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 Phœnicians; 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.