C1 · Advanced
12 min
industrial safetychemistrymanufacturinghistory of sciencechina
Fire and Science: Liuyang and the Secrets of Gunpowder
El fuego y la ciencia: Liuyang y los secretos de la pólvora
An explosion at the world's most famous fireworks factory kills 37 people in Liuyang, China, opening a conversation about the chemistry of gunpowder, the history of explosives, and the human cost behind every celebration. Fletcher and Octavio go deep on the science, the history, and the global implications of what happened in Hunan.
Una explosión en la fábrica de fuegos artificiales más famosa del mundo mata a 37 personas en Liuyang, China, y abre una conversación sobre la química de la pólvora, la historia de los explosivos y el precio humano detrás de cada celebración. Fletcher y Octavio profundizan en la ciencia, la historia y las implicaciones globales de lo que ocurrió en Hunan.
6 essential C1-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| estallar | to burst, to erupt, to break out | El escándalo estalló justo antes de las elecciones, dejando al gobierno sin tiempo para reaccionar. |
| hacer saltar por los aires | to blow sky-high, to blast into pieces | La explosión hizo saltar por los aires toda la nave industrial en cuestión de segundos. |
| onda expansiva | shock wave, blast wave | La onda expansiva de la detonación rompió los cristales de los edificios en un radio de varios kilómetros. |
| reacción en cadena | chain reaction | Una chispa fue suficiente para desencadenar una reacción en cadena que consumió todo el almacén. |
| pirotecnia | pyrotechnics | La pirotecnia es una disciplina que combina química, física e ingeniería de precisión. |
| subcontratado | subcontracted | Gran parte de la producción estaba subcontratada a talleres que operaban sin supervisión adecuada. |
Picture thirty-seven funerals in a single city.
That's where this story starts, and it starts in a place most people have never heard of but whose products they've almost certainly watched light up the sky.
Estamos hablando de Liuyang, una ciudad de Hunan, en el centro de China.
We're talking about Liuyang, a city in Hunan, in central China.
Hace tres días explotó una fábrica de fuegos artificiales y el número de muertos ha subido a treinta y siete, con cincuenta y uno heridos y uno todavía desaparecido.
Three days ago a fireworks factory exploded and the death toll has risen to thirty-seven, with fifty-one injured and one person still missing.
Thirty-seven people.
And the thing I keep coming back to is that this place, Liuyang, isn't just any factory town.
It produces something like half the world's fireworks.
Half.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Liuyang lleva fabricando fuegos artificiales desde hace más de mil trescientos años, desde la dinastía Tang.
Liuyang has been manufacturing fireworks for over thirteen hundred years, since the Tang Dynasty.
No es una industria moderna;
It's not a modern industry;
es una tradición que forma parte del tejido mismo de la ciudad.
it's a tradition that is part of the very fabric of the city.
Thirteen hundred years.
I mean, the Tang Dynasty was running when Charlemagne was still a few generations away.
That's a long time to be blowing things up professionally.
Y hay que entender por qué.
And you have to understand why.
La pólvora negra, que es la base de todo esto, fue inventada en China.
Black powder, which is the foundation of all this, was invented in China.
Los alquimistas taoístas la descubrieron en el siglo noveno buscando el elixir de la inmortalidad.
Taoist alchemists discovered it in the ninth century while searching for the elixir of immortality.
Encontraron lo contrario, diría yo.
They found the opposite, I would say.
That detail never gets old.
People trying to live forever accidentally inventing the thing that would kill people faster than almost anything else.
La mezcla básica es sencilla en apariencia: nitrato de potasio, carbón vegetal y azufre.
The basic mixture appears simple: potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur.
Pero la proporción importa muchísimo.
But the ratio matters enormously.
Un pequeño cambio en las cantidades puede ser la diferencia entre un espectáculo y una catástrofe.
A small change in the amounts can be the difference between a spectacle and a catastrophe.
Walk me through the actual chemistry, because I think people just see the colors and the boom and don't really think about what's happening at the molecular level.
Cuando la pólvora se enciende, la reacción libera una enorme cantidad de gas en fracción de segundo.
When gunpowder ignites, the reaction releases an enormous amount of gas in a fraction of a second.
Ese gas se expande a velocidades de hasta mil metros por segundo.
That gas expands at speeds of up to one thousand meters per second.
El sonido, el calor, la onda expansiva: todo viene de esa liberación brusca de energía.
The sound, the heat, the shock wave: everything comes from that sudden release of energy.
And the colors?
Because that's the part that always struck me as almost magical.
How do you get a specific color out of a controlled explosion?
Ahí entra la química de los metales.
That's where the chemistry of metals comes in.
Las sales metálicas emiten luz de longitudes de onda muy concretas cuando se queman.
Metal salts emit light at very specific wavelengths when they burn.
El estroncio da el rojo;
Strontium gives red;
el bario, el verde;
barium, green;
el cobre, el azul.
copper, blue.
El azul es el más difícil de conseguir, de hecho.
Blue is actually the hardest to achieve.
Blue is the hardest.
That explains something I never could figure out, actually.
You see a lot of red and green, and the blue always looks a little washed out compared to the others.
El problema es que los compuestos de cobre que producen el azul se descomponen a temperaturas altas antes de emitir suficiente luz.
The problem is that the copper compounds that produce blue decompose at high temperatures before emitting enough light.
Los pirotécnicos han estado buscando durante siglos una forma de bajar la temperatura de combustión sin perder la intensidad del color.
Pyrotechnicians have been searching for centuries for a way to lower the combustion temperature without losing color intensity.
Centuries of research just to get a better blue firework.
There's something very human about that.
Anyway, back to Liuyang.
Because the science of what makes fireworks beautiful is also exactly the science of what makes them lethal in a factory setting.
Claro.
Exactly.
En un espectáculo pirotécnico, la explosión es controlada y dirigida hacia arriba.
In a fireworks display, the explosion is controlled and directed upward.
En una fábrica, tienes grandes cantidades de material en un espacio cerrado.
In a factory, you have large quantities of material in an enclosed space.
Cualquier chispa, cualquier fricción inesperada, puede desencadenar una reacción en cadena imposible de detener.
Any spark, any unexpected friction, can trigger a chain reaction impossible to stop.
And that chain reaction is what makes investigating these accidents so difficult afterward.
The evidence is often just, gone.
Sí, es un problema forense enorme.
Yes, it's an enormous forensic problem.
No solo en China, en todas partes.
Not just in China, everywhere.
El accidente de West, Texas, en 2013, tardó años en ser investigado.
The West, Texas accident in 2013 took years to investigate.
El de Tianjin, en 2015, fue incluso más devastador: 173 muertos.
The Tianjin one, in 2015, was even more devastating: 173 dead.
Y en ambos casos reconstruir la causa exacta requirió un trabajo detectivesco extraordinario.
And in both cases, reconstructing the exact cause required extraordinary detective work.
I was in the region when Tianjin happened.
The crater that explosion left was visible in satellite images that afternoon.
It looked like something out of a war zone.
Y Liuyang no es la primera vez.
And Liuyang is not the first time.
Esta ciudad tiene un historial de accidentes graves.
This city has a history of serious accidents.
En 2010, quince muertos.
In 2010, fifteen dead.
En 2015, otro episodio.
In 2015, another episode.
Es una industria que vive literalmente al borde del desastre, y todo el mundo lo sabe, y sin embargo sigue adelante.
It's an industry that literally lives on the edge of disaster, and everyone knows it, and yet it continues.
Why does it continue?
I mean, that's not a rhetorical question.
This city exports to something like half the countries in the world.
When the economics are that large, the pressure to keep production going must be almost impossible to resist.
Porque Liuyang no tiene alternativa sencilla.
Because Liuyang has no easy alternative.
Alrededor del cuarenta por ciento de la economía local depende directamente de esta industria.
Around forty percent of the local economy depends directly on this industry.
Estamos hablando de más de trescientas fábricas y cientos de miles de empleos.
We're talking about more than three hundred factories and hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Para muchas familias en esa ciudad, la alternativa a fabricar pólvora es, simplemente, no comer.
For many families in that city, the alternative to making gunpowder is, simply, not eating.
That's a brutal calculation.
And it's not unique to China, obviously.
There are dangerous industries everywhere where the workers know the risk and take it anyway because the options are worse.
Hay algo que me parece importante señalar aquí: la normativa china sobre explosivos existe y es bastante estricta sobre el papel.
There's something I think is important to point out here: Chinese regulations on explosives exist and are quite strict on paper.
El problema no es la ausencia de regulación sino la distancia entre la ley escrita y lo que ocurre realmente en las fábricas.
The problem is not the absence of regulation but the distance between the written law and what actually happens inside the factories.
That gap between law and practice is one of the oldest stories in industrial history.
Britain had factory safety laws in the 1830s.
That didn't stop children from dying in textile mills for another forty years.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y en el caso de los fuegos artificiales hay otra dimensión que complica todo: la estacionalidad.
And in the case of fireworks there is another dimension that complicates everything: seasonality.
La demanda se concentra en el Año Nuevo chino, el Diwali, el cuatro de julio, la Nochevieja europea.
Demand is concentrated around Chinese New Year, Diwali, the Fourth of July, European New Year's Eve.
Las fábricas producen a ritmo máximo en ciertos meses y eso es cuando los accidentes se concentran también.
The factories produce at maximum capacity during certain months and that is also when accidents cluster.
So every major celebration in the world is, in some indirect sense, connected to the risk those workers in Liuyang are absorbing.
That's not comfortable to think about.
No lo es.
They're not.
Aunque hay que matizar: no todas las condiciones son iguales.
Although we should nuance this: not all conditions are equal.
Algunas fábricas de Liuyang tienen certificaciones internacionales y cumplen estándares razonables.
Some Liuyang factories have international certifications and meet reasonable standards.
El problema son las que operan en los márgenes del sistema, a menudo subcontratadas, a menudo sin supervisión real.
The problem is those operating at the margins of the system, often subcontracted, often without real supervision.
The subcontracting angle is important.
Because that's how accountability gets diffused.
By the time you trace it back from the fireworks display in Madrid or Sydney to the factory where something went wrong, the chain of responsibility is so long it effectively disappears.
Es el mismo problema que con los textiles en Bangladesh, el cacao en Costa de Marfil, los minerales en el Congo.
It's the same problem as with textiles in Bangladesh, cocoa in Ivory Coast, minerals in the Congo.
La globalización ha sido extraordinariamente eficiente exportando el riesgo a donde cuesta menos gestionarlo.
Globalization has been extraordinarily efficient at exporting risk to where it costs less to manage it.
That's putting it plainly.
And it raises a question that I don't think has a clean answer: is there a future for industrial fireworks manufacturing that doesn't look like this?
Because there are alternatives emerging.
Los fuegos artificiales de drones, sí.
Drone fireworks, yes.
Ya los hemos visto en ceremonias de apertura, en eventos deportivos.
We've already seen them at opening ceremonies, at sporting events.
Son espectaculares, seguros, no producen humo ni residuos químicos.
They're spectacular, safe, they produce no smoke or chemical residue.
Pero cuestan mucho más y no tienen el mismo impacto físico, esa percusión en el pecho que sientes con un cohete real.
But they cost much more and they don't have the same physical impact, that percussion in your chest you feel with a real rocket.
The chest percussion.
That's the right way to put it.
There's something almost primal about the concussive boom of a firework.
A drone light show is beautiful, but it doesn't feel like anything.
It's a screensaver.
Es una descripción perfectamente americana, Fletcher.
That's a perfectly American description, Fletcher.
Pero tienes razón en algo: la respuesta emocional humana a los explosivos es muy profunda, evolutivamente hablando.
But you're right about something: the human emotional response to explosions is very deep, evolutionarily speaking.
El sonido fuerte activa el sistema de alarma del cerebro y luego lo libera en placer cuando comprendes que estás a salvo.
A loud sound activates the brain's alarm system and then releases it into pleasure when you realize you're safe.
Es literalmente una descarga de adrenalina seguida de alivio.
It's literally an adrenaline rush followed by relief.
So we're essentially paying to be briefly terrified and then reassured.
Which, now that I say it out loud, describes a lot of human entertainment.
El cine de terror, los parques de atracciones, las montañas rusas...
Horror cinema, amusement parks, roller coasters...
sí.
yes.
Y los fuegos artificiales tienen la ventaja añadida de que son colectivos.
And fireworks have the added advantage of being collective.
Cuando una ciudad entera los ve a la vez, hay una dimensión de cohesión social que no tiene precio.
When an entire city sees them at the same time, there's a dimension of social cohesion that's priceless.
And that takes us back to where we started.
Thirty-seven people died in Liuyang making something designed to bring people together.
There's a real tension in that fact that I don't think gets enough attention when we light the fuses on the Fourth of July.
Eso me lleva a algo que me parece lingüísticamente interesante, ya que hemos estado usando todo el tiempo palabras como «explotar» y «estallar».
That brings me to something I find linguistically interesting, since we've been using words like 'explotar' and 'estallar' throughout.
En español no son intercambiables, y creo que vale la pena detenerse un momento.
In Spanish they're not interchangeable, and I think it's worth pausing for a moment.
Actually, yes, I noticed you switching between the two and I meant to ask.
Is there a real difference?
«Explotar» es más técnico y causal: la bomba explotó porque alguien la detonó.
'Explotar' is more technical and causal: the bomb exploded because someone detonated it.
«Estallar» tiene una energía más súbita, más visceral, como algo que revienta desde dentro sin control aparente.
'Estallar' has a more sudden, more visceral energy, like something bursting from within with no apparent control.
La guerra estalló.
War broke out.
Un escándalo estalla.
A scandal erupts.
No dirías «la guerra explotó».
You wouldn't say 'the war exploded.'
So «estallar» is what you reach for when something is overwhelming, uncontainable.
That's interesting because in English we do something similar.
We say a crisis 'erupts' or 'breaks out' rather than 'explodes', even though an explosion is more dramatic.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y hay una tercera que usaría en este contexto: «hacer saltar por los aires».
And there's a third one I'd use in this context: 'hacer saltar por los aires.' Which literally means to make something fly through the air in pieces.
Que literalmente significa hacer que algo vuele por el aire en pedazos.
It's more colloquial, more graphic, and you'd use it talking about this factory: the explosion blew the entire building sky-high.
Es más coloquial, más gráfica, y la usarías hablando de esta fábrica: la explosión hizo saltar por los aires el edificio entero.
«Hacer saltar por los aires.» To make fly through the air.
I have to say, Spanish has a gift for capturing physical reality in ways English just flattens out.
We say 'blown up' and call it a day.
«Blown up» no está mal.
'Blown up' isn't bad.
Aunque si me permites, Fletcher, lo que más me sorprende es que hayas llegado al final del episodio sin intentar usar ninguna de estas palabras en español.
Although if you'll allow me, Fletcher, what surprises me most is that you've made it to the end of the episode without trying to use any of these words in Spanish.
Me preocupa que estés mejorando.
I'm worried you might be improving.
Don't worry.
I'm saving my attempts for when your mother is in the room.
Thirty-seven people in Liuyang.
Remember that number the next time the sky lights up.