Gunpowder! Secret codes! Evil spirits!

 No, that isn't the plot for the next Dan Brown novel. It’s a brief history of fireworks.

Chinese legend credits a cook’s accidental kitchen fire as the discovery of early fireworks. He spilled salt peter (KNO3), a flavoring salt, into the cooking fire and noticed it produced an intriguing flame.

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Salt peter was then combined with sulfur and charcoal and encased in a bamboo tube. The result was an explosive little firecracker and a crude form of gunpowder. The date of the discovery is hard to pin down, but it is thought to have occurred around 2000 years ago.

The Chinese were fascinated by this invention and fireworks became a traditional part of their religious celebrations. They were exploded at New Year’s celebrations because it was believed they scared off evil spirits.

Marco Polo, on one of his many expeditions, brought fireworks to the west. An English scholar named Roger Bacon (coolest last name ever) was one of the first Europeans to extensively study gunpowder. He learned the formula that provided maximum explosive power. He wrote his findings in code because he feared that this information, in the wrong hands, could prove to be catastrophic. The code was deciphered centuries later, and those proportions are still in use today.

The Chinese discovered it, the English feared it, and the Italians perfected it. They developed aerial shells that exploded in the air, creating fountains of color in the night sky. In the 19^th century, pyro-technicians (yes, that's a real job) developed the technology to make the designs and colors we see every Fourth of July.

Click here to order some awesome fireworks that are probably illegal in your state.