How Man Discovered Fire
Fire was probably one of man’s first, if not the first, great discoveries, and has been one of his greatest servants as well as one of his greatest dangers. We do not know who discovered fire, or what nation first used it. It is, however, one of the signs that distinguishes man from the other animals. Not any of the lower animals was acquainted with the use of fire, while probably the earliest races of mankind seem to have been acquainted with it.
Mythology tells us wonderful stories of the origin of fire: according to these tales it was stolen from the sun, or the gods, and given to man; and Pandora, the first woman, was sent down to earth to punish man for his theft.
The most popular of these stories is the legend of Prometheus. According to this legend, fire, in the early days, was under the exclusive control of the gods. Prometheus, brother of Atlas, the god who supported the world on his shoulders, determined that the use of fire should be given to the people. He decided by some means to send a spark of fire to the earth, believing that one spark caught by man would start a burning flame that would never go out.
With this idea in mind, Prometheus visited Zeus, the great ruler, to carry out his purpose, for Zeus controlled fire. While Zeus was not looking, Prometheus “stole some brands of fire from the hearth, which he hid in the stalk of a fennel and sent it down to the earth.” Through this Prometheus gave to man his first knowledge of fire.
But while this story of fire may or may not be true, the use of fire rests entirely with man and his ingenuity. Through his ingenuity man was able to subject fire to his will; making it perform certain of his labors; and to a certain extent making it his servant; although it always did and always will get beyond his control at times.
Our ancestors were not satisfied with preserving the fire which the gods gave them; they tried and succeeded in producing it. One day one of them discovered that by rubbing two sticks together rapidly, the friction would create a fire. It was a most useful discovery. Before long the whole of mankind had learned this trick; others improved on this crude method until step by step men learned that by striking two pieces of flint or other hard mineral together, quicker action was obtained.
DRILLING WITH BOW STRING
Man’s ingenuity soon taught him that if he tied one end of a string to something and wrapped it around his drilling stick, one end of which was in a hole as in the first drilling picture, he could increase the rapidity of making fire.
DRILLING WITH HELP
With some other to hold the drilling stick while he operated the string he was able to produce fire more quickly than he had ever done before.
All kinds of methods were devised to increase knowledge of producing fire. The early Greeks found out how to catch the rays of the sun on a burning-glass and produce fire; the Romans achieved the same results through the use of mirrors.
PLOWING
This is another method man used for rubbing two pieces of wood together. In following this plan he usually used one stick of bamboo and rubbed it back and forth in a slot he had made in another piece of bamboo.
FLINT AND PYRITES
In some places it was discovered that if you struck a piece of hard stone, like flint, against another, a spark was produced which could be caught on a bunch of dry grass or moss and so start a fire.
In about A.D. 900, an Arab, named Bechel, discovered phosphorus, but it took almost 800 years more for Haukwitz to learn that when phosphorus was brought into friction with sulphur, fire would result. In another hundred years the world was benefited by the invention of the friction match—and since that time about one-half the people have been carrying matches about with them, able thus to start a fire easily any time.
FIRE A MARK OF CIVILIZATION
Fire and man’s knowledge of it have had much to do with man’s progress in civilization. Before man had fire, his life and movements were much like those of other animals. When man had learned to make a fire he was free to move and live anywhere and, therefore, people began to cover more territory.
THE FLINT AND STEEL METHOD OF MAKING FIRE
Tinder box
Striking flint with steel
THE INTRODUCTION OF THE FLINT AND STEEL METHOD
Because fire was so important to him, man kept on trying to make this task easier. He finally contrived a tinder box when iron and steel became known. The tinder box is where he kept his flint and the piece of steel which he struck upon the flint. He also kept in the box pieces of cloth or paper on which he caught the sparks so produced.
PISTOL TINDER BOX
This is a picture of a tinder box in the form of a pistol. It enabled man to produce sparks in greater numbers and more rapidly.
PRODUCING SPARK WITH FLINT AND STEEL
This shows the method for striking the piece of steel against the flint to make the sparks fall on the cloth or paper in the box.
A COMPLETE TINDER BOX SET
This tinder box set is very neat and compact. It is said still to be used among the Himalayan tribes where it was discovered.
THE FIRST MATCHES
THE OXYMURIATE MATCH
This match, the first, was introduced in 1505. It was a slip of wood tipped with a chemical mixture. To light it it was necessary to stick its head into a bottle containing acid.
PROMETHEAN MATCH
This was a paper cigarette dipped in a mixture of sugar and potash. Rolled within the paper was a tiny glass bulb filled with sulphuric acid. To light the match you pressed the bulb with pincers hard enough to break the bulb. This released the acid which set fire to the paper.
What Would We Do Without Matches?
If one were to ask the man in the street what invention of the nineteenth century is his most constant and invaluable ally he might be mystified for the moment, but the undoubted answer would surely come in the single word “Matches.” These familiar objects, apart from their luxurious use by smokers, are the indispensable servants of mankind from the moment of rising in the morning till the household is wrapped in sleep, and it is to them we turn when disturbed in the hours of darkness.
FIRST LUCIFER MATCH
Invented by John Walker in 1827. It consisted of a stick of wood tipped with sulphur and then with a chlorate mixture. To ignite it the match was drawn rapidly through a folded piece of sandpaper.
MODERN SAFETY MATCH
The first practical match was made less than a century ago.
No doubt “familiarity breeds contempt,” and it is difficult to imagine how man would fare, bereft of his box of matches. It might help the world to realize how much it owes to the inventors of the Lucifer Match, were it possible to cut off the supply of these magic fire producers for only one brief day. It requires no very vivid imagination to picture the consternation and confusion that such a step would produce, and there is a grim humor in wondering how the primitive methods of obtaining a light would serve the public convenience in these days of strenuous hustle.
Seeing that fire has been employed by man since prehistoric days, one would expect that easy means of obtaining it would have been devised in the early ages. We find, however, that until the beginning of the nineteenth century nothing in the nature of a match was available, and the crudest methods were still in use. We know from Virgil that in the reign of the Emperor Titus fire was obtained by rubbing decayed wood with a roll of sulphur between two stones, but it is not till Saxon times that we have evidence of the use of the tinder box with its flint and steel. That this latter was still regarded as something remarkable, as late as the fifteenth century, is proved by its representation in the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, which was founded in 1429. Burning glasses had, of course, been employed from the most primitive times, but one can imagine the despair of an early Briton who had to wait for a sunny day before he could boil his kettle.
Incredible as it may seem, it was not a time well within the memory of many people living to-day that matches in anything approaching the form now familiar were offered to the public. The way for their manufacture had been prepared by two discoveries; one by a German who isolated phosphorus in 1669; the other by a Frenchman who produced chlorate of potash in 1786. From this latter date the production of fire was much facilitated, and a few years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, John Walker—a chemist of Stockton-on-Tees—produced the first friction matches of which there is any certain record. These, called “Congreves,” were sold in boxes of fifty for 2/6, and their success soon led others to experiment in match manufacture, so that improvements were rapidly invented and factories sprang up in all parts of the country.
It would be a difficult task to compute accurately the value to the human race of the introduction to general use of this little article. At the present writing, in America the consumption of matches amounts to over a billion of matches a day.
How Matches Are Made
To-day matches are in such demand that the ingenuity of man has devised a machine which makes complete matches without the help of the human hand.
At the very start of operations a man feeds blocks of wood into the jaws of the machine, and thenceforth the mechanical monster does its own work. Seizing the block from the man’s hand, the machine grips it between rollers and forces it against rows of keen-edged cutters, which are so arranged that there is little or no waste. Each of these cutters (and there are usually forty-eight in a machine) severs a piece of wood of exact size and shape. At the same moment a plate rises from beneath, which thrusts these little pieces of wood into a moving flexible cast-iron band, or rather into small holes in this band, from which the embryo matches project like bristles. This traveling band is about 700 feet in length, and follows a serpentine course in its journey, which occupies about an hour from start to finish, the speed being regulated according to temperature so that the matches may be quite dry when they reach the boxes.
When the band arrives at the finishing point, a steel bar punches out the matches stuck in its surface and they fall into the inside boxes placed ready to catch them. These boxes are kept continually shaking, to that no spaces are left and the matches fill them completely. As the inside boxes fill, a steel arm presses them forward into their covers, and they are passed along a trough in dozens, quickly wrapped in paper and sealed by a machine. Quick-fingered girls then wrap twelve of these dozen packages and we have the gross packages of boxes so familiar in the stores. It will be seen, that in spite of the marvellous machines which do so much, there is still plenty of work for human hands.
How Match Boxes Are Made
The machines for making the wooden box which contain the matches are in themselves wonderful. First, a section of the trunk of an aspen tree, about 30 inches in length, is made to revolve in what is known as a peeling machine. After a few revolutions the rough outer surface is removed, and thin rolls of smooth-surfaced wood are peeled off or veneered. The machine at the same time scores the wood ready for folding by the boxmaking machine. Cut into skillets, i. e., into pieces of the size required for box covers or insides, the ends are next dipped in pink dye to cover the edge of the wood which is not covered by the label. The skillets then go to the box machines, which fold and label them, and after half an hour in a cleverly devised drying chamber they are ready for use. In one room alone sixty machines are labelling and folding the skillets to the number of several thousand gross a day. To see these machines take a strip of wood, push it forward to receive the pasted label, fold it, fasten the joint, wipe off the superfluous paste, and, finally, toss the finished “outside” into a receiving basket, is as fascinating an example of mechanical ingenuity as the industrial world can afford.