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1/4/2021 0 Comments happy new year!5..4..2..3..2..1… Happy New Year! We find ourselves at the start of another year, baffled at how time flew so fast and tired from the festivities of the holiday season. Though it looked different this year, one could argue it held more magic than years past. Despite the regretful circumstances, being forced to stay home created the opportunity for many families to spend more time with each other, and to enjoy the holidays together. Many had safe small gatherings with their families and spent time with select friends. For one, I spent my Christmas watching Home Alone by the fireplace with my family, drinking hot cocoa, and listening to Christmas music. The holiday I most enjoyed, though, I’d have to say, is New Year’s Eve. There’s a special kind of hope, of magic that arrives before New Years. The feeling that we can start fresh, create new goals, and start the year out right to achieve them. Even if you hadn’t followed through on any of last year’s resolutions, most find themselves writing new ones. Coupled with counting down ‘til midnight and fireworks, what could make a night more magical?
Fireworks, the beautiful displays of light we enjoy, have been around for hundreds of years, originating in China. They’re created by putting gunpowder or flash powder in tight paper tubes with a fuse to light the powder. The chemicals in the components, such as charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate, react with one another, resulting in the explosion we all know and love. To create bright, shimmering sparks, it’s also common for fireworks to contain aluminum, iron, zinc, or magnesium dust. The metal flakes heat up until they’re bright and glowing, or at a high enough temperature, burn. And to add some pop of color to your light show, a variety of chemicals can be added to make fireworks red, green, purple, yellow, or any other color you want! “But how do fireworks create specific patterns/shapes in the sky?” you may be wondering. A firework is generally formed like a shell with four parts: the container, stars, bursting charge, and fuse. The container is usually pasted paper and string formed into a cylinder shape, with the stars inside, which are spheres, cubes, or cylinders, containing powder. Kind of funny how the stars aren’t shaped like stars, right? The bursting charge is located in the center of the shell, and is a mixture needed for the firework to explode once it’s reached its desired height. Lastly, the fuse provides a time delay so that the shell can reach the right height. These four components work in tandem to create the usual firework shape- sparks extending outward from the center point. To make specific shapes, technicians first have to outline the figure they want with stars. They then surround the stars with a layer of break charge (a mixture similar to burst charge) to separate them from the rest of the shell’s contents and place explosive charges inside to blow them outward into a large figure. And now you know! You understand the magic of fireworks. The display of lights we enjoy during the holidays, as fleeting as they are, aren’t just beautiful explosions in the sky. They are complex devices and take a considerable amount of time to create, not to mention actually coordinating and choreographing an intricate firework show is said to take hours! So next time you see fireworks or a firework show on New Year’s Eve, those random nights people decide to ignite fireworks, or any other night, appreciate the time it took to create them. And make sure to remember the secret of how they come to be!
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