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This Independence Day will mark a 10-year anniversary — one that none of the celebrants gathered on Boston’s Esplanade will likely remember.
In 1999, hundreds of feet in the air above the Charles River, Massachusetts high-tech know-how came together with the sounds of New Orleans jazz great Louis Prima and blew up in an unprecedented fireworks display. In the background, using software and hardware developed by Bose Corp. veteran Paul McKinley, pyrotechnician Ken Clark timed explosive salutes to each drumbeat of a solo laid out by a Boston Pops percussionist during Prima’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.”
“The response, you could hear it from the barges, just to that little subtle twist, something unexpected,” remembers Clark, then in his 16th year choreographing the display and now retired and living in Boston’s South End.
Until that point, the timing of a rocket’s detonation in the air had been governed by timed fuses, inexactly at best. McKinley, working to commercialize a technology developed at venture-backed Magic Fire Inc. of Natick, had developed circuit boards — built into each firework — that timed the mid-air explosion to the one-thousandth of a second.
Today, fireworks displays everywhere use the techniques pioneered by McKinley and Clark. And Boston-born McKinley is still in charge of Magic Fire — and still providing the stuff that makes exploding gunpowder meet the strains of the orchestra at just the right moment in the middle of the midsummer air.
“Today’s fireworks show, most people don’t realize, is completely computerized,” McKinley said. “It’s still lots and lots and lots of guns, but every one has a wire.”
This July 4, like many before, fireworks technicians aboard barges anchored in the Charles River will sit over four firing panels — industrial computers built to run a fireworks display. (“It won’t run Microsoft Windows,” McKinley quipped.) If all goes well, the technicians have little to do during most of the show. Digital signals govern the timing of each barrage, transmitted from a riverside production booth in standard time code developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
“Once we release the safeties, it’s all on time code,” McKinley said. “The computer shoots the show.”
The one exception is the Pops’ rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, he said — during which, a musically literate technician follows the orchestral score and manually shoots the simulated cannonade.
In some years, McKinley has himself filled that role. In the early 1970s, an engineering degree in hand from Northeastern University, McKinley pursued and got a degree from Berklee College of Music, going on to teach electronic music for a few years, before joining Bose.
In 1998, with advanced degrees from both Harvard University and MIT under his belt, McKinley left Bose to satisfy a childhood fascination with fireworks, born on the shores of New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee during amateur fireworks displays put on by his family.
He had been scratching the itch with part-time grunt work on fireworks crews. When Magic Fire backers Cohasset Capital asked him to find a business application for the young company’s electronic-igniter technology, he left behind his career at Bose.
Boston’s July 4 Esplanade event has benefited ever since, said Rich MacDonald, the Mugar Productions manager who oversees the event, which is sponsored by Boston-based insurance company Liberty Mutual.
Fireworks timed to music creates something bigger than the sum of its parts, MacDonald said while sitting in an office trailer behind the Hatch Shell, which he’ll call home for the coming week. “It really allows, in my opinion, more emotion,” he said.
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