Igniting Early Modern Science through Pyrotechnics: Simon Werrett, Fireworks
In the early professional history of the history of science, an idealist perspective regarding the Scientific Revolution, most masterfully developed by Alexandre Koyré, held sway. However, in the 1940s, a group of Marxist-oriented European scholars proposed an alternate view whereby the motive force for scientific innovation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was located in the interaction between artisans and scholars. The most prominent of these Europeans was the Austrian émigré Edgar Zilsel. Although the hegemony of the idealist historical perspective has long since been challenged, no coherent alternative narrative reflecting the Zilsel perspective has emerged. While not attempting anything so ambitious, this fascinating book (Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. vii+359. $45) utilizes the development of pyrotechny in the early modern period as a case that affirms the Zilsel thesis that crafts made a significant contribution to the creation of a “new science” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (p. 236).
Moreover, Simon Werrett carries his narrative of the interaction of the pyrotechnic craftsmen and natural philosophers (and the impact of pyrotechnics on experimental science) from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In particular, Werrett considers comparatively the role of pyrotechny in three different eighteenth-century sites: Saint Petersburg, Paris, and London. In so doing, he highlights a second theme of the book, the importance of what might be termed “sociocultural geography” (my neologism). By this I mean that Werrett investigates regional states of affairs with respect to the relations and interactions of artisans, artists, and savants and their impact on the deployment and the scientific import of pyrotechny for each site.
The first part of the book focuses on the role of “gunners,” the fabricators of gunpowder and firearms in the development of fireworks for spectacles to accompany church and courtly festivals. The use of fireworks followed quite rapidly on the introduction of gunpowder itself into Europe. Firework spectacles get vivid treatment both in text and illustrations but Werrett is more interested in detailing how the gunners extended the domain of their craft toward the socially and intellectually more lofty realms of the sciences and the humanities. Some of this followed naturally on the kinds of spectacular items produced in firework displays—particularly celestial ones such as stars and meteors. Alchemy was one such realm, whose idiom the gunners themselves employed to explain the nature and effects of pyrotechny. More particularly, Werrett argues that, in order to “raise the status of their labors during this period” (p. 35), gunners appealed to various domains of the liberal arts and the new humanism: geometry, philosophy, literature, and the arts, as well as to a distinguished classical origin (the activities of Archimedes). These attributions appeared in treatises on pyrotechny.
This is an extremely interesting section. However, this reader was frustrated by a certain casualness in the accounting of who wrote what and for what purpose. Many of the cited authors, such as Vannoccio Biringuccio and Niccolò Tartaglia were not primarily gunners, although the former published one of the first treatises on “pirotechnia” and the latter wrote on gunnery. There are some treatises by authors who were clearly gunners (such as John Babington, author of a Pyrotechnia of 1633) but we learn little about who he or other gunners were or how they were trained and organized. This is probably not surprising for such artisans, but more attention to the contexts in which authors who were not gunners wrote in elevated language on pyrotechny would have gone a long way to elucidating Werrett’s version of the Zilsel thesis.
Werrett demonstrates convincingly that pyrotechny became a resource for early-seventeenth-century formulators of the new natural philosophical enterprise, such as Tommaso Campanella and Francis Bacon and, at the end of that century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. However, there appears to be a limitation in pyrotechny’s exemplification of the Zilsel thesis: no scientific “advance” (to use a Whiggish term) seems to have been directly brought about through pyrotechnical activities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The remainder of the book focuses on the second theme outlined above: the comparative account of the differing local circumstances under which pyrotechny was practiced and in which it interacted with natural philosophy. In late-seventeenth-century and early-eighteenth-century England (London), there was great ambivalence as to whether pyrotechny should be regarded as public spectacle or as subject for natural philosophical investigation (or both). In the interregnum, the alchemical orientation of many of the radicals lent support to the alchemical connotations and implications of pyrotechny (George Starkey, made famous in recent decades through the scholarship of William Newman and Lawrence Principe, appears here as the author of Pyrotechny Asserted [1658]). But after the Restoration, the old ambivalence asserted itself, particularly in reaction to the perceived Catholic and absolutist implications of spectacular and seemingly miraculous fireworks displays. The Royal Society of London, for one, distanced itself from pyrotechnical experiments. However, by the turn of the eighteenth century, pyrotechny acquired a new practical cachet suited to the growing power of British commerce and empire. These valuations did not come from gunners but rather from those of a more philosophical disposition, such as the theologian William Whiston.
Conversely, in early-eighteenth-century Russia, it was the natural philosophical enterprise of the newly organized Saint Petersburg Academy of Science that evoked ambivalence and suspicion; the savants here utilized the design of pyrotechnical displays for imperial dynastic celebrations to convey the importance and ingenuity of science. In Paris, finally, the context of pyrotechny had important literary dimensions. One of the interesting developments of the eighteenth century was the movement of Italian pyrotechny experts to other parts of Europe. This was particularly marked in Paris, where perhaps the most celebrated of all pyrotechnical families— Italians named Ruggieri—settled in Paris in the eighteenth century and rapidly established their primacy as pyrotechnic artificers.
The activities of Italians inspired a number of fireworks treatises. Werrett contrasts two of these. That by a French artisanal artificer, Jean-Charles Perrinet d’Orval, purported to reveal the “secrets” of the Ruggieris’ skill in pyrotechny, and the other, actually written early in the century by a “learned engineer,” Amédée-François Frézier, attempted to place the subject in more elevated literary and philosophical form. Finally, in mid-century, pyrotechny received treatment in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, in which both Perrinet’s and Frézier’s treatises were utilized by the article’s literary author, Louis de Cahusac.
One of the most interesting sections of this book is the narrative of the role that pyrotechny played in eighteenth-century experimental philosophy. Werrett details how “philosophical fireworks” were deployed in “pleasure gardens” in London and Paris. A changing society and social role for fireworks provided the context: the rise of a commercial middle class, literate and curious. More particularly, fireworks became associated both in popular middle-class culture and in the more specialized scientific culture, with the spread of experimental philosophy, particularly with the dramatic and fashionable electrical experiments of the mid- and late eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, pyrotechny received what was its ultimate scientific cachet, association with the new chemistry of Lavoisier. Claude-Fortuné Ruggieri, for example, raised the status of the pyrotechnist, according to Werrett, to that of “an artist skilled in ‘applied chemistry,’ while fireworks recipes appeared in books of ‘chemical technology’” (p. 233).
This exposition of the book hardly begins to do justice to the fascinating observations and insights contained in it. However, I must say that I came away from Fireworks with a feeling of frustration over the nature and role of the fireworks artificers. Although Werrett gives considerable attention to their relative status compared to architects and natural philosophers, I still had little sense of who they were. By the eighteenth century, they clearly were no longer “gunners” as in earlier periods, but we are given very little indication of how (and why) their craft location changed—particularly how it related to the increasingly state-regulated munitions makers and professionalized artillerists of the eighteenth century. I think that it is telling in this connection that Werrett says nothing about who the post-1800 “pyrotechnists” were once they received their scientific cachet.
Werrett recognizes that there is a problem with the end of his narrative, which he styles “Gone in a Flash: The Disappearing History of Fireworks” (pp. 243–47). He suggests a variety of reasons for this, which would take too long to elaborate here. But we are still left somewhat in the dark regarding the transformation and/or disappearance of those managing fireworks, who had figured so prominently earlier.
Notwithstanding this criticism, I found the book fascinating, sophisticated, and highly enlightening. It adds considerably to our already rich scholarly literature on early modern science, technology, society, and culture—if indeed the boundaries implied by these terms have not been made obsolete by this literature.
©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.
Filed under: 
RSS