Page:Pyrotechnics the history and art of firework making (1922).djvu/118

This page needs to be proofread.

centre of the Terrace, the designs varying in form, movement and colour from time to time, the fire of the centre or largest wheel forming a circle one hundred feet in diameter.

The historical displays during this period include the displays given in India in 1875-6, during the tour of King Edward, then Prince of Wales, at Bombay, Madura, Colombo, Madras, and Jaipur, and a series of enormous displays carried out at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, at one of which 250,000 people paid half-a-dollar admission, and in 1877, the displays given at Calcutta and Delhi on the occasion of the assumption by Queen Victoria of the title Empress of India.

The Jubilee and Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria produced enormous activity in the manufacture of fireworks. Displays great and small took place all over the United Kingdom, or rather, the Empire.

Among the displays fired on the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee, certainly not the least interesting, although comparatively small in extent, was that given at Blantyre in the heart of the African continent. This display, which included a portrait of Her late Majesty, was carried up three hundred and sixty miles of the Zambesi, thence by canoe over eighty miles of sandbanks and mud, and finally thirty miles overland with a rise of 3,500 feet.

Other displays were the display on the Tagus in 1886 on the occasion of the marriage of the late King of Portugal; the display fired from Brooklyn Bridge for the Columbus Tercentenary in 1892; the Imperial Fete on the Danube in 1903; the display fired from thirteen battleships moored at a distance of a quarter of a mile from each other on the occasion of the "Entente Cordiale" visit of the French Fleet in 1905; the display celebrating the Tercentenary of the founding of Quebec in 1908; and the greatest display of fireworks