Fireworks

Fireworks are low-explosive pyrotechnic devices burned or launched for their light, noise, smoke and floating effects rather than for demolition or destruction. The earliest versions grew out of the Han dynasty practice of throwing bamboo stems into fire to make a loud crack; by the Song dynasty (960 to 1279) Chinese craftsmen were packing gunpowder into paper tubes with fuses to make dedicated firecrackers, and the technology reached Europe by the fourteenth century. A modern firework is built around a paper or pasteboard tube holding pyrotechnic stars made of a fuel, an oxidizer, a color-producing salt and a binder, launched either by its own propulsion as a skyrocket or fired from a mortar as an aerial shell.