page fifty-two

The Fireworks

Fifty-one rooms, and every one of them was work done for one person: an owner, a harbour master, a merchant with his books. Tonight's is for the whole company on the lawn, and it is over in about a minute and a quarter. Today's number picks a pleasure garden, a piece for the band, a wind and a purse. Write the fireworks onto the score so that they break with the music, keep the sky from going dark, keep out of your own smoke, and do not set fire to the orchestra.

—

—

—

The garden
The band’s score

—

Stars
Rocket fuse
Balloon fuse
Placing

A rocket or balloon goes on the score where it should break: the dot is where the man at the frame lights it, a fuse earlier, and the diamond is the break. The fuse also decides how high it gets, and the circles on the sky show where the chosen fuses break tonight. Candles and the wheel start where you click.

Night
—

The arrow keys walk to other nights, and Z takes off the last piece. Every night is a different garden, tune, wind and purse.

What is real here and what is not

The pieces, the stars, the order in which colour arrived and the reasons a display went wrong are real. The nights, the tunes and the purses are the day's number.

  1. 01

    Rockets and balloons

    A Georgian firework maker's aerial shell was called a balloon: a paper or pasteboard globe of stars round a bursting charge, thrown from a mortar with a fuse cut to burn while it climbed. A sky rocket carries its own fire and steers by its stick, and a rocket in a wind turns into it, so it climbs upwind while its stars and its falling stick drift back the other way.

  2. 02

    Colour came late

    For most of the eighteenth century a display was gold from charcoal, white from steel filings and the flowery orange of “Chinese fire” from cast-iron borings. Berthollet found potassium chlorate in 1786, and only in the 1830s and 1840s did makers learn to burn it safely with strontium for red, barium for green and copper for a weak blue. The page lets each colour in from a round year.

  3. 03

    Light, then the bang

    Sound covers about 1,100 feet a second, so the company sees a break high over the frame a little before it hears it, and the page's bangs come late by exactly that much. In 1749 the great pavilion built in Green Park for the Royal Fireworks, to music Handel wrote for the night, caught fire during the show; this page's orchestra is wooden too.

  4. 04

    What the page simplifies

    The garden is seen side on, and every star is a point that burns for its composition's time and falls through air moving at one steady wind. The company's favour is a made-up measure: it rises with every break, more on the beat, more for a star it has not seen lately, less through smoke and low over heads, and it sinks in the dark. The season at these gardens ran through the summer; the page keeps today's date anyway.

Fifty-two rooms, and one number doing all the work. Tonight it writes a tune, lays a wind across the lawn and hands you the purse to spend on a minute of fire.