Science with Fireworks! How to Smother a Fire.
Reconstructed for the archive — this video never had a written companion, so I wrote one from the original footage with my own custom AI tools and a little good old-fashioned tweaking for accuracy.
This episode came out a day late, and for once it wasn’t because I lost the footage. While we were filming that weekend, our neighbor’s house caught fire, and we spent the rest of the day helping keep things wet and safe until the fire department arrived. Everyone was okay, but it rearranged the shoot in my head — the Fourth of July stopped being the day to run the fireworks video we’d planned and became the day to slow down and teach some fire safety, because it had just stopped being abstract.
Before lighting anything, I asked my son what fire needs to keep burning. He said “paper,” which isn’t wrong, just aimed small. Fire needs fuel — paper counts, and so does the wax in a candle — and it needs oxygen, and forgetting that second one is the whole reason you can blow out a candle but should never blow on a bonfire. Blow at a small flame and you push its oxygen away faster than it can grab more, so it goes out; blow at a big fire and you’ve just fed it more air. So instead of blowing, we smothered: cover a flame with something that won’t burn, cut off its air, and let it go out on its own. We dropped a glass over a lit candle and watched it shrink as it used up the trapped oxygen, then did the same with a sparkler in progressively smaller containers — a bottle, then a Petri dish — since less air means it dies faster. Outdoors, on a real fire, the same idea scales up to a fireproof blanket thrown over the flames.
None of this is a solo-kid activity, and I mean that plainly. Every part happened outside, with an adult on the flame and a real extinguisher standing by, and I’d say the same to anyone at home: a candle and a controlled smother test are one thing, but fireworks and fire in general are not something to hand a kid unsupervised — full stop. If you want to try the smother trick, a candle and a glass jar are plenty, no fireworks required, and it makes “fire needs oxygen” stick better than just saying it. Next time, we make friends with a fire extinguisher.
I'm Joseph Dattilo — engineer-founder in Lansing, Michigan, author of the FleetHarbor suite, and founder of Date Palm Media. More about me · More writing · Get in touch