During the following century, as compound fireworks developed in this country, the Italian and French nomenclature was introduced, many of which survive at the present time.
The pyrotechnists of the eighteenth century seem to have delighted in inventing new terms, possibly with the idea of impressing the layman. Frézier, writing over a hundred years later than Babington, records very little advance in revolving fireworks, except in the matter of names. He classifies all revolving pieces as girandoles. This word appears in pyrotechny very frequently; curiously enough, nearly every writer has attached a different meaning to it. Frézier explains that the word is derived from girare—to revolve or gyrate, from the Greek.
Bate applied this meaning to it. He says, “How to make gironels or fire wheeles.” He is, however, the only English writer to do so; others use it to mean a flight of rockets, and occasionally for an elaborate fixed piece of the fountain type.
Ruggieri and Sarti, both Italians, used it in the sense of a “flight” of rockets in the programme of their Green Park display in 1749. Ruggieri the younger, however, applies it to a specific kind of revolving firework in his book, and introduces a new word—girande—to which he applies the same meaning as the one generally accepted in this country for girandole. The confusion of these two words, which have the same derivation, may be the explanation of the duplication of meaning, or it may lie in the fact that the name was also applied to the rocket wheel previously mentioned, which both revolves and throws up rockets.
Frézier shows a wheel similar to that given by Babington, and variations on the double saxon, a fixed sun also, as do most early writers, double line rockets to run backwards and forwards and variations. These latter, which appear to have been very popular at this period, were known in France as “courantins.” Bate calls them “swevels,” other early writers “runners on the line.”
The above-mentioned, together with some rather intricate but impracticable appearing water devices, make up the compound fireworks in Frézier’s book.
It seems, however, that he must have been behind his day in this branch of the art, as the Aix-la-Chapelle peace display appears to have included several elaborate pieces which, even allowing for the usual exaggeration of the programme, must have required considerable skill and knowledge in construction. These were mostly what were called regulated or regulating pieces, generally described as of a certain number of mutations. The pieces were, and are, although the old descriptions are now dispensed with, so constructed that after being lit they go through a series of alterations in form and movement without further attention.
Some of those described in old works would seem to have required more than a slight element of luck for their successful performance.
To-day it is often found more advantageous to make a second lighting in cases where there is a danger of premature ignition, the effect to the spectators being identical, and the successful functioning of the piece secured. This does not apply to all pieces of this nature, as with modern safety fuse the pyrotechnist has considerable advantage over the earlier practitioners.
The modern spectator is only concerned with the effect produced, not by the means adopted to produce it. It is difficult to-day to realise the position occupied by the pyrotechnist of the eighteenth century. He carried out his work personally, with of course trained assistants, and occupied a position similar to the artist or sculptor. Each piece was looked upon as a work of art, the personal effort of the pyrotechnic artist. Ruggieri gives some idea of this in the following passage from his book: