What Makes a Match Light When We Strike It?
The match lights when we rub it along a rough substance, because the rubbing produces sufficient heat on the end of the match to set fire to the head, as we call it, which is made of chemicals that light more easily than the stick of wood, which is the rest of the match. The fire thus started is hot enough and burns long enough to set fire to the wooden part of the match.
To explain this more fully, let me say this. Rub your finger quickly along your coat sleeve or along the seat of your trousers, long a favorite place for men to strike matches, pretending that your finger is a match. You find the end of your finger becomes warm, don’t you? Not warm enough to set your finger on fire, of course, but if you had the same combination of chemicals on the end of your finger that there is on the match, you would set the chemicals afire and this would burn your finger, just as it sets fire to the wooden part of the match.
It took a great many years to discover the combination of chemicals of which the head of the match is made. Before that discovery was made it was far from easy to light the light in the evening as it is now. It must have been a serious thing to let the fire go out in the furnace in those days.