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Fireworks were invented by the Chinese thousands of years ago. The explosive powders they used were seen as magical; the chemical reactions they caused were highly unstable, and so the knowledge of how to make them was considered occult and a secret highly guarded. It wasn't until very recently that the chemical mixture was believed to have been discovered; a modern test proved that the Chinese were, indeed, able to create explosives. Fireworks used to be used for military purposes, as they were like primitive rockets. Basically, it would be a stick attached to a box that allowed the reaction to vent out in one direction, providing thrust. A firecracker isn't an explosion per se; it is more like an extremely quick chemical reaction. Such reactions are very exothermic, and the heat released coupled with the speed lead people to believe that it is an explosion.
Nowadays fireworks are commonly used for recreational purposes such as the Fourth of July holiday in the United States. Every year people suffer injuries or die from firework-related accidents during the Fourth, leading to the banning of certain types of fireworks. The most common injuries inflicted are blown off fingers or limbs. In an episode (movie?) of Southpark, the citizens, disgruntled at the ban on fireworks, decided to make a gigantic "snake" for the fourth of july. When they released it, they found out the snake would not stop growing. The two firearm hicks (one of them uses a machine to talk) went into Mexico to buy the "good" fireworks, and thus saved the United States from the giant snake by shooting real fireworks at it.
Most fireworks are sold around the Fourth of July at stands all around most towns. These stands can be operated by anyone; I've even seen church groups run them.


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EDIT: I just now realized I could have looked up information. I thought the whole point was that we couldn't!

I'm going to make it a personal challenge to not look up any information in this thread.

The Sun has been worshiped by people since the dawn of religion. It has been assumed by many peoples to have been carried across the sky by a god; the Greeks believed Apollo was the god of the sun, and that Hyperion carried it in his chariot. The Norse myths believe that the sun is being chased across the sky by an enormous wolf, which will, during Ragnarok, finally catch up and devour it. The Aztecs built in their metropolis the Pyramid of the Sun, the largest pyramid in Mexico, where it is believed human sacrifices would occur to keep the sun shining. In one episode of the Twilight Zone, the protagonists are a group of college-age seniors going on their last trip together, hiking somewhere in the mountains of the Southwest. Inside a cave they discover an urn filled with blood. They accidentally spill it, and subsequently the sun disappears for days. Realizing that without the sun, all life on Earth will die, they choose a human sacrifice by drawing straws. They fill the urn with their friend's blood, and the sun finally returns. In The Benchwarmers, there is a character who has a phobia of the sun. By the end of the movie, he is convinced that the "sun is not a monster."

Basically, the sun is a giant thermonuclear reactor. It was born when another star somewhat close died in a supernova, blowing interstellar gas into itself, from where gravity began to slowly compile the gas into a center. Eventually there was so much gas being forced together by its own gravity that the pressure was enough to induce thermonuclear fusion. In this process, four hydrogen atoms fuse nuclei to form a helium atom (I think deuterium?) and energy. The tiny amount of energy that is converted from the mass of the hydrogen atoms is what keeps the sun bright, hot, and from collapsing in on itself. Eventually, the sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and will resort to helium fusion. The sun will go through many stages of using heavier elements for fuel, during which it will become a red giant and expand to past the orbit of our good, green Earth. The surface will appear red to outside observers, but it will be hotter than the surface is now. Eventually there will be no more fuel left to produce radiation; the radiation that keeps the sun from collapsing in on itself due to gravity. The sun will begin to rapidly contract as everything collects in on the center of gravity. Once that happens, the outer layers will blow off to leave the core of the sun, which will be pure carbon (diamond, in fact). This will be known as a white dwarf, and it will be 100 billion years before the sun cools down enough to not be seen. It will still give off light, but not from nuclear fusion. Its volume will be significantly reduced to less than the size of our Earth, but with much of its original mass.

The original cloud that created the sun also gave rise to our planets. Because elements heaver than hydrogen are only produced by nuclear fusion, we know that another star had to die in order to give rise to the multitude of elements we find on our planet. Thus, we also find a large portion of heavy elements inside our sun than in older, first generation stars, who are only made up of hydrogen and helium.

The sun's energy is a major driving force of life. Without energy input from the sun, life could not have arisen originally. It is the energy the sun gave in the form of UV radiation and x-rays that allowed the primordial soup of molecules to form the very first form of life, the self-replicating molecule. Over billions of years, the replicating molecule was able to undergo Darwinian evolution, and newer versions of the molecule which weren't exact replicas of the original but had a characteristic that made them survive better took over the original molecule. Eventually, RNA and DNA were formed, which is the basis of life as we know it. Without the sun, none of this would have been possible because of the second law of thermodynamics. While the complexity in the world is rising, the sun makes sure that the second law is not broken by maintaining the chaos in space.

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