Glenn Beck’s fireworks history lesson will forever change your 4th of July sky

Tonight, across the entire country, explosions of colorful pyrotechnics will light up the sky as red, white, and blue-clad Americans of all ages ooh and aah, just as they have since 1777 when the American tradition first began at the behest of John Adams.

Yet most of these patriotic revelers are likely unaware of the fascinating history behind the dazzling fireworks that punctuate their Fourth of July celebrations.

On this July 2023 episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn dove into the wild history of fireworks. What he shared is sure to transform your summer holiday celebrations forever.

“The history of fireworks is crazy” and “spans the entire globe,” Glenn says.

Historians disagree about the origins of fireworks, with some contending they originated in China and others arguing they were initially developed in the Middle East or India.

“Either way, we do know that the first firecracker in China was actually created unintentionally when a stick of bamboo was tossed into a fire and it cracked,” Glenn says, noting that these “natural firecrackers” were believed to “ward off evil spirits.”

Then “around 800 B.C., a Chinese alchemist,” aiming to concoct the elixir of “eternal life,” combined “sulfur, charcoal, [and] potassium nitrate.” What he created, ironically, was gunpowder, which the Chinese then began packing into bamboo shoots, and later “paper tubes,” and tossing into fires to create firecrackers.

Compared to the soaring kaleidoscopic bursts we adore today, these ancient Chinese explosives “were not launched into the air” and had “no added colors,” says Glenn.

Projectile fireworks arrived on the scene around 900 A.D. when fireworks were “fastened to arrows,” which the Chinese fired at their enemies. “Over the next 200 years, the fireworks were made into rockets that could be fired at your enemy without the help of an arrow,” Glenn says, noting that these warfare explosives were ironically used in celebrations as well.

Over the next several centuries, fireworks spread across the civilized world. By the 1600s, fireworks, still just “plain orange” in color, were handled by “fire masters” and their assistants, who were referred to as “little green men” because they had to “wear wet leaves to protect themselves from the sparks,” Glenn explains.

While “early American settlers brought the fireworks with them to the new world,” it would be another “60 years” before “the elaborate sparkles of red, white, and blue” we enjoy to this day would be invented.

Like America herself, “the Fourth of July sky is a melting pot of creativity and innovation that came from all over the world,” Glenn says.

Tonight, “we will all sit on the back of our trucks or in bleachers and watch our one fireworks display and celebrate the one truth: We are free,” he says. “We are the freest country ever to grace the Earth.”

“We've made a lot of mistakes, and that is true. We've been a bad country, and we've been a great country, but we're still a country called the United States of America, and we are free.”

To hear more, watch the clip above.

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