Summer Friday: Why Do We Celebrate With Fireworks?
How technology from China turned into a July 4 tradition
Every July 4, Americans gather for cookouts, parades, and fireworks. The tradition is so familiar that it feels as old as the nation itself. And in a way, it is: exactly 250 years ago, one of America’s Founding Fathers imagined almost exactly this kind of celebration.
Recalling the day the Continental Congress voted for independence from Great Britain in Philadelphia, John Adams wrote: “It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Adams wrote those words in a letter to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776.
The letter was written between two milestones: the day before, on July 2, the Continental Congress voted for independence from Great Britain in Philadelphia. The next day, on July 4, it adopted the Declaration of Independence. Adams’s prediction was off by a couple of days — Americans wound up celebrating the July 4 signing, not the July 2 independence vote — but he got the spirit of the celebration right.
A year later, on July 4, 1777, Philadelphia held the first organized Independence Day celebration as the Revolutionary War continued raging. The Pennsylvania Evening Post described the scene: “The glorious fourth of July was… accompanied with triple discharges of cannon and small arms, and loud huzzas that resounded from fleet to fleet through the city… the evening was closed with the ringing of bells, and at night there was a grand exhibition of fireworks (which began and concluded with thirteen rockets) on the Commons, and the city was beautifully illuminated.”
But while the nation was new, fireworks were not.
Origins in China
So where did fireworks actually come from? Fireworks originated in China around 200 BC. During the Han Dynasty, people roasted bamboo stalks until the hot air trapped inside made them burst with a bang. But it was not until around 800 AD that the Chinese went further. According to Dorothy Perkins’s Encyclopedia of China: History and Culture, the Chinese packed gunpowder into bamboo shoots and tossed them into fire pits to explode. These were ground-level bursts, not the aerial ones that we know today.
By around 1200, the Chinese had built rocket cannons that used gunpowder to shoot fiery projectiles at their enemies. It was only a matter of time before this aerial warfare technique made its way to festive occasions. So when gunpowder know-how spread west — during the 13th century, carried by merchants, missionaries, and the Mongol conquests of Asia and Eastern Europe — both its military and celebratory uses made the journey too.
European engineers made fireworks bigger and grander. Royals and the Church across Europe staged fireworks displays to mark military victories, religious feasts, and royal occasions.
Lighting up the American Sky
In England, the earliest recorded display of fireworks goes back to King Henry VII, who had fireworks at his wedding to Elizabeth of York in 1486. When the English crossed the Atlantic, the tradition traveled with them to the 13 colonies.
By the early 18th century, the celebrations were making the papers: a May 24, 1722, dispatch from New York in The American Weekly Mercury describes marking King George I’s birthday “in the most splendid Manner we are capable” with “publick Bonfire… Fireworks and a Ball and a fine Entertainment at the Fort by his Excellency.”
While fireworks were becoming increasingly common in the 1700s, they were still relatively simple and monochromatic: a flash of orange and a few explosions. It wasn’t until the 1800s that European chemists discovered that metal salts could paint the sky: strontium for red, barium for green, copper for blue, sodium for yellow. Pyrotechnic “stars” composed of these compounds were packed into an aerial shell, launched overhead, and burst by a fuse at altitude. Like fireworks themselves, the new chemistry traveled across the Atlantic with European immigrants.
Since the nation’s early years, fireworks have continued to show up at America’s big moments — and not just the Fourth of July. When the Statue of Liberty was unveiled on Oct. 28, 1886, a fireworks display was on the list of planned festivities, but fog and rain pushed it to November 1. When it finally happened, the display “lasted for an hour or two… and was accompanied by shouts from the multitude and steam whistles of countless locomotives, factories, [and] tug boats.”
Fireworks today
In America, the tradition has never been bigger. In 2025, Americans set off about 322.4 million pounds of fireworks, according to the American Pyrotechnics Association — roughly 300 million pounds of consumer fireworks and 23 million pounds of professional display pyrotechnics.
And China didn’t just give us the tradition’s origins — the country still supplies fireworks to the whole world, almost single-handedly. China exports about 85% of the world’s fireworks, with the Netherlands a distant second at roughly 3%. About 99% of the fireworks Americans set off come from China, and the APA says 90% of professional display pyrotechnics do, too.
Nearly 250 years after John Adams imagined a nation celebrating with “Pomp and Parade” and “Illuminations,” Americans are still doing that. The bells may be fewer and the bonfires smaller, but the fireworks remain. So if you happen to see the sky light up on July 4, you’re not just watching a show. You’re taking part in a tradition that stretches back more than 2,000 years — from exploding bamboo in ancient China to the birth of a new nation.
Happy 250th Independence Day!