Ruggieri and Sarti, both Italians, used it in the sense of a "flight" of rockets in the programme of their Green Park display in 1749. Ruggieri the younger, however, applies it to a specific kind of revolving firework in his book, and introduces a new word—girande—to which he applies the same meaning as the one generally accepted in this country for girandole. The confusion of these two words, which have the same derivation, may be the explanation of the duplication of meaning, or it may lie in the fact that the name was also applied to the rocket wheel previously mentioned, which both revolves and throws up rockets.
Frézier shows a wheel similar to that given by Babington, and variations on the double saxon, a fixed sun also, as do most early writers, double line rockets to run backwards and forwards and variations. These latter, which appear to have been very popular at this period, were known in France as "courantins." Bate calls them "swevels," other early writers "runners on the line."
The above-mentioned, together with some rather intricate but impracticable appearing water devices, make up the compound fireworks in Frézier's book.
It seems, however, that he must have been behind his day in this branch of the art, as the Aix-la-Chapelle peace display appears to have included several elaborate pieces which, even allowing for the usual exaggeration of the programme, must have required considerable skill and knowledge in construction. These were mostly what were called regulated or regulating pieces, generally described as of a certain number of mutations. The pieces were, and are, although the old descriptions are now dispensed with, so constructed that after being lit they go through a series of alterations in form and movement without further attention.
Some of those described in old works would seem to have
