We are often told that things don't just come from thin air. Well, in this video, I did make something from the air: a gunpowder-like pyrotechnic composition! While this may seem impossible, through the magic of the Birkeland-Eyde process, it can be (and WAS) done! To be fair, I also had to use a bunch of wood ash, water, copper metal, powdered sugar, and burned cream of tartar. Check out this LabCoatz short to see how I did it...

In depth:
Electric arcs are so hot, that they basically "burn" the nitrogen and oxygen in air to form nitrogen dioxide. This is a brown gas that dissolves readily in water to form nitric acid. As I bubbled this gas through water, though, a lot of the volatile acid evaporated away as it formed. To fix this, I simply added copper metal to the water to react with the acid as it forms. Since copper nitrate won't evaporate like nitric acid, the nitrate ions are forced to stay in solution. After a few weeks or daily operation, I had dissolved almost six grams of copper.
Wood ash is roughly 10% or less potassium carbonate/hydroxide (potash) by weight. Some rough calculations show that I would've needed 22 POUNDS of wood to make enough potash to react with my copper nitrate. So, I roasted some cream of tartar along with my wood. The thermal decomposition of cream of tartar (chemically, potassium bitartrate) yields potassium carbonate, which is used in the reaction alongside the other wood-based potash. After dissolving out my potash from the ashes and burned cream of tartar, I boiled my solution down and added it to the copper nitrate. This yielded highly soluble potassium nitrate and an insoluble copper hydroxide/carbonate paste. This was easily filtered off. My solution of potassium nitrate was boiled until it was fairly concentrated, and then refrigerated at 38F for 10 hours. Over that time, huge potassium nitrate crystals formed, which I kept and dried. The total yield was 6.7 grams.
I mixed my nitrate with 3 grams of powdered sugar and 1 gram of candle wax, which gave me almost 11g of flammable smoke bomb mix, which I lit with my 9kV neon sign transformer.

Long description, I know. But, it's information for those who want it!