This year it falls to me to ring out the old year here on Amazing Stories. What better topic to choose for my New Year’s Eve post, than Fireworks!
By the time this blog post will go live, for me the new year will already be several hours old: New Zealand always goes first.
I haven’t quite managed to find images to represent each and every time zone, but there is an image for every time zone: I didn’t know this before I wrote this blog, but there really are 26, not 24 as one might assume. Good for me, because I had the greatest trouble editing down all those glorious images DeviantArt was throwing at me! I really am a sucker for a good firework.
I do apologize for being biased toward those parts of the world I am personally familiar with: though I would have liked to find at least one more good firework from Latin America! Perhaps I should have run a search in Spanish.
These days, firework displays may seem like something truly universal: ranging from the sophisticated and artful displays one can admire at international pyrotechnics festivals, over the flamboyance of public events on various national holidays, to the cheerful chaos of people firing up their own on occasions like New Year’s Eve.
Originally, the art of pyrotechnic displays came from China – the first documents date from the 7th century, and by the turn of the first millennium there was an established class of professional pyrotechnicians, while ordinary people could buy various kinds of fireworks from market vendors – it was believed that they chased bad luck away.
From there, the knowledge of how to make fireworks, along with the knowledge of the uses of gunpowder, first spread to the Arab world. Europe didn’t catch on to using fireworks for entertainment purposes until the 17th century, but by the middle of the 18th century they had become an essential part of the pomp and circumstance of various European courts, for instance Versailles. Clearly, in our time this baroque spectacle is having a big renaissance!
Source: Wikipedia article on fireworks
Wishing you all some jolly good New Year’s Eve fireworks, and all the best for a rainbow coloured New Year 2015!
All images are copyright the respective photographers, and may not be reproduced without permission.
