089 SMITH JOURNALEVERY YEAR, FORTUNATO FOTI
STANDS BENEATH THE SYDNEY
HARBOUR BRIDGE AND WAITS
TO WATCH EIGHT MONTHS OF
HARD WORK EXPLODE. SEVERAL
TECHNICIANS ARE NEARBY, BROWS
FURROWED, CHECKING SEQUENCES
ON A LAPTOP. THE CLOCK STRIKES
MIDNIGHT. IT’S GO TIME. BANG!
WHOOSH! SHOOM! HAPPY NEW YEAR.
..........................................
Violet supernovas burst over the water,
a spider web of Brocades, orange Fireflies
and Bombettes of pure magenta. Schools
of silver Fish swim across the clouds as
pinwheels twirl, green Pistils bloom
inside one another, and Ring Shells,
bright pink Dahlias and Tourbillions
burn circles in the sky.
Just another day at the oice.
Fortunato is a maker of fireworks, just like
his father before him – and his father before
him, and so on and so on. It’s safe to say
sulphur runs through the family’s veins:
Fotis were lighting fuses before the Russian
Revolution. They were blasting Roman
Candles while Darwin sailed on The Beagle.
In fact, the Foti family were tinkering with
chemical compounds before the periodic
table was even invented. For 225 years they’ve
mastered the art of making things that blow
up. Now they handle most of the major
firework events in Australia – over 400 shows
a year – from Sydney’s N YE celebrations
to festivals like Dark Mofo in Hobart.
The Foti family began plying their trade
in Sicily in 1793, which makes Fortunato a
seventh-generation pyrotechnician. “As a
kid, I used to go and help at the factory on
school holidays,” he explains down the line
from the company’s complex in Marulan,
a two-hour drive south-west of Sydney.
“I’ve been doing it full-time since I was- It’s nice to have the next generation
coming through now. My kids are looking
forward to working on New Year’s Eve.”
It was Fortunato’s grandfather, Celestino Foti,
who brought the family name to Australia.
He was a POW at Cowra, NSW, during
World War II, and oicially migrated in
the early 1950s. Tucked in his suitcase was
something more valuable than cordite:
his recipe cards. These contained some of
the family’s original alchemical formulas,
handwritten on ink-stained, soot-blasted
paper. He worked in exact, secretive
measurements – so much magnesium
oxide here, half a teaspoon of potassium
nitrate there – that he always seemed more
scientist than tradesman. “Obviously you
can’t do a course that teaches you how to
go and make fireworks,” Fortunato says, “so
the formulas and compositions are passed
down from generation to generation.”For the Foti family, these cards are priceless.
It’d be like a physics student finding Niels
Bohr’s lost journals or the late-night doodles
of Isaac Newton. Fortunato says some of
the formulas needed to be updated and
the chemical batches tweaked, but the
basic recipes have remained unchanged for
hundreds of years. Still, there ’s no harm
in moving with the times. “We like to play
around a bit,” he admits. “I’m one of eight
family members involved in the business,
and we’re always bouncing ideas o each
other. Also the industry is changing. When
I started out, you had to run around with
a flare and light all the fuses by hand.
Now it’s all controlled through computers
and sequencers. There are 175 positions
on the Harbour Bridge alone, and we
can fire everything from a laptop.”>>Clockwise from top left
Foti at his Marulan
pyrotechnic centre
A handful of copper sulphate,
used to create blue explosions
Empty mortars, into which
the load and lifting charge
of a firework is packed
These new scripting programs, designed
in the U.S., mean that Fortunato and his
team can launch literally hundreds of
rockets per second (try doing that in the
dark with a flare). They can allocate
certain fireworks to certain cues, and
easily synchronise the show to music.
“We can time our explosions to drop with
the beat or rise to a crescendo,” he says.
“It’s a lot safer these days for the operator.
But it does take the buzz out of it a bit.”The family’s formulas might be a tightly
guarded secret, but Fortunato says there are
over 50 dierent chemicals that can be used
in fireworks. Each cardboard shell usually
contains around seven dierent elements,
which ignite to produce a particular eect.
These need to be packed in a very specific
order. The load is then glued together, a bit
like papier-mâché, and placed in a mortar
with a lifting charge. That charge allows the
firework to reach a predetermined height
before exploding. “Every firework has an
oxidiser, a fuel, and a colour enhancement,”
Fortunato explains. “Copper salts create blue.
Purple is a mixture of strontium and copper.
Yellow is sodium nitrate. But obviously
you need to calculate the burn rates for
each one, so the firework holds its shape.”The chemistry involved makes Breaking Bad
look like Play School. Take a green firework,
for instance. To make one, you need barium.
But barium is unstable at room temperature,
so it has to be combined with a more stable
compound, like chlorinated rubber. When
the charge explodes, the chlorine is released
and forms barium chloride, which burns
green. Now imagine your barium chloride
shell is just one of over 100,000 pyrotechnic
eects, choreographed to the millisecond
and strapped to the Sydney Harbour
Bridge. Projected tourism revenue: $ 170
million. Walter White could take notes.