Page:Pyrotechnics the history and art of firework making (1922).djvu/207

 paper round in the form of a tube, the space so formed containing some mealed powder.

He also describes what he calls fixed wheels, which are in effect the fixed sun of to-day; that is, a framework with cases arranged radially so that the fire is thrown out from the centre.

As variations of the above, he suggests various effects such as "a fixed wheel which shall give divers reports," "which shall cast forth divers fisgigs, and likewise as many reports or breakers," "which shall cast forth many rockets into the ayre." The latter is evidently the prototype of a piece known later as the rocket wheel, popular for some time, but little used at the present, the objection to it being that there is no control over the direction in which the rockets fly from it. The wheel revolves horizontally, and projects a series of rockets into the air as it revolves.

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.