THE FRICTION MATCH
The biggest things are not always the most important. A little article,
used many times in the course of every day and familiar to every
person, is one of the world's great inventions. It is the friction
match.
Fire is one of man's absolute necessities. Without it civilization
would have been impossible, and life could scarcely continue. The story
of man's power to produce and use fire is practically the story of
civilization itself. So far as history can reveal there has never been
in any time a people who were without the knowledge and use of fire;
which, on its beneficent side, is man's indispensable friend; and in
its wrath, a terrible destroyer.
A mass of mythological stories has come down from the days of antiquity
regarding the origin of fire. The Persian tradition is that fire was
discovered by one of the hero dragon-fighters. He hurled a huge stone
at a dragon, but missed his aim. The stone struck another rock.
According to the story, "the heart of the rock flashed out in glory,
and fire was seen for the first time in the world." The Dakota Indians
of North America believed that their ancestors produced fire from the
sparks which a friendly panther struck with its claws in scampering
over a stony hill. Finnish poems describe how "fire, the child of the
sun, came down from heaven, where it was rocked in a tube of yellow
copper, in a large pail of gold." Some of the Australian tribes have a
myth that fire came from the breaking of a staff held in the hands of
an old man's daughter. In another Australian legend fire was stolen by
a hawk and given to man; in still another a man held his spear to the
sun and thus procured fire.
According to Greek mythology, fire was stolen from heaven by
Prometheus, friend of men, and brought to them in a hollow stalk of
fennel. As the legend runs, he took away from mankind the evil gift of
foreseeing the future, and gave them instead the better gifts of hope
and fire. For the bestowing of these gifts upon the human race,
Prometheus was sorely punished by Zeus, king of the gods. The myth that
fire was stolen from heaven by a hero is not confined to the Greeks; it
is scattered among the traditions of all nations. It is not strange
that primitive man should ascribe the origin of fire to supernatural
causes. Before he learned how to use and control it, he must have been
strangely impressed with its various manifestations--the flash of the
lightning, the hissing eruption of the volcano, the burning heat of the
sun, and perhaps the wild devastation of forest and prairie fires
caused by spontaneous combustion.
Because of its mysterious origin and its uncontrollable power for good
or ill, fire was supposed from the earliest times to be divine. The
Bible tells us that the Lord went before the children of Israel in
their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land in a pillar of fire by
night. From the earliest hours of religious history the sun has been
worshiped as a god. All the tribes of antiquity had a fire god. It was
Agni in ancient India; Moloch among the Phoenicians; Hephaestus in
Greece; Vulcan among the Romans; Osiris in Egypt; and Loki among the
Scandinavians. In ancient religious belief fire and the human soul were
supposed to be one and the same in substance. In some instances fire
was held to be the very soul of nature, the essence of everything that
had shape. "From Jupiter to the fly, from the wandering star to the
tiniest blade of grass, all beings owed existence to the fiery
element." This theory was believed by the Aztecs, who invoked in their
prayers "fire the most ancient divinity, the father and mother of all
gods." Of these ancient fire-divinities some were good and some evil;
just as fire itself is both beneficent and malignant.
Among some peoples fire was used for purification from sin and the cure
of disease. It also burned upon the tombs of the dead to dispel evil
spirits. Greek colonists, in setting out from the mother country for
the purpose of founding new homes, took fire from the home altar with
which to kindle fires in their new homes. Upon some altars fires were
kept constantly burning, and their extinguishment was considered a
matter of great alarm. If by chance the fire that burned in the Roman
temple of Vesta went out, all tribunals, all authority, all public and
private business had to stop immediately until the fire should be
relighted. The Greeks and the Aztecs received ambassadors of foreign
countries in their temples of fire, where at the national hearth they
prepared feasts for their guests. In some cases ambassadors were not
received until they had stood close to fire in order that any
impurities they might have brought should be singed away. No Greek or
Roman army crossed a frontier without taking an altar whereon burned
night and day fire brought from the public council hall and temple at
home. The Egyptians had a fire burning night and day in every temple,
and the Greeks, Romans, and Persians had such a fire in every town and
village.
Among our Anglo-Saxon ancestors the ordeal by fire was one of the modes
of trying cases of law. The accused was compelled to walk blindfolded
over red-hot plowshares. If these burned him, he was adjudged guilty;
if not, he was acquitted, for it was supposed that the purity of fire
would not permit an innocent man to suffer. The custom of the North
American Indians was to discuss important tribal affairs around the
council fire. Each sachem marched around it thrice, turning to it all
sides of his person. Among peoples in both hemispheres it has been the
practice to free fields from the demons of barrenness by lighting huge
fires. The fields were supposed to be made fertile as far as the flames
could be seen. In Bavaria seeds were passed through fire before they
were sown to insure fertility. In some places children were held over
the flame of an altar fire for purposes of purification.
Nothing has played a more important part in the history of the race
than fire. Human culture began with the use of it, and increased in
proportion as its use increased. For ages man felt his helplessness
before fire; he did not know how to produce it, or to turn it to good
account. By and by the secret was discovered; mind began to gain the
mastery over this great force.
The most primitive method of producing fire artificially was by rubbing
two sticks together. This method was probably discovered by accident.
Fire from friction was caused also by pushing the end of a stick along
a groove in another piece of wood, or by twirling rapidly a stick which
had its end placed perpendicularly in a hole made in another piece of
wood. Focusing the rays of the sun powerfully upon a given point by
means of a lens or concave mirror, was another method used for starting
fire. The story is told that when the ancient city of Syracuse in
Sicily was being besieged, the great mathematician Archimedes, who was
a resident of that city, set on fire the enemy's ships by focusing the
sun's rays upon them with a mirror. In China the burning-glass was
widely used not very long ago. When iron came into use, it was employed
for making fire. A piece of flint was struck against an iron object.
The concussion produced a spark, which fell into a box containing
charred cotton called tinder. The tinder took fire but did not burst
into flame. The flame came by touching the burning tinder with a strip
of wood tipped with sulphur. This flint-and-steel method was used for
producing fire until less than a century ago.
No attempt was made to produce fire by chemical means until 1805. In
that year M. Chancel, a Paris professor, invented an apparatus
consisting of a small bottle containing asbestos, saturated with
sulphuric acid, and wooden splints or matches coated with sulphur,
chlorate of potash, and sugar. The wooden splint, when dipped into the
bottle, was ignited. The first really successful friction matches were
made in 1827 by John Walker, an English druggist. They consisted of
wooden splints coated with sulphur and tipped with antimony, chlorate
of potash, and gum. They were sold at a shilling or twenty-four cents
per box, each box containing eighty-four matches.
The modern phosphorus friction match came into use about 1833. It is
not possible to ascertain precisely who the inventor was. But in that
year Preschel had a factory in Vienna, Austria, for the manufacture of
friction matches with phosphorus as the chief chemical. For years
Austria and the States in the south of Germany were the center of the
match industry. Phosphorus is still used as the principal chemical
ingredient in the manufacture of matches. The first patent in the
United States for a friction match was issued October 24, 1836, to
Alonzo D. Phillips, of Springfield, Massachusetts. The "safety match,"
which will not ignite unless brought into contact with the side of the
box in which it is packed, was invented by Lundstrom of Sweden, in
1855. The match industry in Norway and Sweden has developed during the
last few years with great rapidity. About sixty factories are in
operation in these countries. One town alone contains six thousand
matchmakers. In France the government has the sole right to manufacture
matches.
Phosphorus is very poisonous, and the early manufacture of phosphorus
matches was attended with loss of life and great suffering. Inhalation
of phosphorus fumes produced necrosis, or decay of the bone, usually of
the lower jaw. In the first years of phosphorus match making, the
business was chiefly carried on by the poorer people in large cities.
The work was done in damp, foul cellars; and the peculiar disease of
the bone caused by the phosphorus fumes became so widespread that the
different governments drove the match factories out of the cellars and
ordered that the business be conducted in better ventilated buildings.
But the discovery of red phosphorus, which never produces the disease,
the use of lessened quantities of the ordinary phosphorus, and better
ventilation have all combined to make the malady now very rare.
The first matches were made by hand, one by one, and were of necessity
few and costly. Matches are now made and boxed by machinery. One
million splints can be cut in an hour with the machinery in use. Some
single manufacturing firms make as many as one hundred millions of
matches in a day. With diminished cost of production have come
decreased prices, so that now a large box can be purchased for a very
few cents. Until about 1860 railroads in the United States would not
receive matches for transportation, owing to the danger involved. The
distribution before that year was mainly by canal or wagon. A match is
a little thing, but it is one of the world's really great inventions.