It’s been written that gunpowder is the ‘explosive that changed the world’ and whilst that phrase is more of a reference to gunpowder’s militaristic uses it is also true that without it the world would have been denied one of its most astounding forms of art: the firework display.
Controlled colorful explosions in the sky have been giving mesmerized audiences a crick in the proverbial neck for centuries. The ability of fireworks to captivate was recorded for posterity in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2004) in which fireworks, or ‘sunflowers’, were depicted as a great way to distract zombies, arguably a symbolic component of the film’s tongue-in-cheek critique of the masses. In the wake of the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony held recently in Melbourne, Australia, the city hasn’t stopped talking about the amazing display that capped off the night. And of course tradition foretells that large-scale pyrotechnics displays will produce a similar response in the US public around Independence Day.
