
Speaker 1: soldiers and troops and everyone else. Absolutely, so how is
Speaker 1: it made? Don't try this at home, yes, do not.
Speaker 1: This is one of those things that if you are
Speaker 1: if you're part of a lab and the lab has
Speaker 1: the facilities to do it, and you can make it
Speaker 1: in small amounts, it's a very interesting process. But this
Speaker 1: is not something for you to ever try on your
Speaker 1: own because if you got the mixture either just right
Speaker 1: or just wrong, bad things can happen. But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: here's what the processes, and I'm not again going to
Speaker 1: explain the specific amounts. First we have to reduce each
Speaker 1: ingredient to fine grains of powder. And you would want
Speaker 1: to do this separately, right this, You don't mix them
Speaker 1: together first. So you get your charcoal and you mash
Speaker 1: it up, so you've got charcoal powder. You get your sulfur.
Speaker 1: You make sure you you pound out any any clumps
Speaker 1: so that you just get a fine powder. Same thing
Speaker 1: with your saltpeter. You want to make sure all of
Speaker 1: that stuff is as fine as you possibly can make it.
Speaker 1: Then you mix those ingredients together with a little water
Speaker 1: or some other liquid for example. And I'm not making
Speaker 1: this up. One of the liquids I saw was stale urine.
Speaker 1: Stale urine, stale urine specifically stale Yes, I am not joking,
Speaker 1: because it allows for a more consistent burn. I um yeah,
Speaker 1: all right. So anyway, you mix it in with this
Speaker 1: liquid to help these different ingredients bind together. Usually you
Speaker 1: have some sort of binding agent, what, some something that's
Speaker 1: going to help them stick together in the right in
Speaker 1: the right amounts. Salt peter, as it turns out, was
Speaker 1: really soluble and it'll in all those nice little spaces
Speaker 1: and charcoal pretty easily. Charcoal has a lot of surface areas,
Speaker 1: so it's it's a good mix. Then you let the
Speaker 1: mixture dries, becomes kind of like a cake like mass.
Speaker 1: It's solidifying like a hard biscuit. Yeah, it's like a
Speaker 1: red velvet cake, right, Yeah, it's it's much more dense,
Speaker 1: also much more likely to explode than your traditional red velvet. Yes.
Speaker 1: You then crush this dry matt mass with something that
Speaker 1: will totally not cause sparks. Please. Yeah, you don't use
Speaker 1: any nothing that's gonna potentially create a spark. So usually
Speaker 1: it's ceramic or non sparking metals or something along those
Speaker 1: lines of stone, just regular stone, not like Flynn steel,
Speaker 1: would be a terrible idea to turn it into a powder. Um.
Speaker 1: This is one of the reasons why it's challenging to
Speaker 1: make this stuff in huge amounts, particularly for someone who
Speaker 1: doesn't have like a powder mill at their disposal. They
Speaker 1: the accounts I read were especially for people who are
Speaker 1: like uh, um, military recreationist people, people who create, uh
Speaker 1: they recreate like the famous battles, and they want to
Speaker 1: have black powder muskets. They're not firing musket balls, but
Speaker 1: they want to be able to have that big loud
Speaker 1: bang smoke. Um they talk about making us to say,
Speaker 1: it's a little hard if you want to make more
Speaker 1: than say, ten pounds of the stuff at a time,
Speaker 1: like you know, keeping in mind that ten pounds of gunpowder,
Speaker 1: especially if it's in a compact container, could be incredibly dangerous.
Speaker 1: I just had a very mild panic attack thinking about
Speaker 1: any of the people that I personally know who dress
Speaker 1: up in costumes and run around the woods firing fake
Speaker 1: guns at each other, having ten pounds of gunpowder at
Speaker 1: your disposal. Yeah, it's uh. It certainly is one of
Speaker 1: those things where you do need to know the best
Speaker 1: practices to safely handle this stuff, because it really is
Speaker 1: incredibly dangerous. But at that point in this process, you're done.
Speaker 1: You've got your gunpowder. If you do want to make
Speaker 1: large quantities. How did those powder mills work that you
Speaker 1: were mentioning earlier? So, yeah, you usually you would have
Speaker 1: some sort of of bowl like surface, and then you'd
Speaker 1: have a grinding wheel that would be powered either by
Speaker 1: horse power, manpower, or water wheel, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So it's a mill, you know, the kind of mill
Speaker 1: that you would see for any other sort of thing,
Speaker 1: grinding grain, for example. And what you would do is
Speaker 1: you would you would mix all these ingredients together and
Speaker 1: then you would put that in the mill for it
Speaker 1: to grind up into the proper fine powder that you
Speaker 1: would need to use as black powder. Again, you would
Speaker 1: have to make sure that all the equipment you had
Speaker 1: was not likely to cause a spark al right, wood
Speaker 1: or stone or something very non spark making. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's hard, non spark worthy. It's kind of hard to
Speaker 1: to put it into words properly. It is incombustible. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's good. One other interesting feature that a lot of
Speaker 1: these powder mills had was that at least one wall,
Speaker 1: sometimes more than one was specifically built weaker than the
Speaker 1: other walls. The other walls would support more of the
Speaker 1: structure's weight. H so that if everything in the factory exploded,
Speaker 1: it would be easier for people to get out well,
Speaker 1: or easier for firefighters to get in. Uh yeah, because
Speaker 1: I mean if you are caught inside that building when
Speaker 1: there's an explosion, there's probably parts of you got out. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it was meant so that it could open up
Speaker 1: an easy pathway for any reactionary measures measures, whether that's
Speaker 1: putting out fires or you know, dealing with the aftermath.
Speaker 1: I mean, you didn't necessarily have people inside these things
Speaker 1: all the time while they were grinding anyway, but it
Speaker 1: was meant as this way. Like let's say, if you
Speaker 1: have it as a water wheel, you know it means
Speaker 1: you're near a source of water running water, you might
Speaker 1: have the wall that is closest to the running water blowout,
Speaker 1: so that way, if there is a fire, you can
Speaker 1: you've got the water right there, so you can start
Speaker 1: a bucket brigade type thing. No, that's why I kind
Speaker 1: of had a face upon a moment thinking about that one.
Speaker 1: But now that you mentioned it, really that's I sort
Speaker 1: of want all of my buildings to be structurally we
Speaker 1: are on one side. If nothing else that I could
Speaker 1: just right out of anything, that would be fair. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There are so many times where I I just think
Speaker 1: that I need to have the Jonathan shaped dust cloud
Speaker 1: and then the wall the Jonathan shaped hole in the
Speaker 1: wall where I've made my escape. So these days, we
Speaker 1: don't have so many water wheels kicking around in large
Speaker 1: factory facilities. We do have some machine versions that will
Speaker 1: do the crushing, but again, it's really tricky because you
Speaker 1: have to make sure that that machinery is not going
Speaker 1: to have any kind of sparking element to it. So
Speaker 1: in other words, the motors can't be sparking, not just
Speaker 1: the rollers or whatever. So you have to make sure
Speaker 1: that the materials you're using the surface and the rollers
Speaker 1: that are doing the crushing are not going to create
Speaker 1: any sparks, and furthermore, that they're going to be cool
Speaker 1: enough to not risk igniting. Yeah, exactly. So it's it's
Speaker 1: one of those things that really took a lot of
Speaker 1: of effort to get it right so that it could
Speaker 1: be created safely, or at least as safely as possible.
Speaker 1: Accidents still happen I mean, you've probably heard of accidents,
Speaker 1: whether they were in facilities that were processing black powder
Speaker 1: or a fireworks warehouse. These things do happen, so it
Speaker 1: really drives home the fact that you've got to treat
Speaker 1: it with respect. Sure, sure, Okay, So once you've got
Speaker 1: your black powder, how do you assemble the fireworks themselves? Okay?
Speaker 1: So basically, and we'll talk more about this in in
Speaker 1: our part two about fireworks, but basically what you need
Speaker 1: to do is do it by hand because automated versions
Speaker 1: again tend to have equipment that could create a spark.
Speaker 1: And so you've most fireworks are are handmade, hand packed.
Speaker 1: So if you if you were to take a typical firework,
Speaker 1: like a big one one that's used in a professional display,
Speaker 1: these things tend to weigh several pounds. They can be
Speaker 1: in lots of different shapes. It all depends upon the
Speaker 1: effect you want. We'll talk about that in the next
Speaker 1: episode two. But if you were to cut it in half,
Speaker 1: you would see that you would have a core of
Speaker 1: this black powder, whether it was made with potassium nitrate
Speaker 1: or potassium chlorate or some other oxidizer involved, but the
Speaker 1: black powder would be at the core and you would
Speaker 1: have these other little elements inside the firework that are
Speaker 1: meant to be projected outward after the core explode, all right,
Speaker 1: probably suspended in clay or something staple like that, right, right,
Speaker 1: And then you would also have another at the base
Speaker 1: of your projectile. Uh, if you have in fact a
Speaker 1: two stage firework. We'll talk about the different options in
Speaker 1: the next episode. But at the base of your firework,
Speaker 1: you would also have a lift charge which would be
Speaker 1: ignited first another little gunpowder puck. Yeah, so you would
Speaker 1: have that at the base of it, and that's what
Speaker 1: would provide it the energy to lift out of the mortar.
Speaker 1: The basically the tube you have to fire it off
Speaker 1: into the sky. So it's it's really a two chamber
Speaker 1: at least a minimum of two chamber approaches if you're
Speaker 1: using the traditional method of launching. All though, the mouse
Speaker 1: House has come up with a totally different way of
Speaker 1: launching fireworks that doesn't require that separate blast chamber the
Speaker 1: lift chamber, but we'll talk about that in our next episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because although we did not mention it at the top
Speaker 1: of this episode because we weren't entirely sure how long
Speaker 1: we were going to run here, but we seem to
Speaker 1: have run more or less to the end of of
Speaker 1: our time today, so so we are going to cut
Speaker 1: off here and when we come back in the next episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about how how technicians add color
Speaker 1: into this sort of thing, how they create the various shapes,
Speaker 1: the various effects, like the smiley face that that cyber
Speaker 1: Knight mentioned. I'll talk about that a little bit. We'll
Speaker 1: also give you some ideas of how the really big
Speaker 1: the like the choreographed what displays work put off UM
Speaker 1: We'll talk about the Forced Disney because that they're one
Speaker 1: of the um i'd say, one of the pioneers in
Speaker 1: that space, Like they really choreograph it down so that
Speaker 1: their fireworks displays try and tell a story. So we'll
Speaker 1: talk about how they manage that. And then though I
Speaker 1: think we've got some fun like just random bits of
Speaker 1: trivia that I found interesting that didn't really fit in
Speaker 1: other parts of the episode, So definitely stay tuned. We're
Speaker 1: going to talk all about that in our next episode.
Speaker 1: And if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff, any sort of topic at all, like
Speaker 1: you've always wanted to know a question or maybe you
Speaker 1: just want to ask us a question that isn't necessarily
Speaker 1: a full episode. It's just something you've always wanted to know.
Speaker 1: Let us know. I would love to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 1: You can write us our email addresses tech stuff at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com, or you can drop us
Speaker 1: a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler or handle at
Speaker 1: all three is tech Stuff, H. S W and Lauren
Speaker 1: and I will talk to you again really soon for
Speaker 1: more on this and basands of other topics. Because it
Speaker 1: has staff works dot com