Tom Daniels, an assistant professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at Iowa State, knows how to make sparks fly. His summer hobby is setting off fireworks—the ones you see at your local Fourth of July celebration.

“I do everything from wiring and fusing together shells and other pyrotechnics to manually lighting the shells,” he says.” For some shows, he’ll shoot as many as 400 shells into the night sky, bringing oohs and ahhs from young and old alike.

This year, Daniels and his co-workers from Aerial FX in St. Joseph, Missouri, did four shows over the Fourth of July holiday. That, he says, is pretty typical. In all, he might shoot eight to ten shows during the summer, depending on his work schedule at Iowa State.

His hobby isn’t always glamorous, though. Once in a while, instead of lighting the fuses to send exploding rockets into the air, it’s his job to drop the shells into a tube. It’s not as easy as it sounds. “You walk around with an armful of explosive shells, and you hope you don’t get blown to bits,” he explains.

While his passion can be dangerous, Daniels explains that training workshops have shown him and other pyrotechnic professionals how to safely shoot these high-powered fireworks. Knowing the guidelines, he says, is part of the certification process.

Daniels also points out that the greatest number of firework-related injuries comes from products as simple as sparklers, followed by illegal fireworks.

Professional injuries do happen once in a while. “Sure, there is a risk of an accident, but we do a number of things for our safety and crowd safety,” he says. “It’s a matter of minimizing risk.” To do that, Daniels works with four or five other team members for a show in a small community. The crew can be as large as 30 for a city the size of Des Moines.

Of course, planning also mitigates some of the danger, and that’s why Daniels and his crew spend considerable time working out details for every show. Each show requires a level of choreography consistent with the complexity of the performance. Shells can be synchronized with music so that the explosion occurs at a particular moment, he says, “so there’s some level of creativity that goes into a show.”

Getting started
Knowing someone already shooting fireworks is usually how a person gets started in this hobby, and that’s how it happened for Daniels. You might even say he married into the business. “My father-in-law has been shooting professional fireworks at his home shows for 20 years,” he explains, “so I couldn’t wait to help.”

Daniels was hooked right away. Then, about four years ago, he took the next step and became certified through Pyrotechnics Guild International, an independent worldwide nonprofit organization of amateur and professional fireworks enthusiasts that was founded in 1969. Among its purposes, the group promotes the safe and responsible display and use of pyrotechnics and fireworks, along with encouraging the display of public and private fireworks in conjunction with local and national holidays and patriotic events.

While all of his jobs are in Missouri, Daniels would eventually like to get a club started here on campus. “I’ve always thought it would be nice to find a group of interested, mature students to start a club here at Iowa State,” he says. “It has to be the right set of students, but I think it would be great fun.”

Daniels admits to one caveat for anyone thinking about getting into this line of business. “We don’t do it for the money,” Daniels says. “We do it because it’s a lot of fun.”