Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making

For over a millennium, fireworks have transformed night into day, marking triumphs and mourning losses across civilizations. Alan St. Hill Brock, heir to eight generations of English pyrotechnists, traces this explosive history from ancient Chinese discovery through Renaissance European innovation to the modern era. Part One sweeps across centuries, revealing how a sacred Chinese mystery became the centerpiece of royal celebrations and battlefield signals. Part Two descends into the workshops themselves, exploring the alchemy of composition, the mathematics of shells, and the meticulous craft behind every aerial burst. Brock writes not as a distant scholar but as a inheritor of secrets, his prose carrying the weight of family tradition passed hand to hand across centuries. The book also serves as an intimate memorial to his brother, Wing-Commander Frank Arthur Brock, killed at Zeebrugge in 1918, whose military pyrotechnics continued the family's dual legacy of beauty and destruction. This is both a practical manual preserved from obsolescence and a meditation on an art form that exists between science and wonder.