I love this time of year because I love fireworks. Did a love of fireworks spark a lifelong interest in science? When I was about 11, a close friend showed me fireworks for the first time. He showed not only how "bangers" could be used as "light ordinance," but also how the black powder inside could be used. I became hooked (and quickly needed new eyebrows). As a child who grew up during the Apollo moon missions, I've always been interested in building rockets.
Even in the Cavalier 1970s, it wasn't easy for scruffy-looking schoolboys to get fireworks. But I thought that I could learn how to make my own gunpowder if I did some study. It was said around school that it had been done before. As it turned out, schoolbooks freely say that gunpowder was probably invented by the Chinese more than 2,000 years ago, but no author or publisher was willing to share a full recipe. It looks like libraries in the area were also wary of boys who asked where the books on making fireworks were kept. Now that I think about it, I'm surprised that they gave me credit for my basic lab skills.
I learned about chemical elements, thermodynamics, and OIL-RIG in middle school (for those who don't know, oxidation means loss and reduction means gain). There were also chemistry teachers, and some of them had their own pyrotechnic goals, which they were happy to show off every once in a while. It took a lot of close (and probably annoyingly persistent) questioning to get the knowledge that was needed. The scenes I needed to find the answers to were a lot like the ones between Professor Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) and Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter films. To make a long story short, the teachers were usually wary of this otherwise average student's sudden interest in chemistry. I remember that they never really told me everything, but it was clear that Dr. Neath and Dr. Houghton didn't know about my two-pronged method. People used to have to work really hard to learn things before the internet and Google.
Having what looked like a good recipe, the potassium nitrate seemed like it would be the hardest thing to find. Back then, I could still get small amounts of sulphur from the village hardware shop and the local chemist. Charcoal has a lot of carbon in it.
What I'm thinking about potassium nitrate is the first of many pointless academic detours that have led me to nowhere over the years. If I had done a little more study, I might have found that the same hardware store that was happy to give me sulphur to treat the rust on my dad's roses also had a lot of fertiliser. I went a different way.
A lot of books had talked about how the floor of cow sheds was a good place to find saltpetre. You'd probably laugh so hard you'd cry at the steps I came up with to turn the smelly waste from the nearby farmer's cow shed into different grades of green-gray sludge. It turned into a full-on obsession (maybe the first of many) and then a real cottage business. There's no way my dad or mum knew what was going on in their garages or kitchens. By chance, the story goes that a cook set off the first fireworks by lighting a mixture of honey, saltpetre, and charcoal. It looks like the explosive mix wasn't fully used until honey (which clearly has water in it) was switched out for charcoal.
My extracurricular interests did not turn me into a towering scientific genius who was destined to do well in school. I had a teacher who told me, "Hardman, you'll never make it as a scientist." But I have to say that, even though it made my peers laugh, it was a terrible and embarrassing grade. Thank you, Dr. Bowman, for leaving me with permanent mental scars.
Even so, the experiments I did on my own taught me some very important things that all scientists should know. First, "suck it and see." If you have an idea, there's no better way to test it than to do it yourself. Second, nothing works the first time (or if it does work the first time, it won't work the second, third, etc.), so keep trying. Third, write down everything you do for each new method you try. Doing the same thing over and over again wastes time and resources.
The last thing you can do if nothing else works is to learn from someone who does it. I really can't put into words how happy I was when I finally got my firing ticket from the British Army, after many years of waiting. Was I successful in the end, and did my interest in fireworks lead me to a career in science? Well, after trying a bunch of sputtering, popping, and awful-smelling alternatives, I finally made gunpowder that worked pretty well. By that time, I was old enough to buy my own fireworks. In a strange way, this describes a lot of the scientific study I've done over the years: just when you think you've found something new, you find that someone else has gone one step further. Though I didn't end up with a life in science, I did end up with a career in the life sciences. It's safe to say that science was the right place for my curious mind to play. In the same way, science has always given me answers, even if they aren't the ones I want to hear. That's all I have to say today: pass the matches.
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