Donna Forman, age 12, of Daly City, California, for her question:

Who started fireworks?

The Chinese claim that fireworks started in China and reliable historians agree with this. Nobody knows who set off the first of these wondrous displays, but it happened many centuries ago. The Chinese like to make a big thing of their holiday parades and celebrations. The shows they enjoy best are the gayest and gaudiest ones.. A show, they consider, is even better if it happens to include a few sudden surprises to startle people out of their wits.

A firecracker is just the thing to startle people and leave them agog with admiration. Some historians suspect that Chinese inventors strained their brains a long time to find just the right ingredients to make it work. Apparently they experimented with several more or less harmless explosive materials. At last they discovered black powder, alias gunpowder, and the Chinese firework business boomed. Centuries later, they introduced it to visitors from Europe    who took the idea home and used the gunpowder to create firearms.