February 3, 2020 • 48 mins
How were matches invented? From toxic chemicals to pee science, we learn about matches. And a fictional character stops by to irritate our host.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and I love all things tech, and guys,
it's time to get real. See. Sometimes when I'm thinking
(00:26):
about what tech topic I should cover for my next episode,
you know, I get really excited and inspired right away,
and I just I'm off to the races. And sometimes
I struggle for the better part of an hour at
some days to figure out what I want to talk about,
and and preferably I need to pick something that I
haven't talked about a billion times before, which is tricky
(00:49):
to do when you've got episodes. And sometimes I get
an idea that I first dismiss as being totally stupid,
but then I changed my mind and to side, I'm
gonna do it anyway. And sometimes those days where I
come up with the dumb idea happened to coincide with
the days where I've been sitting for an hour desperate
(01:10):
to come up with a topic. And so you see
where this is going. This is why today we're going
to talk about fire. Did somebody say fire no god. No. Um,
ladies and gentlemen, I've been blessed with a special guest today.
(01:33):
Would you please introduce herself to all these nice people. Well,
I'm almona midler, and I'm a matchmaker that I didn't
quite understand with matchmaking entailed, so I'm quite good at
starting fires. Yes, so um, for those who do not know,
I have a sordid history with the Georgia Renaissance Festival,
(01:55):
and it was there, I believe where my path first
crossed with that of Alamon as uh the village matchmaker.
And um, I guess it's only fitting that for this
episode I have a pyro enthusiast join us for the show.
So Alamona, thank you for being here. Hey, thank you
(02:20):
for having me. You look quite familiar. I can't quite
put my match stick on it, but yeah, you see
a lot of faces at the festival. I'm I'm sure
there are a lot of I have one of those
faces too, like you know, one of the ones that
lots of people have. Um, because we let's get your
Jonathan Strickland mask at the Tech stuff store today. No
they're not really, They're okay, but we're gonna talk about
(02:42):
stuff like matches, which I understand you consider yourself somewhat
of an expert on which I find perplexing. I am
an expert on matches. It's it's a little wooden stick thing,
and then and then you you you you strike the
end of it and and it in it, and then
it goes boom, and then the pretty orange stuff comes out.
(03:02):
It's very hot. It's odd to me that you would
be so familiar with them, because the matches as you
describe them weren't available until the early nineteenth century, and
if my math is correct, the renaissances before times of
the nineteenth century, my whole life has been a lie.
(03:23):
Fair enough, all right, Well, Alimona, I'm glad you could
be here because I'm going to explain to you the
history of matches, and if you have things you want
to say or questions you want to ask, then we can,
you know, really focus on that. And there's sometimes where
I'm going to ask you a question just to see
what you know about things, and when we find out
(03:43):
the depth of your ignorance, I will then illuminate by
explaining exactly what the reality of the situation is. I
really like the word illuminate, but I didn't quite like
the word ignorance. I think the man explaining part of
the episode is just be on. So we're gonna begin,
as I said, with the history of matches. You know,
(04:04):
you might think of it as the predecessor to the lighter. Uh,
it's a lighter, lighter than what Okay, right, what's a heavier?
Is there a heavier? No? Okay, this is this is
how this is gonna go. U's a lighter thing that
produces flame over and over and over again, and yeah,
you would love them. And interesting thing is that the
(04:28):
modern match and the modern lighter actually were developed around
the same time. They were co developed at around the
same time. We would normally think the matches must have
come much earlier, but modern matches rely very heavily on
something you and I completely lack chemistry. So we're gonna
talk about that, but we're going to start with matches.
(04:50):
And really, when we talk about matches, you gotta look
all the way back to China, the country, not the
type of dishes. I can see your mind working right
in front of me, Alimona. I love the way China
sounds when you break it. Yeah, So the country of China, Uh,
they began to experiment using sticks dipped in sulfur. And
(05:15):
this was not the type of match that you would
strike against a surface and have it ignite. Instead, it
was a way of lighting something and having it burn
at a controlled rate so that you could transfer the
fire from one place to another, for example, from say
a roaring fire to a candle. You would want to
(05:36):
be able to move that fire around. And as we
all know, moving fire just with your hands is a
bad idea because it's because it's hot, but it's very fun. Okay,
all right, we're also going to stress to our listeners
playing with fire is a dangerous thing once you get
past the tingling sensation. Okay, all right now, Alamona, really
(05:59):
let's let's reaf becus here. So those matches don't really
fit our modern description of the word, and they would
not really play into the type of strike matches that
we think of when we hear the word match. So
instead you have to go all the way up to
the seventeenth century, so a bit late in the day
(06:20):
for you, Alimona, an old woman diving, I might be
as old as years old. That's interesting, Yeah, I guess
you would definitely adhere to the philosophy. That's better to
burn out than to fade away. Good one, thank you.
So in the in the in the seventeenth century, there
(06:44):
was this, uh, this German alchemist Hinnig Brandt, thank you.
So he was attempting to do what many alchemists were
trying to do. Oh, I know what an alchemist is.
That's like a scientist, not really uh, predecessor to science.
(07:06):
I would argue closer. I would argue closer to Professor
Snape than a scientist. Yes, alchemy is all about the
attempt to figure out ways to turn base metals or
base materials into gold, which to this day perplexes me
(07:27):
because alamono, just just follow along with me here. Alright,
I'm going to explain to you the concept of supply
and demand as well as that of value, right something
I like, Oh boy, I'm glad I didn't say that.
So gold people ascribe great value to gold. Right, gold
(07:47):
is valuable. It lets you buy stuff. If you amass
a lot of gold, you have wealth. Correct. Wealth concept
foreign to me, but yes, yes, but you understand the
idea of wealth, even though you may never have possessed
it yourself. Right. So alchemists wanted to find a way
(08:07):
to turn other types of stuff into gold. But if
you could do that, if you could turn say lead
into gold, then you would suddenly have a surplus of gold.
And one of the things, in fact, the chief thing
that makes gold valuable is its scarcity. So if you've
taken something that was valuable because it was scarce, and
(08:29):
you made a whole bunch more of it, what do
you think happens lots and lots of money? Is that right? Okay?
All right, so you're you're you're about a step behind me. No,
if you have too much of it. If you have
a lot of this gold that was valuable because of
its scarcity, is no longer scarce, It is no longer valuable. Yes,
(08:53):
it means that you would have way too much of it,
And yeah, up until the point where you had a
an abundance of gold on the market, in which case
the value would plummet. So I never understood alchemy from
that perspective. But um, let's get a dig a little deeper,
because boy, it gets way more weird than that. So
(09:15):
one of the important advancements that made matches possible was
the discovery of phosphorus. So phosphorus is it's it's a
naturally occurring element, but usually we wouldn't. It's usually bound
up in other things. The less said about that, the
better with you here, Almona. But it's bound up with
other things, and then if we can refine it, then
(09:37):
we can use it as a component in things like matches.
So Hennig Brand discovered how to isolate phosphorus. That's not
what he was trying to do, but it is what
he effectively ended up doing. Ah, he isolated phosphorus from urine. Wow. Yeah, yeah,
(10:00):
I thought I would blin inside you we're going to
talk about pa science. Yeah, that's right. You get it
all out there, Alonna. So are you saying that when
when I use the privy, I'm sitting on a gold mine,
or rather a phosphorus mine. Hinnig. Well, you're certainly sitting
on a phosphorus mine, Hinnig Brand, But perhaps it was
(10:23):
a gold mine. Here was his line of yeah, exactly,
that's exactly what Brand was thinking. No, you're you're on
the right track. He was sitting there thinking, you know what,
he's kind of yellow. Gold's yellow. Maybe p is yellow
because there's gold in them. The arp, so he thought
(10:44):
how do I get the P away and keep the gold?
Alchemist was so smart back then, I thought you'd think so.
So here's what he did. Uh stop me. If you
heard this before. He goes and collects a lot of P,
go ahead and ask me how much is a lot
of P? How much is a lot of gallons of
(11:08):
the stuff? How many friends did he have? It was
just a Super Bowl weekends. How many friends did he have?
More fewer by the end of it than he did
at the beginning of it. I'm sure that I realize
how few friends I have. I don't know who I
could just walk up to and say, like, hey, would
you mind yeah this gallon jug and yes, it is
(11:29):
exactly the way I need you to to do it.
That's that's the what you're thinking, that's what I need.
So he takes all this P and then of course
he puts it into a giant fat because I mean,
what else are you going to do with it? And
then he boiled it. He boiled the P. I know
you're thinking, I've smelled the privs on a hot day
at the Georgia Renaissance Festival. That's what you're thinking, isn't
(11:52):
it all? Yeah, that's that's a that's a smell that
will linger in your thoughts forever. Trust me. The first
year I did it was still haven't forgotten. So soups gross.
He boils it, which ends up evaporating a lot of
the water out of the content of the urine, and
(12:13):
what was left behind was described as a surupy substance.
No do not. And then as the stuff was heating up,
it started to glow red hot. As it cooled, it
turned black and became hard. If your urine turns red
(12:33):
and in black, maybe you should go see it or something. Maybe.
So he then takes some of the hardened black stuff
and he mix mixes it with some of the red
hot glowing stuff and ends up noticing that it caught fire.
It just combusts, It bursts into flame, and he didn't
(12:55):
realize that what he had discovered was phosphorus. He actually thought,
originally and others did too, that he had come across
the fabled Philosopher's stone. Um not that kind of stone
in urine, And eventually he referred to the stuff as
cold fire because he knows that this phosphorus would glow
in the dark. It wouldn't give off heat, but would
glow in the dark weird. So if one were to
(13:19):
refine this phosphorus further, you would eventually get to what's
called white phosphorus. Sometimes it's called yellow phosphorus because it's
not really white white. Uh. This stuff is very dangerous
because it ignites upon exposure to air. That sounds fun. Yeah,
it's very much like you. So I must possess this magic.
It wouldn't be for long it uh. So it ignites
(13:43):
as soon as it it encounters oxygen. What's happening is
that the phosphorus molecules. Just think of pretty thoughts, Alimona.
I'll be back with you in a second. Uh, quietly
think of pretty thoughts. Phosphorus molecules very weak molecular bonds, uh,
and oxygen when it encounters phosphorus breaks those molecular bonds,
(14:06):
and then the phosphorus bonds with the oxygen in an
exothermic reaction, which means it's a reaction that gives off
a lot of heat. And because it gives off a
lot of heat very quickly, uh, it ignites, and so
you have the spontaneously combustible material white phosphorus. All right,
So that would become important for matches, but we don't
(14:27):
get two matches just yet. We're still talking about the
basic components that allow matches to become a thing. We will, however,
talk about matches in just a moment, but before we
do that, Almona, we're gonna take a quick break to
thank our sponsors. Please don't set them on fire, not
(14:49):
even a little bit. Okay, we're just gonna take a break. Okay,
we're back. The studio remarkably is still standing and not
currently on fire. Alimonia, you're still here. I know. It's
(15:11):
thank goodness. We have all those blankets. So we're gonna
move on. We just finished talking about peace science, which
you were I could tell, So we're gonna move on.
And now we're going to talk about a person named
Jean Chancel. Oh he sounds pretty It's a fancy dude.
Jean Chancel found a way to create a match using
(15:35):
a chemical reaction. And this is probably the most hardcore
metal way of lighting a match I have ever heard about.
So okay, not that kind of all right, no, like
like rock and roll metal. So he took a splint
a piece of wood, and he coded it in a
(15:56):
substance called potassium chlorate and he all so put in
the same on the same mixture, some sugar and some
sticky gum, and the gum was to bind everything together.
It was to hold the sugar and the potassium chlorate
together on the end of the stick. And then he
dipped the end of the stick into a jar of
(16:18):
sulfuric acid and that caused the stick to ignite, which is,
like I said, super hardcore when you're using sulfuric acid
to light your matches. So here's what's going on. I
want to explain to you the actual chemical process, the
reaction that's happening, so that we understand how this technology works.
(16:38):
So potassium chlorate is an effective oxidizing agent. Now, Alumona,
I know you know this from personal experience, hands on experience.
But fire needs three things to be fire. And it's
not magic, it's it's not love either. You want to
give one more, more, more shot, you can give me
(17:00):
you one of the three a spring day at the
Georgia Renaissance Fest. Okay, none of those three things are necessary. No,
it needs fuel, it needs heat, and it needs an oxidizer. Typically,
the oxidizer for most fires that we encounter is the air, oxygen,
oxygen as an oxidizer. Those three things are necessary. If
you're missing any one of those three things, you cannot
(17:21):
make fire. And if you have a fire, the fire
will extinguish. So if you run out fuel, the fire
goes out right. If you no longer have an oxidizer,
the fire cannot burn anymore. If if the heat is
removed from the fire, it will not continuously burn. It'll
the the the chemical reaction that is fire will stop.
So potassium chlorate is an effective oxidizing agent. The sugar
(17:47):
is fuel UH. In fact, we all know sugar is
fuel because if you ever had a lot of sugar
like I suspect Alamona has had, you will be very
energetic for at least a short while. And then potassium
chlorate when it decomposes under heat, it releases molecular oxygen.
So thus you get the oxidizing effect there. All right,
(18:09):
So you've got everything you need mixed up. There. You've
got the fuel and the oxidizer. There. You need to
have the heat to start the reaction. Here's where the
sulfuric acid comes in. When you dip this mixture of
sugar and UH and potassium chlorate together in the sulfuric acid.
It the acid actually acts as sort of a catalyst.
(18:31):
It creates this exothermic chemical reaction. Again, exothermic means it's
giving awful lot of heat. So now you've got the
third part of that triangle, right, You've got the fuel,
you have the oxidizer, you have the heat. The match
catches on fire. But the only way it works, the
only way it works is if you have a jar
of sulfuric acid. So while this was effective, it was
(18:52):
not uh something that a lot of people wanted because
sulfuric acid is extremely reactive stuff off and if it
touches organic material, it tends to char it not burn
it like catch it on fire. It won't ignite, but
it will char. Like if you just poured sulphuric acid
on wood, the wood would char from that. So you
(19:14):
definitely don't want to get it on yourself because you
will suffer terrible injuries like Phantom of the Opera level injuries.
It's a reference to that that. I guess you wouldn't get Alamona,
but don't worry. I'll show it to you later. So yeah,
so so this didn't this did not get widespread adoption
(19:35):
because it was not practical. It was effective, but not practical. Also,
the ignition was so usually pretty spectacular, so in other words,
it wasn't like a small flame like or a small
spark and then a flame. It was very bright, very loud,
spontaneous combustion type flame. The stick goes boom, The stick
(19:58):
goes boom, as you did, uh so eloquently put it earlier. Yes,
in this case you were right. So this was an
early example of using chemistry to ignit of fire as
opposed to the old style of rubbing two sticks together
kind of friction approach. Now, as I said, sulfuric acid
(20:20):
is super duper dangerous all on its own, and this
particular reaction was really dangerous as well. It also was
very smelly. The the smoke it would give off had
a foul odor. So there were a lot of downsides
to this particular approach. Let's move forward to eighty six.
Now we have an Englishman to talk about, Yes, exactly,
(20:43):
one of your fellow Brits. This English chemist was named
John Walker, and he was working on this problem two.
I'm sorry, that's that's the English for you. So he
wanted to pair chemicals together, so those two chemicals could
burst into flame with a substance like cardboard or wood
(21:06):
that could burn more slowly, so you would get an
initial burst of flame with the chemicals that flame. That
flame would then set fire to some sort of substance
that can last longer. It would burn more slowly, and
thus you could hold the other end as a handle.
These are the components we need for a working match.
(21:28):
We need something we can hold as a handle that's
preferably not on fire. That's because we're touching it, and
we have to have an end that is on fire
or that can at least ignite, and then catch that
end on fire. So that was the whole idea here,
and touching fire is bad, right. So he was experimenting
(21:49):
with different chemical mixtures, but he accidentally dragged a stick
that was coded in these different chemical mixtures against the
hearth of his fireplace and discovered that just the friction
of moving this chemical coated stick against the heart generated
enough heat to ignite the stick. So he invented a
(22:10):
strike anywhere match. I matched that because the chemicals that
were on the end of it, we're in the right mixture.
They just need to be heated up enough to hit
ignition and then puff burst into flame. So pretty exciting
for him. He immediately saw the value of this discovery.
He immediately saw the utility of it, but he also
(22:31):
thought it was far too useful for him to make
it secret. His friends were actually suggesting, hey, you should
patent that. A guy named Faraday, very important person in science.
I don't expect you to know him. Okay, fair enough. Faraday,
uh recommended to Walker, hey you should patent that, and
(22:53):
he said, no, nonsense, nonsense, I'm not going to patent
it because it's far too interesting and important. People should
be able to do with us whatever they want. And
so that allowed a guy named Samuel Jones, another Englishman,
very exciting name, Sammy Jones of London. He took the
exact same approach as Walker, and so he began to
(23:14):
market his own Strike Anywhere matches based on the exact
same formula that Walker had created. And he called them Lucifers.
Bringer of light. Yeah, a little little dark and and spooky,
despite the fact that's also bringer of light. And Henry,
the leader of the church, will protectors from lucier I'm
(23:35):
sure that excellent. It's a good Anglican reference. So this
began around eighty nine. And these matches again could be
struck on any surface and would ignite, and they were
still pretty spectacular matches, like the burst of flame was
pretty bright and violent, also smelly. Again you identify with
(23:57):
that and there, and they were more than a little
bit dangerous. And other chemists over the time would play
with different mixtures, and some of them would even use
white phosphorus. Now you remember what I said earlier about
white phosphorus rights this, this is the stuff that when
you refine it down to white phosphorus, if it's exposed
(24:17):
to the air, it will catch fire. That's what I
want for Christmas. In case you went, well, they made
matches out of the stuff, so you there are actual
matches that had white phosphorus. And the idea was that
they had a slight coating on the outside so that
it wasn't constantly exposed to air, and that striking it
(24:37):
would break that coating exposed the white phosphorus to air.
It would then have this exothermic reaction I was talking
about that would ignite the end of the match stick
and you would get this very bright, powerful, uh light.
The match however, It also meant that if the match
heads were damaged at all and encountered the air, they
(24:59):
would ignore spontaneously. So typically you would have a container
that was air tight to keep these matches inside, because
you didn't want to risk the danger of the matches
going off on their own. Because this is all about
controlled experiences with fire, Alamona, not not just rampant fire,
(25:21):
lit fire. Your your sympathies lie in different areas than
my own, but uh, other chemist chemists would play with
these different approaches, trying to get it just right, and
over time there was a decision to move away from
(25:42):
white phosphorus matches, not just because they were dangerous. They
were incredibly popular by the way. People loved the fact
that you could strike these against anything. They were very convenient,
but a misunderstood certainly dangerous because also it was discovered
that people working in the manufacturing facilities they were making
(26:03):
these white phosphorus matches, we're starting to get sick and
they developed an illness that became known. And I am
not making this up as fossey jaw jaw. Yeah, would
you like to know the symptoms or you want to
take a guess? I think that was my grandmother's name,
(26:25):
Old lady, false jaw. I was expecting you to say
you would be wearing a bowler hat and doing jazz
hands and wearing a black unitard. I don't understand that
that's fair, that's a that's a fossy joke. No. Actually,
this was a truly terrible, terrible disease, and it was
disfiguring disease. So the exposure to phosphorus vapor would cause
(26:48):
the bone of the lower jaw to dissolve slowly to
the point where people had completely would have to have
their lower jaws removed, moved because if they didn't, then
the the illness would progress to the point where they
would experience oregon failure and then die. So this is
(27:09):
what we call a bad thing. And they would lose
teeth throughout the process, they'd lose bone mass and their jaws.
Their jaws would actually give off a greenish white light
in the dark. They would actually glow a bit from
all the phosphor that they were or phosphorus that they
were absorbing. So pretty terrifying stuff. Now, at the time
(27:33):
that this was happening, it was during the Industrial Revolution,
which again, Alamona, it's ahead of your time. But the
peasants talk about revolution. In this case, the peasants also
were uh in trouble during the Industrial Revolution because they
were being exploited terribly. So this was a time of
(27:54):
great industry where you have these huge manufacturing facilities that
are being built and labor is needed, but labors also plentiful.
There are a lot of people who are no longer
farmers there in there in search for work, so they
all start looking for places where they can get employment.
They start joining different facilities, including matchmaking facilities. A lot
(28:15):
of young women did this. I could work that these
were the women who were suffering from Fossey jaw Alamona.
These are not not women that I'm just saying, I'd
be qualified. From the industrialist point of view, these workers
were disposable because if someone got sick or died or whatever,
(28:37):
there were a hundred others who were just desperate for
a job. So this was a terrible situation where people
were being exploited and they were getting sick, and it
all got to the point where the women organized what
was called the Great match Girls Strike. Was the pun intended,
(28:59):
It's an excellent question, but it really was like a
union strike. Uh, they weren't striking matches. I understand that
it's just, you know, sometimes a pun, a really good pun,
just falls into it. This time has an unintentional pun. Uh.
So all four women walked out of a manufacturing company,
a matchmaking company called Bryant and May in protest of conditions.
(29:23):
Eventually they were able to win some protections, although a
lot of the white phosphorus stuff was still largely ignored
because they were so popular. There was an alternative that
I'm going to talk about in the second, to white phosphorus,
but nobody wanted those. They wanted the ones you could
strike anywhere. Well, in nineteen o six there was an organization,
(29:44):
a group gathering called the International Burn Convention that passed
prohibitions on white phosphorus matches, and the industry as a
whole migrated away from them. It took a few more years.
They kept on doing it for a little while longer,
and then eventually they stopped, and thus we saw a
drastic improvement in conditions for workers who were making matches.
(30:08):
But yeah, it was a pretty ironically dark time when
you look at the conditions that people had to endure
in order to make these. Now, on the other hand,
the demand for matches at this time it was astounding
because you're talking about a moment in history where people
had access to things that would allow them to generate
(30:30):
light after the sun went down, Alamona, you know that
when the sun goes down, it's just time to go
to bed because you can't see nothing that well, there
was there was that one time where I got a
little excited in it. Yeah. Well, apart from like conflagrations,
you don't really see village. It was all bright and
(30:53):
everyone was happy. That explains why we went from willy
Nilly on the wash over to Newcastle. There was actually
a location of the Georgia or in this onncestival. All
of that is true, by the way you can aller
the relocation part, I'm not so certain about the yeah
that part. So this was a change, a social change.
(31:14):
Now we're getting into a point where people had opportunity
to have lights in their own homes, whether they were
you know, lanterns that have been around for ages, but
now it was easier to light them because you had matches,
or it was even stuff like gas lamps that were
starting to be deployed in certain cities. So that meant
that matches were really sought after, so there was a
(31:37):
heavy market for them. Fortunately, there were some other smarty
pants who were coming up with ideas that were alternatives
to this white phosphorus approach. And I'll talk about that
more in just a second, but first let's take another
quick break. All right, Alimonia, you're still following me right somewhere?
(32:01):
I got a little bit lost along the path, he said,
are you looking for I heard it was a nice
person named the Quister walking around. Oh yeah, that's a
different show. I think he dresses like me a bit. Okay, yeah,
all right, So if you want to know who Alimona
is talking about with the Quister, you need to listen
to the podcast Ridiculous History, where the Quister shows up
(32:24):
and occasionally in in episodes and torments the hosts of
that show. The hosts that show are are Ben Bolan
and Noel Brown. Like, I'm tormenting you match made in
Heaven so similar that it's actually making me regret Quisters
segments at this point. Alright, So, in the mid to
(32:45):
late nineteenth century, different inventors were using stuff like lead
ox side and potassium chlorate to kind of tweak matches.
They were trying to make the matches burn without generating
as much smelly smoke like, because these still smelled really bad.
They're very sulfuric um. They were trying to find ways
(33:05):
so that they were quieter because they were very loud
when you were striking these matches, the early ones, and
with a more controlled burn. There was an Austrian scientist
named Anton von Schrutter who yes, yes, and he used
red phosphorus instead of white phosphorus, and he did that
(33:27):
to create a more stable match, one that would not
be prone to spontaneous combustion. So, okay, well you're sad,
but most people meant that if you were to accidentally
scratch the end of the match head, you didn't have
to worry about it bursting into flame. And this is
what paved the way to the modern safety match. So
a safety match is a very clever invention in which
(33:51):
the ingredients needed for combustion are not all contained within
the match head itself, So you divide them. You put
some of the ingredients on the match head, but you
put the other ingredients on the striking surface that you're
going to use to ignite the match. And this is
how you make it safe because it's not gonna even
(34:12):
if you rub two matches together, they're lacking the ingredients
that will allow them to combust, so you don't have
to worry about them like jostling around and then setting
themselves on fire. Uh So in a modern matchbook, you
can think of one half of the ingredients is being
on the match stick. The other half are on that
little strip that you use when you strike the match
and ignite it. And this is why, uh you don't
(34:34):
have to, you know, freak out about those matches. Just
like hitting the ground or something. They'll never ignite unless
it just happens to be hot enough to hit their
ignition temperature, because that will still cause them to ignite.
I mean, I'm sure if you've ever certainly feels like
it gets hot enough for that. But if you ever
bring like an unlit match close to a flame, you'll
(34:56):
see that at some point it will burst into flame
itself because you will have heated the end of that
match to its ignition point. But don't do that. It's dangerous.
Don't listen. It's not almona show, it's my show. And
it's also why, um, these matches you can't replicate that
(35:18):
cool move you might see and you won't know this alumona,
But in a movie where someone like strikes a match
against like the bottom of their shoe or a brick,
and it just burst in the flame, and then they
light something cool with it and they shake the match
stick out. You can't do that with safety matches unless
you happen to have coated the bottom of your shoe
with the other component needed to create combustion, which I
(35:41):
guess you could do if you really wanted to. Uh Now,
And there's still are non safety matches. They're still matches
that will ignite if you strike them against any surface.
You can still buy them. They are not made out
of white phosphorus anymore. They're made of of other materials,
but they still do the same thing, and you can
strike them against any surface and they will ignite, uh
(36:03):
if they as long as the friction allows them to
reach their ignition temperature. As for modern safety matches, they
tend to have potassium chlorate as well as an oxidizing agent,
or as the oxidizing agent, I should say, And they
have antimately sulfide, which sounds like a relative of yours
and got little right, And then the striking surface would
(36:26):
have the coding of red phosphorus, So the red phosphorus
is actually on whatever surface you're supposed to strike the
match on, and so bringing them together and creating friction
is enough to light the little suckers. All right, Well,
I'm gonna do another episode where I'm gonna talk more
about lighters, but I want to give you a little
bit of of a preview of that, Alimona, because this
(36:46):
is you seem to be fascinated by the concept of
a lighter. So I'm going to talk about the earliest
thing that people refer to as a lighter, and that's
going to be the clothes of this episode. So lighters,
like I said earlier, we're being developed around the same
time that matches were. It's not like we got matches
(37:07):
right and then we moved on to lighters. They were
independent lines of invention and innovation. So the first lighter,
most people agree, was made by a German chemist named
Johann Wolfgang Dobbert Reiner. Great name, he wins, he wins
the names. Yeah, So he made numerous contributions to chemistry.
(37:29):
He it's not just the guy who made the first lighter.
He did lots of stuff. But for our purposes, the
thing we want to look at is this lighter that
he made, the Dobbert Reiner lamp, and this was an
ingenious invention. It is also tricky to describe without pictures,
but I'm gonna try and do it, and Alimona, honestly,
(37:50):
the only way I can read books just through the pictures. Okay, Well,
I'm going to paint you a word picture with my words.
But if you have questions, like honestly, if you have
trouble imagining what I'm saying, tell me, because that would
tell me, oh, I should explain this a different way
so that the listeners at home also understand it. So
(38:11):
you're gonna play a truly valuable service here. Welcome. Okay,
well just take it seriously. Here we go. Now, first
we're gonna start imagining that you have a glass jar
and you have a lid that would fit on top
of that glass jar. Okay, so that's what we're starting from.
The glass jar has sulfuric acid in it. That's that
(38:34):
stuff I was talking about earlier, super reactive. It can
char you know, skin and would uh and you definitely
don't want to touch it. So anyway, you've got this
jar of sulfuric acid. Now imagine that that you've taken
the lid off of this jar and you attached to
the lid a cylinder of glass. Okay, it's open at
(38:57):
either end, except that you've glued one end to the
bottom side of the lid of the jar, all right,
And now imagine that you have poked a hole in
the top of the lid on the other side of
that open end of the cylinder, and you put a
valve there, which only allows air to pass through if
(39:17):
the valve is open, but it's closed. Now, this means
that if you were to put the lid on the jar,
you would be pushing that cylinder down through the sulfuric
acid in the jar. And because the air is trapped
inside the cylinder, it will push the sulfuric acid out
of the way. It will displace it, so the level
of sulfuric acid will rise a bit in the jar.
(39:40):
The cylinder inside will remain just full of air. The
sulfuric acid can't come up in there. If you're having
trouble imagining this, just imagine what happens if you take
a straw like a drinking straw and you put your
finger over the top of the drinking straw and then
you put it down into liquid. The liquid doesn't go
up in the straw because the air pressure inside the
(40:00):
straw keeps it out. All right, good, I'm glad that
we're on the same page. Okay. So you've got this
cylinder in it. It keeps the sulfuric acid out because
it's air tight at the moment, because the valve is shut. Now,
also imagine that dangling in the center of the cylinder,
(40:21):
so you've you've attached some form of line on the
underside of the lid as well. At where the cylinder,
at the top of the cylinder is dangling. Inside the
cylinder is a piece of zinc. Okay, the metal zinc.
It is attached to a tether. It's dangling in the
middle of this cylinder. Still, there's nothing touching anything else, right,
(40:43):
The sulfuric acid isn't coming into contact with anything inside
the cylinder, all right. Now, imagine you open the valve
on the top of the lid. So now you've created
away for the air inside the cylinder to escape. The
pressure from the sulfuric acid will push against the air
inside that cylinder. It will make some of that air escape.
(41:04):
The sulfuric acid will start to come into where the
cylinder is and actually make contact with the zinc. You
close off the VALVEU you shut the valve. Valve shut.
Now the sulfuric acid is going to react with that zinc,
and that reaction gives off hydrogen gas. So little bubbles
will form on this zinc, and the bubbles will bubble
(41:24):
up into the interior of the cylinder. And because the
valve is shut, the bubbles have nowhere to go. The
bubble start building up. That starts to push the sulfuric
acid back out again because you're increasing the pressure inside
the cylinder. But now it's not air, just regular air
that's in that cylinder. Now it's hydrogen gas. So you've
(41:44):
got a cylinder filled with hydrogen gas. If you open
up that valve again, you'll release hydrogen gas. Okay, So
that's the basic part of this lamp. The next part
was another component on top of the lid, the top side,
not the side that's inside the jar, that holds a
what they called a platinum sponge. It was a porous
(42:05):
piece of platinum and it's position in such a way
to be directly across from the valve where the hydrogen
can come out. All right, So when you open up
the valve, hydrogen shoots out from the air pressure and
it goes across and hits this platinum sponge. When platinum
(42:26):
is in the presence of hydrogen and oxygen, it creates
a chemical reaction that's exothermic, which means it gives off heat.
Hydrogen gas is extremely flammable that I'm sure you would.
Does the phrase oh the humanity mean anything to you.
That's what everyone screamed when I when it was really
(42:47):
dark that one night tonight, And yeah, okay, well then
you're totally on board. So this means that the hydrogen
gas catches fire and you've got a lighter because the
hydrogen from the cylinder has come out it's hit that
platinum sponge. The platinum sponge has that exothermic catalyzes, an
(43:09):
exothermic reaction that then ignites the hydrogen gas that's still
coming out through the valve. As long as the valve
is open, this is still going. But hydrogen flames are
essentially invisible. You can't really see them. However, if you
were to put anything within that that section where the
valve is open, it would catch fire. So if you
put a match in there, it would make the match
(43:31):
catch on fire because even though it's invisible, it's flaming.
It actually is happening. It's it's burning at that moment,
so you can use it to light you know, matches
or candles or whatever. All right, And then when you
would close the valve, the flame would go out because
there's no more fuel coming out. And as long as
(43:52):
the zinc is still in contact with the sulfuric acid,
it will continue to generate more hydrogen gas. And eventually
one of two things will happen. It'll either generate enough
hydrogen gas so that the gas has pushed the sulfuric
acid down to a level where it's no longer in
contact with the zinc, because you know, you've built up
the air pressure. It's pushed it's like blowing into a straw.
(44:14):
It's pushed down. The liquid um or the zinc will
get consumed by the sulfuric acid and it will stop
because there's nothing for the sulfuric acid to dissolve anymore,
so you won't you won't be generating anymore hydrogen, you'll
have to replace the zinc um. Those are the two outcomes.
So it was really cool because this liner worked purely
on chemistry. There was no striking, there was no sparks,
(44:38):
there was nothing that had to ignite a fuel. It
was purely by generating this hydrogen gas, shooting it at platinum,
having that create the chemical reaction and then boom, you've
got a flame as long as that valve is open.
It was ingenious. It was also incredibly dangerous because it
was a vat of sulfuric acid um. So it was
(45:00):
not something that would become widely adopted or universally adopted.
But it is a phenomenal invention and there are um
forgive me Alimona, there are videos on YouTube that show
these things working. Yeah, you just sit there and think
about fiery stuff. But there are videos on YouTube if
(45:22):
you want to look this up. They are really fascinating
and you can even see them in action and understand
better the mechanisms I'm talking about that make this lighter possible. Again,
that's a Dobba Reiner lamp, so you should check those
out because they are really cool. So it does not
(45:44):
surprise me in the slightest. Well, um Alimona, uh design,
thank you. You have been the most unique guest I've
ever had on tech Stuff and I once had strong
bad in here. Oh he sounds fun. Yeah, he gave
(46:06):
me a sign off even it was pretty amazing. Uh So,
speaking of sign offs, guys, this wraps up this episode.
In our next episode, I'll talk more about lighters and
how they work and how they've evolved over time. Uh
and we'll we'll pick up from the chemical double rhiner
lamp and move up two more modern ones and talk
about things like how the companies came to be like Zippo.
(46:30):
It's a name that I'm sure you find very Yeah. Well,
then we're gonna wrap this up. Guys. If you have
any suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, I highly
recommend you let me know by getting in touch on
social media. I am on Facebook and Twitter with the
handle text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you
(46:52):
again really soon. No, look, it's the Quista find bank.
Hext Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(47:13):
listen to your favorite shows, guys. One thing I want
to mention before we go, I want to thank my
good friend Shay for joining the show as Alamona. Shay
also has an amazing YouTube series, Books and Blue Stockings.
She's plays Betty Bookworm on that series, so I highly
(47:37):
recommend you go to YouTube and search that. She does
very inventive videos talking about different books and different literary
tropes and UH and themes, and you should definitely check
that out. There's also a series that she and I
do called Age of Cinema where we show each other
(47:58):
movies uh sometimes against the other person's will. Often against
the other person's will. So if you want to hear
more and see more from Shay, definitely go check that out.
Highly recommend it. And sometimes Alamona pops up
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and I love all things tech, and guys,
it's time to get real. See. Sometimes when I'm thinking
(00:26):
about what tech topic I should cover for my next episode,
you know, I get really excited and inspired right away,
and I just I'm off to the races. And sometimes
I struggle for the better part of an hour at
some days to figure out what I want to talk about,
and and preferably I need to pick something that I
haven't talked about a billion times before, which is tricky
(00:49):
to do when you've got episodes. And sometimes I get
an idea that I first dismiss as being totally stupid,
but then I changed my mind and to side, I'm
gonna do it anyway. And sometimes those days where I
come up with the dumb idea happened to coincide with
the days where I've been sitting for an hour desperate
(01:10):
to come up with a topic. And so you see
where this is going. This is why today we're going
to talk about fire. Did somebody say fire no god. No. Um,
ladies and gentlemen, I've been blessed with a special guest today.
(01:33):
Would you please introduce herself to all these nice people. Well,
I'm almona midler, and I'm a matchmaker that I didn't
quite understand with matchmaking entailed, so I'm quite good at
starting fires. Yes, so um, for those who do not know,
I have a sordid history with the Georgia Renaissance Festival,
(01:55):
and it was there, I believe where my path first
crossed with that of Alamon as uh the village matchmaker.
And um, I guess it's only fitting that for this
episode I have a pyro enthusiast join us for the show.
So Alamona, thank you for being here. Hey, thank you
(02:20):
for having me. You look quite familiar. I can't quite
put my match stick on it, but yeah, you see
a lot of faces at the festival. I'm I'm sure
there are a lot of I have one of those
faces too, like you know, one of the ones that
lots of people have. Um, because we let's get your
Jonathan Strickland mask at the Tech stuff store today. No
they're not really, They're okay, but we're gonna talk about
(02:42):
stuff like matches, which I understand you consider yourself somewhat
of an expert on which I find perplexing. I am
an expert on matches. It's it's a little wooden stick thing,
and then and then you you you you strike the
end of it and and it in it, and then
it goes boom, and then the pretty orange stuff comes out.
(03:02):
It's very hot. It's odd to me that you would
be so familiar with them, because the matches as you
describe them weren't available until the early nineteenth century, and
if my math is correct, the renaissances before times of
the nineteenth century, my whole life has been a lie.
(03:23):
Fair enough, all right, Well, Alimona, I'm glad you could
be here because I'm going to explain to you the
history of matches, and if you have things you want
to say or questions you want to ask, then we can,
you know, really focus on that. And there's sometimes where
I'm going to ask you a question just to see
what you know about things, and when we find out
(03:43):
the depth of your ignorance, I will then illuminate by
explaining exactly what the reality of the situation is. I
really like the word illuminate, but I didn't quite like
the word ignorance. I think the man explaining part of
the episode is just be on. So we're gonna begin,
as I said, with the history of matches. You know,
(04:04):
you might think of it as the predecessor to the lighter. Uh,
it's a lighter, lighter than what Okay, right, what's a heavier?
Is there a heavier? No? Okay, this is this is
how this is gonna go. U's a lighter thing that
produces flame over and over and over again, and yeah,
you would love them. And interesting thing is that the
(04:28):
modern match and the modern lighter actually were developed around
the same time. They were co developed at around the
same time. We would normally think the matches must have
come much earlier, but modern matches rely very heavily on
something you and I completely lack chemistry. So we're gonna
talk about that, but we're going to start with matches.
(04:50):
And really, when we talk about matches, you gotta look
all the way back to China, the country, not the
type of dishes. I can see your mind working right
in front of me, Alimona. I love the way China
sounds when you break it. Yeah, So the country of China, Uh,
they began to experiment using sticks dipped in sulfur. And
(05:15):
this was not the type of match that you would
strike against a surface and have it ignite. Instead, it
was a way of lighting something and having it burn
at a controlled rate so that you could transfer the
fire from one place to another, for example, from say
a roaring fire to a candle. You would want to
(05:36):
be able to move that fire around. And as we
all know, moving fire just with your hands is a
bad idea because it's because it's hot, but it's very fun. Okay,
all right, we're also going to stress to our listeners
playing with fire is a dangerous thing once you get
past the tingling sensation. Okay, all right now, Alamona, really
(05:59):
let's let's reaf becus here. So those matches don't really
fit our modern description of the word, and they would
not really play into the type of strike matches that
we think of when we hear the word match. So
instead you have to go all the way up to
the seventeenth century, so a bit late in the day
(06:20):
for you, Alimona, an old woman diving, I might be
as old as years old. That's interesting, Yeah, I guess
you would definitely adhere to the philosophy. That's better to
burn out than to fade away. Good one, thank you.
So in the in the in the seventeenth century, there
(06:44):
was this, uh, this German alchemist Hinnig Brandt, thank you.
So he was attempting to do what many alchemists were
trying to do. Oh, I know what an alchemist is.
That's like a scientist, not really uh, predecessor to science.
(07:06):
I would argue closer. I would argue closer to Professor
Snape than a scientist. Yes, alchemy is all about the
attempt to figure out ways to turn base metals or
base materials into gold, which to this day perplexes me
(07:27):
because alamono, just just follow along with me here. Alright,
I'm going to explain to you the concept of supply
and demand as well as that of value, right something
I like, Oh boy, I'm glad I didn't say that.
So gold people ascribe great value to gold. Right, gold
(07:47):
is valuable. It lets you buy stuff. If you amass
a lot of gold, you have wealth. Correct. Wealth concept
foreign to me, but yes, yes, but you understand the
idea of wealth, even though you may never have possessed
it yourself. Right. So alchemists wanted to find a way
(08:07):
to turn other types of stuff into gold. But if
you could do that, if you could turn say lead
into gold, then you would suddenly have a surplus of gold.
And one of the things, in fact, the chief thing
that makes gold valuable is its scarcity. So if you've
taken something that was valuable because it was scarce, and
(08:29):
you made a whole bunch more of it, what do
you think happens lots and lots of money? Is that right? Okay?
All right, so you're you're you're about a step behind me. No,
if you have too much of it. If you have
a lot of this gold that was valuable because of
its scarcity, is no longer scarce, It is no longer valuable. Yes,
(08:53):
it means that you would have way too much of it,
And yeah, up until the point where you had a
an abundance of gold on the market, in which case
the value would plummet. So I never understood alchemy from
that perspective. But um, let's get a dig a little deeper,
because boy, it gets way more weird than that. So
(09:15):
one of the important advancements that made matches possible was
the discovery of phosphorus. So phosphorus is it's it's a
naturally occurring element, but usually we wouldn't. It's usually bound
up in other things. The less said about that, the
better with you here, Almona. But it's bound up with
other things, and then if we can refine it, then
(09:37):
we can use it as a component in things like matches.
So Hennig Brand discovered how to isolate phosphorus. That's not
what he was trying to do, but it is what
he effectively ended up doing. Ah, he isolated phosphorus from urine. Wow. Yeah, yeah,
(10:00):
I thought I would blin inside you we're going to
talk about pa science. Yeah, that's right. You get it
all out there, Alonna. So are you saying that when
when I use the privy, I'm sitting on a gold mine,
or rather a phosphorus mine. Hinnig. Well, you're certainly sitting
on a phosphorus mine, Hinnig Brand, But perhaps it was
(10:23):
a gold mine. Here was his line of yeah, exactly,
that's exactly what Brand was thinking. No, you're you're on
the right track. He was sitting there thinking, you know what,
he's kind of yellow. Gold's yellow. Maybe p is yellow
because there's gold in them. The arp, so he thought
(10:44):
how do I get the P away and keep the gold?
Alchemist was so smart back then, I thought you'd think so.
So here's what he did. Uh stop me. If you
heard this before. He goes and collects a lot of P,
go ahead and ask me how much is a lot
of P? How much is a lot of gallons of
(11:08):
the stuff? How many friends did he have? It was
just a Super Bowl weekends. How many friends did he have?
More fewer by the end of it than he did
at the beginning of it. I'm sure that I realize
how few friends I have. I don't know who I
could just walk up to and say, like, hey, would
you mind yeah this gallon jug and yes, it is
(11:29):
exactly the way I need you to to do it.
That's that's the what you're thinking, that's what I need.
So he takes all this P and then of course
he puts it into a giant fat because I mean,
what else are you going to do with it? And
then he boiled it. He boiled the P. I know
you're thinking, I've smelled the privs on a hot day
at the Georgia Renaissance Festival. That's what you're thinking, isn't
(11:52):
it all? Yeah, that's that's a that's a smell that
will linger in your thoughts forever. Trust me. The first
year I did it was still haven't forgotten. So soups gross.
He boils it, which ends up evaporating a lot of
the water out of the content of the urine, and
(12:13):
what was left behind was described as a surupy substance.
No do not. And then as the stuff was heating up,
it started to glow red hot. As it cooled, it
turned black and became hard. If your urine turns red
(12:33):
and in black, maybe you should go see it or something. Maybe.
So he then takes some of the hardened black stuff
and he mix mixes it with some of the red
hot glowing stuff and ends up noticing that it caught fire.
It just combusts, It bursts into flame, and he didn't
(12:55):
realize that what he had discovered was phosphorus. He actually thought,
originally and others did too, that he had come across
the fabled Philosopher's stone. Um not that kind of stone
in urine, And eventually he referred to the stuff as
cold fire because he knows that this phosphorus would glow
in the dark. It wouldn't give off heat, but would
glow in the dark weird. So if one were to
(13:19):
refine this phosphorus further, you would eventually get to what's
called white phosphorus. Sometimes it's called yellow phosphorus because it's
not really white white. Uh. This stuff is very dangerous
because it ignites upon exposure to air. That sounds fun. Yeah,
it's very much like you. So I must possess this magic.
It wouldn't be for long it uh. So it ignites
(13:43):
as soon as it it encounters oxygen. What's happening is
that the phosphorus molecules. Just think of pretty thoughts, Alimona.
I'll be back with you in a second. Uh, quietly
think of pretty thoughts. Phosphorus molecules very weak molecular bonds, uh,
and oxygen when it encounters phosphorus breaks those molecular bonds,
(14:06):
and then the phosphorus bonds with the oxygen in an
exothermic reaction, which means it's a reaction that gives off
a lot of heat. And because it gives off a
lot of heat very quickly, uh, it ignites, and so
you have the spontaneously combustible material white phosphorus. All right,
So that would become important for matches, but we don't
(14:27):
get two matches just yet. We're still talking about the
basic components that allow matches to become a thing. We will, however,
talk about matches in just a moment, but before we
do that, Almona, we're gonna take a quick break to
thank our sponsors. Please don't set them on fire, not
(14:49):
even a little bit. Okay, we're just gonna take a break. Okay,
we're back. The studio remarkably is still standing and not
currently on fire. Alimonia, you're still here. I know. It's
(15:11):
thank goodness. We have all those blankets. So we're gonna
move on. We just finished talking about peace science, which
you were I could tell, So we're gonna move on.
And now we're going to talk about a person named
Jean Chancel. Oh he sounds pretty It's a fancy dude.
Jean Chancel found a way to create a match using
(15:35):
a chemical reaction. And this is probably the most hardcore
metal way of lighting a match I have ever heard about.
So okay, not that kind of all right, no, like
like rock and roll metal. So he took a splint
a piece of wood, and he coded it in a
(15:56):
substance called potassium chlorate and he all so put in
the same on the same mixture, some sugar and some
sticky gum, and the gum was to bind everything together.
It was to hold the sugar and the potassium chlorate
together on the end of the stick. And then he
dipped the end of the stick into a jar of
(16:18):
sulfuric acid and that caused the stick to ignite, which is,
like I said, super hardcore when you're using sulfuric acid
to light your matches. So here's what's going on. I
want to explain to you the actual chemical process, the
reaction that's happening, so that we understand how this technology works.
(16:38):
So potassium chlorate is an effective oxidizing agent. Now, Alumona,
I know you know this from personal experience, hands on experience.
But fire needs three things to be fire. And it's
not magic, it's it's not love either. You want to
give one more, more, more shot, you can give me
(17:00):
you one of the three a spring day at the
Georgia Renaissance Fest. Okay, none of those three things are necessary. No,
it needs fuel, it needs heat, and it needs an oxidizer. Typically,
the oxidizer for most fires that we encounter is the air, oxygen,
oxygen as an oxidizer. Those three things are necessary. If
you're missing any one of those three things, you cannot
(17:21):
make fire. And if you have a fire, the fire
will extinguish. So if you run out fuel, the fire
goes out right. If you no longer have an oxidizer,
the fire cannot burn anymore. If if the heat is
removed from the fire, it will not continuously burn. It'll
the the the chemical reaction that is fire will stop.
So potassium chlorate is an effective oxidizing agent. The sugar
(17:47):
is fuel UH. In fact, we all know sugar is
fuel because if you ever had a lot of sugar
like I suspect Alamona has had, you will be very
energetic for at least a short while. And then potassium
chlorate when it decomposes under heat, it releases molecular oxygen.
So thus you get the oxidizing effect there. All right,
(18:09):
So you've got everything you need mixed up. There. You've
got the fuel and the oxidizer. There. You need to
have the heat to start the reaction. Here's where the
sulfuric acid comes in. When you dip this mixture of
sugar and UH and potassium chlorate together in the sulfuric acid.
It the acid actually acts as sort of a catalyst.
(18:31):
It creates this exothermic chemical reaction. Again, exothermic means it's
giving awful lot of heat. So now you've got the
third part of that triangle, right, You've got the fuel,
you have the oxidizer, you have the heat. The match
catches on fire. But the only way it works, the
only way it works is if you have a jar
of sulfuric acid. So while this was effective, it was
(18:52):
not uh something that a lot of people wanted because
sulfuric acid is extremely reactive stuff off and if it
touches organic material, it tends to char it not burn
it like catch it on fire. It won't ignite, but
it will char. Like if you just poured sulphuric acid
on wood, the wood would char from that. So you
(19:14):
definitely don't want to get it on yourself because you
will suffer terrible injuries like Phantom of the Opera level injuries.
It's a reference to that that. I guess you wouldn't get Alamona,
but don't worry. I'll show it to you later. So yeah,
so so this didn't this did not get widespread adoption
(19:35):
because it was not practical. It was effective, but not practical. Also,
the ignition was so usually pretty spectacular, so in other words,
it wasn't like a small flame like or a small
spark and then a flame. It was very bright, very loud,
spontaneous combustion type flame. The stick goes boom, The stick
(19:58):
goes boom, as you did, uh so eloquently put it earlier. Yes,
in this case you were right. So this was an
early example of using chemistry to ignit of fire as
opposed to the old style of rubbing two sticks together
kind of friction approach. Now, as I said, sulfuric acid
(20:20):
is super duper dangerous all on its own, and this
particular reaction was really dangerous as well. It also was
very smelly. The the smoke it would give off had
a foul odor. So there were a lot of downsides
to this particular approach. Let's move forward to eighty six.
Now we have an Englishman to talk about, Yes, exactly,
(20:43):
one of your fellow Brits. This English chemist was named
John Walker, and he was working on this problem two.
I'm sorry, that's that's the English for you. So he
wanted to pair chemicals together, so those two chemicals could
burst into flame with a substance like cardboard or wood
(21:06):
that could burn more slowly, so you would get an
initial burst of flame with the chemicals that flame. That
flame would then set fire to some sort of substance
that can last longer. It would burn more slowly, and
thus you could hold the other end as a handle.
These are the components we need for a working match.
(21:28):
We need something we can hold as a handle that's
preferably not on fire. That's because we're touching it, and
we have to have an end that is on fire
or that can at least ignite, and then catch that
end on fire. So that was the whole idea here,
and touching fire is bad, right. So he was experimenting
(21:49):
with different chemical mixtures, but he accidentally dragged a stick
that was coded in these different chemical mixtures against the
hearth of his fireplace and discovered that just the friction
of moving this chemical coated stick against the heart generated
enough heat to ignite the stick. So he invented a
(22:10):
strike anywhere match. I matched that because the chemicals that
were on the end of it, we're in the right mixture.
They just need to be heated up enough to hit
ignition and then puff burst into flame. So pretty exciting
for him. He immediately saw the value of this discovery.
He immediately saw the utility of it, but he also
(22:31):
thought it was far too useful for him to make
it secret. His friends were actually suggesting, hey, you should
patent that. A guy named Faraday, very important person in science.
I don't expect you to know him. Okay, fair enough. Faraday,
uh recommended to Walker, hey you should patent that, and
(22:53):
he said, no, nonsense, nonsense, I'm not going to patent
it because it's far too interesting and important. People should
be able to do with us whatever they want. And
so that allowed a guy named Samuel Jones, another Englishman,
very exciting name, Sammy Jones of London. He took the
exact same approach as Walker, and so he began to
(23:14):
market his own Strike Anywhere matches based on the exact
same formula that Walker had created. And he called them Lucifers.
Bringer of light. Yeah, a little little dark and and spooky,
despite the fact that's also bringer of light. And Henry,
the leader of the church, will protectors from lucier I'm
(23:35):
sure that excellent. It's a good Anglican reference. So this
began around eighty nine. And these matches again could be
struck on any surface and would ignite, and they were
still pretty spectacular matches, like the burst of flame was
pretty bright and violent, also smelly. Again you identify with
(23:57):
that and there, and they were more than a little
bit dangerous. And other chemists over the time would play
with different mixtures, and some of them would even use
white phosphorus. Now you remember what I said earlier about
white phosphorus rights this, this is the stuff that when
you refine it down to white phosphorus, if it's exposed
(24:17):
to the air, it will catch fire. That's what I
want for Christmas. In case you went, well, they made
matches out of the stuff, so you there are actual
matches that had white phosphorus. And the idea was that
they had a slight coating on the outside so that
it wasn't constantly exposed to air, and that striking it
(24:37):
would break that coating exposed the white phosphorus to air.
It would then have this exothermic reaction I was talking
about that would ignite the end of the match stick
and you would get this very bright, powerful, uh light.
The match however, It also meant that if the match
heads were damaged at all and encountered the air, they
(24:59):
would ignore spontaneously. So typically you would have a container
that was air tight to keep these matches inside, because
you didn't want to risk the danger of the matches
going off on their own. Because this is all about
controlled experiences with fire, Alamona, not not just rampant fire,
(25:21):
lit fire. Your your sympathies lie in different areas than
my own, but uh, other chemist chemists would play with
these different approaches, trying to get it just right, and
over time there was a decision to move away from
(25:42):
white phosphorus matches, not just because they were dangerous. They
were incredibly popular by the way. People loved the fact
that you could strike these against anything. They were very convenient,
but a misunderstood certainly dangerous because also it was discovered
that people working in the manufacturing facilities they were making
(26:03):
these white phosphorus matches, we're starting to get sick and
they developed an illness that became known. And I am
not making this up as fossey jaw jaw. Yeah, would
you like to know the symptoms or you want to
take a guess? I think that was my grandmother's name,
(26:25):
Old lady, false jaw. I was expecting you to say
you would be wearing a bowler hat and doing jazz
hands and wearing a black unitard. I don't understand that
that's fair, that's a that's a fossy joke. No. Actually,
this was a truly terrible, terrible disease, and it was
disfiguring disease. So the exposure to phosphorus vapor would cause
(26:48):
the bone of the lower jaw to dissolve slowly to
the point where people had completely would have to have
their lower jaws removed, moved because if they didn't, then
the the illness would progress to the point where they
would experience oregon failure and then die. So this is
(27:09):
what we call a bad thing. And they would lose
teeth throughout the process, they'd lose bone mass and their jaws.
Their jaws would actually give off a greenish white light
in the dark. They would actually glow a bit from
all the phosphor that they were or phosphorus that they
were absorbing. So pretty terrifying stuff. Now, at the time
(27:33):
that this was happening, it was during the Industrial Revolution,
which again, Alamona, it's ahead of your time. But the
peasants talk about revolution. In this case, the peasants also
were uh in trouble during the Industrial Revolution because they
were being exploited terribly. So this was a time of
(27:54):
great industry where you have these huge manufacturing facilities that
are being built and labor is needed, but labors also plentiful.
There are a lot of people who are no longer
farmers there in there in search for work, so they
all start looking for places where they can get employment.
They start joining different facilities, including matchmaking facilities. A lot
(28:15):
of young women did this. I could work that these
were the women who were suffering from Fossey jaw Alamona.
These are not not women that I'm just saying, I'd
be qualified. From the industrialist point of view, these workers
were disposable because if someone got sick or died or whatever,
(28:37):
there were a hundred others who were just desperate for
a job. So this was a terrible situation where people
were being exploited and they were getting sick, and it
all got to the point where the women organized what
was called the Great match Girls Strike. Was the pun intended,
(28:59):
It's an excellent question, but it really was like a
union strike. Uh, they weren't striking matches. I understand that
it's just, you know, sometimes a pun, a really good pun,
just falls into it. This time has an unintentional pun. Uh.
So all four women walked out of a manufacturing company,
a matchmaking company called Bryant and May in protest of conditions.
(29:23):
Eventually they were able to win some protections, although a
lot of the white phosphorus stuff was still largely ignored
because they were so popular. There was an alternative that
I'm going to talk about in the second, to white phosphorus,
but nobody wanted those. They wanted the ones you could
strike anywhere. Well, in nineteen o six there was an organization,
(29:44):
a group gathering called the International Burn Convention that passed
prohibitions on white phosphorus matches, and the industry as a
whole migrated away from them. It took a few more years.
They kept on doing it for a little while longer,
and then eventually they stopped, and thus we saw a
drastic improvement in conditions for workers who were making matches.
(30:08):
But yeah, it was a pretty ironically dark time when
you look at the conditions that people had to endure
in order to make these. Now, on the other hand,
the demand for matches at this time it was astounding
because you're talking about a moment in history where people
had access to things that would allow them to generate
(30:30):
light after the sun went down, Alamona, you know that
when the sun goes down, it's just time to go
to bed because you can't see nothing that well, there
was there was that one time where I got a
little excited in it. Yeah. Well, apart from like conflagrations,
you don't really see village. It was all bright and
(30:53):
everyone was happy. That explains why we went from willy
Nilly on the wash over to Newcastle. There was actually
a location of the Georgia or in this onncestival. All
of that is true, by the way you can aller
the relocation part, I'm not so certain about the yeah
that part. So this was a change, a social change.
(31:14):
Now we're getting into a point where people had opportunity
to have lights in their own homes, whether they were
you know, lanterns that have been around for ages, but
now it was easier to light them because you had matches,
or it was even stuff like gas lamps that were
starting to be deployed in certain cities. So that meant
that matches were really sought after, so there was a
(31:37):
heavy market for them. Fortunately, there were some other smarty
pants who were coming up with ideas that were alternatives
to this white phosphorus approach. And I'll talk about that
more in just a second, but first let's take another
quick break. All right, Alimonia, you're still following me right somewhere?
(32:01):
I got a little bit lost along the path, he said,
are you looking for I heard it was a nice
person named the Quister walking around. Oh yeah, that's a
different show. I think he dresses like me a bit. Okay, yeah,
all right, So if you want to know who Alimona
is talking about with the Quister, you need to listen
to the podcast Ridiculous History, where the Quister shows up
(32:24):
and occasionally in in episodes and torments the hosts of
that show. The hosts that show are are Ben Bolan
and Noel Brown. Like, I'm tormenting you match made in
Heaven so similar that it's actually making me regret Quisters
segments at this point. Alright, So, in the mid to
(32:45):
late nineteenth century, different inventors were using stuff like lead
ox side and potassium chlorate to kind of tweak matches.
They were trying to make the matches burn without generating
as much smelly smoke like, because these still smelled really bad.
They're very sulfuric um. They were trying to find ways
(33:05):
so that they were quieter because they were very loud
when you were striking these matches, the early ones, and
with a more controlled burn. There was an Austrian scientist
named Anton von Schrutter who yes, yes, and he used
red phosphorus instead of white phosphorus, and he did that
(33:27):
to create a more stable match, one that would not
be prone to spontaneous combustion. So, okay, well you're sad,
but most people meant that if you were to accidentally
scratch the end of the match head, you didn't have
to worry about it bursting into flame. And this is
what paved the way to the modern safety match. So
a safety match is a very clever invention in which
(33:51):
the ingredients needed for combustion are not all contained within
the match head itself, So you divide them. You put
some of the ingredients on the match head, but you
put the other ingredients on the striking surface that you're
going to use to ignite the match. And this is
how you make it safe because it's not gonna even
(34:12):
if you rub two matches together, they're lacking the ingredients
that will allow them to combust, so you don't have
to worry about them like jostling around and then setting
themselves on fire. Uh So in a modern matchbook, you
can think of one half of the ingredients is being
on the match stick. The other half are on that
little strip that you use when you strike the match
and ignite it. And this is why, uh you don't
(34:34):
have to, you know, freak out about those matches. Just
like hitting the ground or something. They'll never ignite unless
it just happens to be hot enough to hit their
ignition temperature, because that will still cause them to ignite.
I mean, I'm sure if you've ever certainly feels like
it gets hot enough for that. But if you ever
bring like an unlit match close to a flame, you'll
(34:56):
see that at some point it will burst into flame
itself because you will have heated the end of that
match to its ignition point. But don't do that. It's dangerous.
Don't listen. It's not almona show, it's my show. And
it's also why, um, these matches you can't replicate that
(35:18):
cool move you might see and you won't know this alumona,
But in a movie where someone like strikes a match
against like the bottom of their shoe or a brick,
and it just burst in the flame, and then they
light something cool with it and they shake the match
stick out. You can't do that with safety matches unless
you happen to have coated the bottom of your shoe
with the other component needed to create combustion, which I
(35:41):
guess you could do if you really wanted to. Uh Now,
And there's still are non safety matches. They're still matches
that will ignite if you strike them against any surface.
You can still buy them. They are not made out
of white phosphorus anymore. They're made of of other materials,
but they still do the same thing, and you can
strike them against any surface and they will ignite, uh
(36:03):
if they as long as the friction allows them to
reach their ignition temperature. As for modern safety matches, they
tend to have potassium chlorate as well as an oxidizing agent,
or as the oxidizing agent, I should say, And they
have antimately sulfide, which sounds like a relative of yours
and got little right, And then the striking surface would
(36:26):
have the coding of red phosphorus, So the red phosphorus
is actually on whatever surface you're supposed to strike the
match on, and so bringing them together and creating friction
is enough to light the little suckers. All right, Well,
I'm gonna do another episode where I'm gonna talk more
about lighters, but I want to give you a little
bit of of a preview of that, Alimona, because this
(36:46):
is you seem to be fascinated by the concept of
a lighter. So I'm going to talk about the earliest
thing that people refer to as a lighter, and that's
going to be the clothes of this episode. So lighters,
like I said earlier, we're being developed around the same
time that matches were. It's not like we got matches
(37:07):
right and then we moved on to lighters. They were
independent lines of invention and innovation. So the first lighter,
most people agree, was made by a German chemist named
Johann Wolfgang Dobbert Reiner. Great name, he wins, he wins
the names. Yeah, So he made numerous contributions to chemistry.
(37:29):
He it's not just the guy who made the first lighter.
He did lots of stuff. But for our purposes, the
thing we want to look at is this lighter that
he made, the Dobbert Reiner lamp, and this was an
ingenious invention. It is also tricky to describe without pictures,
but I'm gonna try and do it, and Alimona, honestly,
(37:50):
the only way I can read books just through the pictures. Okay, Well,
I'm going to paint you a word picture with my words.
But if you have questions, like honestly, if you have
trouble imagining what I'm saying, tell me, because that would
tell me, oh, I should explain this a different way
so that the listeners at home also understand it. So
(38:11):
you're gonna play a truly valuable service here. Welcome. Okay,
well just take it seriously. Here we go. Now, first
we're gonna start imagining that you have a glass jar
and you have a lid that would fit on top
of that glass jar. Okay, so that's what we're starting from.
The glass jar has sulfuric acid in it. That's that
(38:34):
stuff I was talking about earlier, super reactive. It can
char you know, skin and would uh and you definitely
don't want to touch it. So anyway, you've got this
jar of sulfuric acid. Now imagine that that you've taken
the lid off of this jar and you attached to
the lid a cylinder of glass. Okay, it's open at
(38:57):
either end, except that you've glued one end to the
bottom side of the lid of the jar, all right,
And now imagine that you have poked a hole in
the top of the lid on the other side of
that open end of the cylinder, and you put a
valve there, which only allows air to pass through if
(39:17):
the valve is open, but it's closed. Now, this means
that if you were to put the lid on the jar,
you would be pushing that cylinder down through the sulfuric
acid in the jar. And because the air is trapped
inside the cylinder, it will push the sulfuric acid out
of the way. It will displace it, so the level
of sulfuric acid will rise a bit in the jar.
(39:40):
The cylinder inside will remain just full of air. The
sulfuric acid can't come up in there. If you're having
trouble imagining this, just imagine what happens if you take
a straw like a drinking straw and you put your
finger over the top of the drinking straw and then
you put it down into liquid. The liquid doesn't go
up in the straw because the air pressure inside the
(40:00):
straw keeps it out. All right, good, I'm glad that
we're on the same page. Okay. So you've got this
cylinder in it. It keeps the sulfuric acid out because
it's air tight at the moment, because the valve is shut. Now,
also imagine that dangling in the center of the cylinder,
(40:21):
so you've you've attached some form of line on the
underside of the lid as well. At where the cylinder,
at the top of the cylinder is dangling. Inside the
cylinder is a piece of zinc. Okay, the metal zinc.
It is attached to a tether. It's dangling in the
middle of this cylinder. Still, there's nothing touching anything else, right,
(40:43):
The sulfuric acid isn't coming into contact with anything inside
the cylinder, all right. Now, imagine you open the valve
on the top of the lid. So now you've created
away for the air inside the cylinder to escape. The
pressure from the sulfuric acid will push against the air
inside that cylinder. It will make some of that air escape.
(41:04):
The sulfuric acid will start to come into where the
cylinder is and actually make contact with the zinc. You
close off the VALVEU you shut the valve. Valve shut.
Now the sulfuric acid is going to react with that zinc,
and that reaction gives off hydrogen gas. So little bubbles
will form on this zinc, and the bubbles will bubble
(41:24):
up into the interior of the cylinder. And because the
valve is shut, the bubbles have nowhere to go. The
bubble start building up. That starts to push the sulfuric
acid back out again because you're increasing the pressure inside
the cylinder. But now it's not air, just regular air
that's in that cylinder. Now it's hydrogen gas. So you've
(41:44):
got a cylinder filled with hydrogen gas. If you open
up that valve again, you'll release hydrogen gas. Okay, So
that's the basic part of this lamp. The next part
was another component on top of the lid, the top side,
not the side that's inside the jar, that holds a
what they called a platinum sponge. It was a porous
(42:05):
piece of platinum and it's position in such a way
to be directly across from the valve where the hydrogen
can come out. All right, So when you open up
the valve, hydrogen shoots out from the air pressure and
it goes across and hits this platinum sponge. When platinum
(42:26):
is in the presence of hydrogen and oxygen, it creates
a chemical reaction that's exothermic, which means it gives off heat.
Hydrogen gas is extremely flammable that I'm sure you would.
Does the phrase oh the humanity mean anything to you.
That's what everyone screamed when I when it was really
(42:47):
dark that one night tonight, And yeah, okay, well then
you're totally on board. So this means that the hydrogen
gas catches fire and you've got a lighter because the
hydrogen from the cylinder has come out it's hit that
platinum sponge. The platinum sponge has that exothermic catalyzes, an
(43:09):
exothermic reaction that then ignites the hydrogen gas that's still
coming out through the valve. As long as the valve
is open, this is still going. But hydrogen flames are
essentially invisible. You can't really see them. However, if you
were to put anything within that that section where the
valve is open, it would catch fire. So if you
put a match in there, it would make the match
(43:31):
catch on fire because even though it's invisible, it's flaming.
It actually is happening. It's it's burning at that moment,
so you can use it to light you know, matches
or candles or whatever. All right, And then when you
would close the valve, the flame would go out because
there's no more fuel coming out. And as long as
(43:52):
the zinc is still in contact with the sulfuric acid,
it will continue to generate more hydrogen gas. And eventually
one of two things will happen. It'll either generate enough
hydrogen gas so that the gas has pushed the sulfuric
acid down to a level where it's no longer in
contact with the zinc, because you know, you've built up
the air pressure. It's pushed it's like blowing into a straw.
(44:14):
It's pushed down. The liquid um or the zinc will
get consumed by the sulfuric acid and it will stop
because there's nothing for the sulfuric acid to dissolve anymore,
so you won't you won't be generating anymore hydrogen, you'll
have to replace the zinc um. Those are the two outcomes.
So it was really cool because this liner worked purely
on chemistry. There was no striking, there was no sparks,
(44:38):
there was nothing that had to ignite a fuel. It
was purely by generating this hydrogen gas, shooting it at platinum,
having that create the chemical reaction and then boom, you've
got a flame as long as that valve is open.
It was ingenious. It was also incredibly dangerous because it
was a vat of sulfuric acid um. So it was
(45:00):
not something that would become widely adopted or universally adopted.
But it is a phenomenal invention and there are um
forgive me Alimona, there are videos on YouTube that show
these things working. Yeah, you just sit there and think
about fiery stuff. But there are videos on YouTube if
(45:22):
you want to look this up. They are really fascinating
and you can even see them in action and understand
better the mechanisms I'm talking about that make this lighter possible. Again,
that's a Dobba Reiner lamp, so you should check those
out because they are really cool. So it does not
(45:44):
surprise me in the slightest. Well, um Alimona, uh design,
thank you. You have been the most unique guest I've
ever had on tech Stuff and I once had strong
bad in here. Oh he sounds fun. Yeah, he gave
(46:06):
me a sign off even it was pretty amazing. Uh So,
speaking of sign offs, guys, this wraps up this episode.
In our next episode, I'll talk more about lighters and
how they work and how they've evolved over time. Uh
and we'll we'll pick up from the chemical double rhiner
lamp and move up two more modern ones and talk
about things like how the companies came to be like Zippo.
(46:30):
It's a name that I'm sure you find very Yeah. Well,
then we're gonna wrap this up. Guys. If you have
any suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff, I highly
recommend you let me know by getting in touch on
social media. I am on Facebook and Twitter with the
handle text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you
(46:52):
again really soon. No, look, it's the Quista find bank.
Hext Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(47:13):
listen to your favorite shows, guys. One thing I want
to mention before we go, I want to thank my
good friend Shay for joining the show as Alamona. Shay
also has an amazing YouTube series, Books and Blue Stockings.
She's plays Betty Bookworm on that series, so I highly
(47:37):
recommend you go to YouTube and search that. She does
very inventive videos talking about different books and different literary
tropes and UH and themes, and you should definitely check
that out. There's also a series that she and I
do called Age of Cinema where we show each other
(47:58):
movies uh sometimes against the other person's will. Often against
the other person's will. So if you want to hear
more and see more from Shay, definitely go check that out.
Highly recommend it. And sometimes Alamona pops up
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