Name: Why You Never See Brilliant Blue Fireworks
Uploaded: 2021-03-15T18:25:25.000Z
Duration: 3 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

[Narrator] Fireworks have been around for millennia.

at a level comparable to the greens and reds and whites,

just because it's a stability issue at high temperatures.

He's one of the world's leading experts in pyrotechnics,

and he says the problem comes down to chemistry.

You mix this stuff up into what's called a pellet,

it sets off the gunpowder, which explodes.

That explosion heats up those color-producing compounds,

Conkling: The hotter you can get the molecules

in your flame, the more emission you're gonna get,

so the brighter and more intense the flame color's gonna be.

will break down those molecules and wash out the color.

But some molecules are hardier than others.

Strontium chloride, the compound used to make red fireworks,

can withstand at least 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

But to make a blue firework, you need copper chloride,

As soon as it gets hot enough to blaze blue,

So pyrotechnicians need to find a mixture

that gets hot enough to set off the blue compound

but not so hot that it destroys the color.

[Narrator] And even after centuries of searching,

we still haven't discovered the right one,

nor have we found a more stable replacement

And even if we do, we'd better hope that it's cheap

Conkling: Arsenic, for example, has been used

is not something you wanna put up in the smoke

[Narrator] To be fair, we've gotten close-ish.

Conkling: There's some respectable pale blues

where the audience is a little closer to the action,

It's been a long search, and we're not there yet.

[Narrator] But there's still hope for bright blue.

so there could be a breakthrough one of these days.

[Narrator] And even if we never find that brilliant blue,

there's still plenty to get excited about on the horizon,

like fireworks that burst into different shapes

So maybe one day we can have an American-flag firework

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Why You Never See Brilliant Blue Fireworks

stuff

intense

delicate

fragile