We do not see blue fireworks because they are so difficult to manufacture

• Bright blue fireworks are much harder to produce than common colors like red, white or green.
• Pyrotechnicians have been trying to produce brilliant blue fireworks for centuries, to no avail.
• The challenge is that the copper compound needed to create this bright color dissipates at the high temperatures needed to operate a fireworks.
• Meanwhile, chemicals that produce more common colors like red, green, and white are harder to destroy.
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Here is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Fireworks have existed for millennia. They flood the sky with bright shards of scarlet, emerald and ivory. But never blue. Pyrotechnicians have been trying to produce blue fireworks for centuries and they have not been successful yet. Why is blue so elusive?

John Conkling: Blue has been very, very hard to reach at a level comparable to greens and reds and whites, simply because it's a high-temperature stability problem.

Narrator: That's John Conkling. He is one of the world's foremost experts in pyrotechnics and he says the problem comes from chemistry.

You see, to make fireworks, you need four basic components: the fuel, usually gunpowder, a compound that produces color, a fuse and glue to hold it together .

You mix these elements in what you call a pellet, then you throw it in the air. When the fuse burns, it fires the gunpowder, which explodes. This explosion warms these compounds producing colors and makes them shine.

And it turns out that

Tangle: The more you heat the molecules in your flame, the more you will light, the more the color of the flame will be bright and intense.

Narrator: But there is a limit. Because too hot temperatures will break these molecules and wash the color.

But some molecules are more resistant than others. Strontium chloride, the compound used to make red fireworks, can withstand at least 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. It's hotter than lava. But to make a blue fire, you need copper chloride, which is much more fragile.

As soon as it's hot enough to flash blue, at least 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it begins to degrade. And even after centuries of research, we still have not found the right choice or found a more stable substitute for copper chloride. And even if we did, we'd better hope it was cheap and nontoxic.

Tangle: Arsenic, for example, has been used in old firework formulations, but obviously, an arsenic-based compound is not something you would like to put in the smoke when people watch the fireworks.

Narrator: To be fair, we became close.

Tangle: There are respectable pale blues used in special effects, where the audience is closer to the action, where the color is more visible. But the search has been long and we are not there yet.

Narrator: But there is still hope for the bright blue.

Tangle: Certainly it is possible. There are many people working on it. There could be a breakthrough one of these days.

Narrator: And even if we never find this brilliant blue, there is still something to marvel at the horizon, like a fireworks that explodes in different forms and patterns, even letters. So maybe one day we could see a fire under American flag for July 4th.

We just need to get this blue.