February 5, 2020 • 55 mins
How do lighters work? Jonathan explains the mechanics and chemistry behind lighters from their earliest forms to the type you can buy today.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to text Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
iHeart Radio and I love all things tech. And today
we're going to talk about lighters. And this is sort
of a sequel to our last episode, which was about matches.
(00:29):
Alimona is not in the studio and I'm happy to
report that nothing in my line of vision is currently
on fire. So we're going to pick up where we
left off in that last episode. And in that episode,
I described an invention that used chemistry to create a flame,
(00:49):
to ignite a flame. Now, this particular invention I talked
about in the last episode is a pretty dangerous contraption.
It used sulfuric acid, which by itself is dangerous can
seriously injure and disfigure you. But it was using sulfuric
acid and zinc in order to generate hydrogen gas, and
hydrogen gas is also potentially really dangerous. Hydrogen gas is
(01:13):
lighter than air, but unlike helium, hydrogen is extremely flammable.
It's the stuff that contributed to the famous Hindenburg disaster.
But now we're going to switch over to some other
technologies and developments that made the modern lighter possible. Because,
if you remember in that last episode, though the version
(01:33):
I just mentioned was not really practical, they sold a
few thousand of them, but it wasn't something that could
easily be used, and it certainly wasn't something you could
carry around in your pocket. So our next advance in
the making of fire would date back to the beginning
of the twentieth century, so the early nineteen hundreds. That's
(01:54):
when an Austrian scientist named Baron carl Aur von Velba
was working with some mixtures of rare earth elements to
see what you know, they would do, so what scientists
do sometimes just trying stuff. Well, one of those elements
he was working with was a metal called serrium c
(02:17):
E R I U M, and it's a relatively soft metal.
It's silvery white in color, but it does tarnish when
it's exposed to air, so it doesn't stay silvery white
for very long. And it's soft enough then you can
actually cut this stuff with a knife, so it's a
pretty soft metal. Velbot discovered that creating an alloy, which is,
(02:40):
you know, a combination of different metals and other components.
But if you create an alloy using iron and cyrium,
it was actually mostly iron about seventy iron cirium that
you would create a substance that could ignite sparks if
it was struck or scratched by a harder material. And
he called this stuff pharaoh cyrium, and he classified it
(03:04):
as a mish battle, which is sort of a Germanic
word that essentially means mixed metal or alloy. These days,
pharao cyrium and mish metal has a slightly different spelling.
Typically are frequently used to describe the same thing. Also,
a lot of folks will refer to this stuff as
flint in modern lighters, but that is misleading. Flint is
(03:27):
something very different, and this merits a quick explanation so
that you guys can understand and appreciate the difference between
flint and pharaoh cirium. Alright, so let's start off with quartz.
This stuff is the most abundant mineral found at Earth's surface,
so we humans have tons of experience with quartz. If
(03:49):
you take one part silicon to two parts oxygen, that's quartz.
And it's a durable mineral, and it has some really
super interesting properties. It's heat resistant, so it's a good
component to use in materials where you want to have
something that can stand up to great amounts of heat.
It also has a really interesting quirky phenomena that's associated
(04:13):
with it and some other materials. If you exert a
mechanical stress on quartz, in other words, if you hit it,
it then accumulates an electrical charge, or if you expose
quarts to an electrical charge, it will exert an internal
mechanical strain. It will vibrate. So you can make quartz
(04:34):
pulse at a consistent frequency by applying an electrical charge
to it, which is why quartz crystals are used in
analog watches and clocks. The predictable, repeatable vibration that frequency
is always going to be the same is a great
way to keep track of the passing of time, and
(04:54):
so you use that as sort of the uh, the
foundation for all the other time keeping elements. But this
is not an episode about clockwork. So we'll get back
to piece of electric because it will play a part
later on in our episode, but let's leave that off
(05:15):
for now. Now. More than that, quartz comes in many
different varieties and one of those varieties is flint. Flint
contains a lot of impurities, so it doesn't look like
pure quartz at all. It doesn't look like what we
think of when we think of the word quartz. Flint
tends to be dark gray in color, but it can
(05:36):
have other colors in it as well, like brown or red,
sometimes even whi er yellow, and typically is much closer
to opaque than what we think of when we think
of quarts. We tend to think of something that's at
least translucent with quartz, but flint tends to be almost opaque.
And like courts in general, flint has no flat surfaces
(05:57):
of internal weakness, no Planer weakness inside court flint or cowards.
That means that you do not observe cleavage with quartz
or flint, which is, you know, actual geological kind of
term here. So in other words, if you were to
strike this material hard enough to break it, you would
(06:18):
see what's called a conchoidal fracture, that's a smoothly curving fracture.
Surface Glass is a type of material that has conchoidal
fractures as opposed to Planer fractures or cleavage. By breaking
quartz or flint in very precise ways. You can fashion tough,
(06:40):
sharp objects, stuff that can stand up to somewear and tear,
and it can have a very sharp edge to it,
which is why flint was a valuable material in early
human history. It could be chipped to shape into stuff
like arrowheads spear points, as well as into cutting tools
like access is now getting back to making fires. The
(07:03):
property we're interested in with flint is that if you
were to strike flint against iron, you can create sparks.
But why is that, Well, it's not because of the
flint necessarily, it's actually more because of the irons. The
iron is pyrophoric, which means it's a material that will
(07:24):
ignite under room temperature. And that probably sounds really weird, right.
I Mean, we've all come into contact with iron, We've
all seen iron objects, and most of the time I
think we could agree that's not you know, currently on fire.
So what actually gives here? What's happening and why do
(07:46):
I say that iron is pyrophoric. We'll see when iron
encounters air, it begins to oxidize, and with iron, that
means it develops a thin layer of iron oxide on
the outside surface of the iron itself. Iron oxide is
known by another name rust. So the rusting process is
a chemical reaction, and it's an exothermic chemical reaction, if
(08:10):
you remember from our last episode. An exothermic reaction is
one that in the process of this chemical reaction going on,
releases heat. But if you're talking about any appreciable amount
of iron, as in more than just a tiny speck
of the stuff, that heat dissipates pretty quickly. The relative
mass of the iron is great enough that the heat
(08:33):
becomes a non factor. And this is really important. We
have to consider the ratio of a any given amount
of irons mass relative to the surface area that is
exposed to the air. If the iron has more than
a little mass, that heat can dissipate through the rest
of the hunk of iron. You know, all the iron
(08:54):
atoms that are not exposed to air will just sort
of absorb that heat and nothing else happens apart from
the external surfaces rusting. And once they rust, they've got
this sort of protective layer, and thus the rest of
the iron atoms aren't exposed to oxygen anymore. Rusting really
is just a similar process to burning. That burning is
(09:14):
also a chemical reaction. In which material oxidizes. It is
just that burning happens a lot faster and with you know,
flames and stuff. When you strike iron with a flint,
the flint is actually hard enough and typically sharp enough
to cause very tiny shards of iron to shear off
(09:35):
of whatever it is you're striking. While any part of
those tiny pieces that were previously exposed to oxygen still
have an iron oxide coating, the rest of those small
pieces haven't been touched by oxygen at all, So these
are pure iron with no iron oxide arm and as
soon as that surface makes contact with oxygen, the oxidizing
(09:58):
process begins immediately. So now we're talking about iron in
which the ratio of surface area of exposed iron compared
to the mass of that iron has been flipped. It's
very little mass, and much of it is exposed to oxygen.
The mass of the shards is so low that it
cannot dissipate that heat, So the exposed surface oxidizes at
(10:23):
a rate faster than heat can dissipate. So since the
heat can't dissipate, it builds up. It builds up super
super fast, and those tiny shards of iron get hot,
hot enough to glow and to reach the ignition temperature
of some other fuel source, like the tinder of a
camp fire. That all happens in the blink of an eye,
(10:44):
and that is a spark. The spark you see are
these tiny pieces of iron that are oxidizing and they're
generating so much heat that they cannot dissipate that the
metal itself begins to glow from that heat. So when
you strike iron against flint, you're creating tiny flying shards
of white hot iron particles, and that's why you're able
(11:08):
to use those to light a camp fire. For example.
Flint was also used in early firearms. Flint would be
in the striking arm of a gun like a flint
lock rifle or a flint lock pistol, and so you
would have this little hammer that would have flint attached
(11:29):
to it, and you would have a little cup, essentially
a little receptacle cup, and the when you pull the trigger,
the hammer would come down and strike inside the cup.
It would hit another surface that would be made out
of pyrite, which is a mix of iron and silicon.
The collision would create sparks, which ignites a small amount
(11:49):
of gunpowder. It leads into the chamber of the firearm
ignites a larger amount of gunpowder, which causes an explosion
and then propels a projectile out of the weapon. So
that's where you get your flintlock pistols and your flintlock rifles. Now,
technically you don't absolutely have to use flint. If you
want to use iron to generate sparks. You really just
(12:11):
need something that's hard enough and sharp enough to shear
off those tiny particles of iron. That's the secret. It's
not the flint, it's really the iron. Flint happens to
have that kind of hardness to it naturally, and there's
a whole lot of flint that's available readily out in
the world. It's close to the surface of the planet,
(12:31):
so it's easy to find, so it's a very common
pairing with iron or steel. Also, remember steel itself is
an alloy of iron and carbon and sometimes some other
stuff too, and carbon steel is mostly iron like iron,
and tends to be fairly brittle as far as steel goes,
(12:52):
so it's frequently used in flint and steel kits. In fact,
steel is typically better than playin old iron is because
as iron has a tendency to bend rather than break
when it's struck by a harder surface, So you want
something that's a little more brittle that will shear off
a bit. Because bending doesn't produce sparks, It just you know,
(13:12):
dentse it. Adding carbon makes iron less bindy. So in general,
the harder the steel and the sharper the flint, the
better sparks you're gonna get when you strike the two
of them together. Also, if you've ever seen anyone use
a machine like a grinder to shape iron or steel,
you've likely seen showers of sparks that come down as
(13:33):
a result. Those sparks come from the same process I
just described. Tiny fragments of pure iron are glowing white
hot as they oxidize upon exposure to the air. All right,
but what about pharaoh cyrium. I mentioned that earlier. Well
for starters, pharaoh Cyrium is not a mineral like flint is.
And to be fair, some people don't refer to flint
(13:54):
as a mineral, they just call it a rock. But
pharaoh cirium isn't a mineral or a rock. It's an alloy.
It's made up of two metals, and the combination of
iron and syrium turned out to be really useful. You've
got iron, which will oxidize rapidly when exposed to air,
and you've got cirium, which has a low ignition temperature,
so that oxidizing process will ignite the serrium and make
(14:17):
the sparks more practical, makes it more likely that you're
able to use them to do something like light of fire.
And after he first developed pharaoh cirium, Welsbach would tweak
this alloy to try and fine tune it to make
it more effective as sort of a spark making fire
starting material. He discovered that adding another soft metal called
(14:40):
lanthanum in very small amounts meant that Pharao cirium would
create brighter sparks and thus be even more effective as
a way of starting fires. Now, in most lighters, the
quote unquote flint in the lighter is actually a piece
of pharaoh cirium. It's not flint, it's pharaoh cirium. And
(15:00):
then most lighters use some sort of wheel made out
of a harder material like steel that's a striker. So
turning the steel wheel causes the wheel to rub or
strike against the pharaoh cyrium quote unquote flint quickly, and
that throws off sparks. There's usually some other piece of
(15:21):
the lighter that holds the pharaoh cirium to a positive
pressure against the wheel so that it remains in contact
with the wheel even as you start to wear down
the pharaoh cirium. So there's usually some sort of spring
or something that exerts pressure on that pharaoh cirium to
make sure it remains in contact with the wheel, because
(15:41):
if the pharaoh cirium loses contact with the wheel, the
wheel will just spend freely. You won't get any sparks
at all because the material that gives off the sparks
isn't in contact with the striking surface anymore. Bells box
discovery created an alternative to relying on chemistry to generate
a flame. The arc would do it if only you
(16:02):
have a supply of fuel. So one of the early
inventions to use pharaoh sirium as a way to start
fires was called the Pisto lighter. I actually have an
outtake where I said pistoleter because it's spelled like leader,
but lighter. It's a lighter. Uh is from a company
called Ronson, and it was called the Pisto lighter because
it had sort of a pistol grip. In fact, it
(16:24):
looked kind of like a little handgun, a little pistol,
but instead of shooting bullets, this thing shoots sparks. Ronson
would actually play an important part in the early history
of lighters, so it makes sense to talk about them
for just a minute. The company was founded just before
the turn of the twentieth century by Louis Vincent Ironson
(16:44):
or Ronson, h Leopold Hertzig and Max Hecked, though at
the time the company they called they formed was called
the Art Metal Works, and the company mainly made stuff
out of iron, ranging from lamps to decorative items. But
Aaronson was a bit of a chemist and an engineer,
(17:04):
and he kept liking to, you know, to to to
fiddle and and mess with stuff and try and figure
out different ways of accomplishing things. He worked on creating
better matches before he started making you know, lighters, and
UH we talked about some of those attempts in the
last episode, not about his work in particular, but the
attempt to move away from things like white phosphorus as
(17:27):
your active component in a match. While n the company,
UH introduced the pistol lighter, and inside this lighter was
a length of pharaoh syrium um like a surface of
pharao syrium inside what would be the barrel of this pistol,
and then also inside of it was a spring loaded
(17:48):
file of harder material, and so you could pull back
on this and it would have the spring compress and
a little catch would be put in place to hold
the spring there, and the file would be in its
h back position. You'd pull a trigger that would release
the spring, and the spring would thus expand and would
(18:11):
push the file against the pharaoh serrium inside the barrel
of this pistol lighter, and sparks would fly out the end.
As a result. The pistol lighter didn't create a sustained
flame like a modern lighter. It was more of a
spark stick type of thing. So the idea was you
would aim this at, say the tinder for a camp fire,
(18:32):
or maybe a motor engine. At the time, there were
cars that and and motors that required you to have
uh an actual external ignition source to to make them work.
Scary times, but if all went well, when you pull
the trigger, the sparks from the pistol lighter would ignite
whatever it was you were aiming. At and you would
(18:54):
have your camp fire started, or your motor would begin
if it didn't work on the first past, and you
could pull the file back to the starting position, compressing
the spring, activating the catch, and you'd be ready for
a second go of it. To create a sustained flame,
a lighter would need an additional component, one of the
three components that make up the fire triangle, and that
(19:17):
would be fuel. I'll explain more in just a moment,
but first let's take a quick break. All right, we're
back now. There are three main components that I want
to focus on with the early lighters that could create
(19:39):
a sustained flame. One is the piece of faro syrium, which,
as I just mentioned, frequently gets referred to as the flint,
even though flint and pharao sirium are very different things,
and technically it's again not flint. In flint and steel
that gives off the sparks when you're striking them together,
it's really the steel, not the flint. If you slam
(20:02):
two pieces of flint together, you can sometimes get sparks
because sometimes you have trace other elements in there that
will create them. But the second component is the striker,
which in many lighters is a wheel that has a
ribbed outer edge and that is pressed against the pharao serium,
or rather I should say the pharaoh cerium is pressed
against the wheel. And so typically you would put like
(20:24):
your thumb on the wheel, for example, and and you
would spin it the wheel pretty quickly by bringing your
thumb down, and that would end up striking against the
pharao serrium and then you get a spark. The third
component is a wick, as in a wick like like
what you would find in a candle, and the purpose
of the wick is to transfer small amounts of some
(20:47):
sort of fuel such as uh nuff the from a
fuel container section of the lighter to the area where
the wheel and the pharaoh cerium are generating sparks. And
clearly you want that to be a separate area from
the main source of fuel. Otherwise you're being igniting all
the fuel in one go, and that would be wasteful
and probably pretty darned dangerous. So the wick is sort
(21:10):
of like a fuel highway. It's very similar to the
way wick works with a candle. So let's talk about
the physics involved in that for a second, because candles
are something I never really thought about in the sense
of how do those work? I mean, why would you
even bother encasing a wick in wax? Why not just
burn the wick material? What the heck is going on here?
(21:32):
All right? So, when you light a candle, you light
the end of the exposed wick, and that part is
easy to understand, right. It starts to burn, So the
wick itself is starting to burn, and the heat from
that burning wick melts wax at that end of the candle.
At the top of the candle, the wick starts to
absorb that liquid wax, so it wicks away the wax
(21:57):
into the wick itself. The lick it wax. If you
were to try and light it on fire, it would
only burn if you were using really high temperatures, far
hotter than what a burning wick would be able to create.
The liquid wax in the wick continues to heat up
and it starts to vaporize. And while liquid wax only
(22:18):
burns its super high temperatures, wax vapor is different. It's
flammable at the right temperature of of a candle. So
the vaporizing wax is what you're actually seeing burn when
a candle is burning, and the vaporizing wax also has
the effect of cooling the wick underneath. As it vaporizes,
it's carrying heat away, so the wick doesn't just burn away.
(22:40):
That's why the wick can remain serviceable even as the
candle continues to burn. It doesn't just burn up and
become useless. So the wick remains a conduit for the
liquid wax. So if you just set fire to a wick,
if it didn't have any candle around it, it would
just burn up pretty quickly and then you'd be in
the dark again. But a candle isn't burning up the
(23:02):
wick as its primary fuel. It's burning up the wax, right,
So a lighter wick serves the same purpose as a
candle wick, which is again to convey fuel through absorption
or wicking from the fuel container to the combustion area.
The fuel for early lighters was, as I said, neftha
(23:23):
or nf thea uh. That's a term that originates from
the Middle East, particularly around Azerbaijan and Iran, and it
was used to describe a particularly volatile type of petroleum
found in those regions, But then it would get applied
to all sorts of different stuff after that, Like it
was described as early as the first century by smarty
(23:47):
pants eggheads like Pliny the Elder, but later folks would
use that term to refer to all sorts of different stuff,
and it confused the matter, like alchemists and scholars in
the Middle Ages would use it to describe pretty much
any liquid with a low boiling point. For our purposes,
we're talking about a hydrocarbon fuel. In nineteen twelve, the
(24:07):
Ronson Company introduced the Wonder light, and unlike the pistol light,
this lighter actually contained fuel and used a wick so
that the sparks would ignite the fuel that was in
the wig and create a sort of permanent match. That's
what they called it. Now, it was much easier to
light stuff like lamps and candles that way. You weren't
(24:29):
just shooting sparks. You had a sustained flame and you
could use that to light other stuff. And there may
well have been other lighters in a similar vein of
this type uh that might have even been invented before
the wonder Light. But as it turns out, this is
one of those topics where it's really hard to find
a definitive history on the subject, and it's also difficult
(24:50):
to trace back who created the very first version of
whatever particular incarnation you're looking at. But in ninety six
Ronson introduced a super cool lighter, a pocket lighter called
the Banjo. This lighter had a button essentially a lever.
So imagine a little lighter where you've got a lever
(25:10):
and you push down on the lever, and when you
do that, it has sort of a double action result.
One is that this pushing down would also turn a
striking wheel that would rub up against some pharaoh cyrium
and thus create a spark. So pushing down on the
lever you get a spark out of it. But the
other effect was that it lifted a cap off of
(25:31):
the wick for this lighter. So when the lever is
in the up position, you know, unpressed, the cap is down.
Pushing down on the lever creates the spark and reveals
the wick, and the same go so the spark can
hit the wick that's got fuel on it, and then
the wick can light. Letting go of the button, as
long as you hold the button, the light is the
(25:53):
light still remains, the flame is still lit. But leting
go to the button means the cap comes down and
it extinguishes the fire because it cuts off the supply
of oxygen, which is again one of the three things
we need in order to sustain a fire. You need
the fuel, you need the heat, and you need an oxidizer.
So you remove the oxidizer, the flame goes out. This
(26:14):
made the Banjo the first automatic pocket lighter in the world.
In the company would release a tabletop version of the banjo,
so this was one that you would not carry around
with you in your pocket. Uh. It would be a
piece on a desk or a table that you would
use to light various things, typically cigarettes. I don't like
(26:35):
talking about that because I don't like cigarettes, but that
was the typical application of the time. As for fuel, well,
I found a manual on how to care and refuel
a Banjo lighter, and boy howdy did it raise my
eyebrows because according to the manual, you could use quote
high grade gasoline benzene or energen as fuel. Gasoline. That
(27:02):
lighter must have smelled terrible, so to refuel. Uh. It
had two screw caps on this lighter, a big one
and a small one, so you would want to unscrew
the larger of the two screw caps and that would
open up a access to the fuel chamber, and presumably
you would then use a funnel and you would very
(27:23):
carefully refuel the lighter or else risks spilling something like
gasoline all over it and turning it into a very
dangerous one use item. The other screw cap, the smaller one,
was for the chamber that held the piece of pharaoh
syrium in place, so that the strike wheel would maintain
contact with the pharaoh cyrium. And so imagine that you've
(27:44):
got this little piece of this material that when it's struck,
it gives us sparks, and it's being held against this
wheel through the use of a spring that's slightly compressed.
Uh So the screw cap opened up the chamber where
the spring was. So if your Pharao syrium ran out,
you know, you're spinning the wheel and no sparks are
(28:05):
coming out, probably means that there's no more far as syrium,
or that it's been worn down so far that's no
longer making contact with the wheel. You would unscrew the
screw cap, you take the spring out, you would take
out whatever little remnants of the Pharao serrium you had
in there. You put a new piece into that chamber.
The new piece of Pharao syrium. You would put the
(28:25):
spring back into the chamber and you would have to
compress it down a little bit as you screwed the
screw cap back in place, and it would again hold
the new piece of Farris serrium against that striking wheel,
so that you would have the sparking material right there
ready to go for the next time you need to
use the lighter. So you can actually use these things
(28:46):
indefinitely as long as the other components held out. The
banjo sold for five dollars according to most sources I
came across. Now, you know me, I had to find
out how much would be if we were to purchase
it today, right, because this was five dollars back in
nineteen twenty six. So according to inflation calculators, five dollars
(29:10):
back in nineteen twenty six would be about the same
amount as seventy two dollars today if we we factor
in inflation, So this would be a lighter that would
cost seventy two bucks. That's a pretty expensive lighter. But
I guess if you're thinking that this could potentially replace
the need for matches for like ever, maybe that could
(29:31):
be a deal. If you're going through matches like crazy.
These days, the original Ronson banjo lighters, if you can
find them in good condition, can sell for a couple
of hundred to several hundred dollars. They are sought after
by collectors uh. Since nineteen twenty eight or so, the
only Ronson banjo lighters that have been made have been
(29:51):
replicas out of Japan, so those obviously are not as valuable.
It's only the ones between nineteen six and nineteen twenty
eight that were originally made by Ronson that will fetch
those higher prices. Lighters like the banjo have lids so
that the fuel doesn't just gradually evaporate away. If you
(30:11):
kept that wick exposed to air, then fuel would start
to evaporate over time, and you would continue to see
it wick away from the fuel chamber and then and
evaporate into the atmosphere. So you would end up running
out a fuel much faster, So you want to have
some sort of cap that keeps that from happening. Another
brand would make this style of lighter incredibly famous, particularly
(30:35):
in America. That brand was Zippo, and Zippo's founder was
a guy named George G. Blaisdell, and the story goes
that in the early nineteen thirties, Blaisdell saw a guy
at the Bradford Country Club where Blaisdell was hanging out
uh in Pennsylvania struggled to light a cigarette from an
(30:57):
Austrian built lighter. But the lighter was kind of unwieldy
and it looked like it required two hands to operate.
It was made out of very thin metal, so that
thin metal was actually soft enough where if you were
gripping it too tightly, you could dent the lighter just
through trying to use it. So Blaisdel saw the opportunity
(31:18):
to improve upon that design and create a pocket lighter
for the United States because he also saw that people
really like cigarettes and they were going through matches like crazy,
So if you could market something like that, you could
really make some money. So Blaisdell then goes and purchases
the United States production and distribution rights for that Austrian
(31:40):
lighter manufacturer, so now Blasdel has the rights to make
and sell those style lighters in the US. However, it
didn't go over so well. He gave them a chrome
plating to kind of make them more attractive and a
little more durable. And he tried to sell them, but
the lighters just didn't work very well, so he ultimately
(32:01):
decided to scrap that approach entirely and to make his
own lighters. So he rented out a small work space
and he hired three people and they collectively tried to
build a prototype for a new type of lighter. Blaizel
sunk nearly three bucks Princely some in nineteen two to
purchase used equipment machining equipment in order to design and
(32:22):
build this lighter. Together, they built a lighter that had
a hinged top. If you open the top, it would
expose the striking wheel and the wick to the to
the air uh and the wick itself was housed inside
a chimney like chamber to protect it from the wind,
so you could use the lighter even if you were
out in on a windy day. You can also open
(32:45):
the lighter with one hand. You could flick it open.
All it took was the spin of the wheel to
strike against the ferres sinium flint to cause a spark
that would ignite the fuel on the wick in the chimney,
and you get a nice bright flame. So if you practiced,
you can flip open the lighter with one hand. You
can roll the wheel with your thumb, or if you're
(33:05):
trying to be you know, like serious cool person, you
flipped open and then you strike that wheel against your
hip or your thigh or something, and you light it
and then you do your cool you know, I meant
to do that kind of face. I can't. I can't
do that face because I if I meant to do it,
it didn't happen, And if it happened, I'm just as
(33:27):
surprised as you are. Anyway, the flame would stay active
with the Zippo lighters until either all the fuel was
gone or you flipped close the lid in order to
cut off oxygen to the flame, so you didn't have
to do anything to keep it lit. You know, you
you roll the striking wheel as soon as those sparks
ignite the fuel on the wick, it was gonna stay
(33:50):
lit until you either closed it or you ran out
of fuel or something else happened, like maybe I don't know,
you dunked it in water or something. Blaze don't liked
the sound of the word zipper. He felt that just
had a really good zing to it, so he decided
to take a kind of a variant on that. Then
he named the lighter the Zippo. The original price for
(34:14):
a windproof zippo was a dollar n two, which means
that today it would cost you about thirty six dollars. Now,
if you wanted to go out and buy a brand
new zippo today, prices start somewhere around twenty bucks and
they go up from there, reaching more than a hundred dollars.
For certain limited edition zippos, they're known not only for
(34:36):
their iconic hinged top and the fact that they'll stay
lit once you light them, but also for the types
of artwork that are featured on them. I think my
own personal favorite is one that is the brass Necronomicon lighter.
But then I'm also the guy who wrote how Cathulu
works as well as how the Necronomicon works for how
stuff works dot Com. By the way, I don't own
(34:59):
a zip bow, but if I did, that's probably the
one I would go for. Now. If you were to
open up a modern Zippo lighter with the traditional fuel,
so for example, let's say that you need to replace
the wick or you need to refuel the zippo, here's
how that that would go you would open up the case,
and the Zippo case is just that, it's a case.
(35:20):
It's it's not the lighter itself. The lighter is inside
the case, and you can actually pull the lighter out
lifting it out of the case. You turn the lighter
upside down and on the underside you're gonna see a
felt pad being held in place by a screw that's
actually in an inside of a tube. That tube holds
(35:41):
the pharaoh cirium uh or or flint screw. It's a
piece that has the pharaoh cyrium at the very end
of it. UH. If you're just refueling, you don't even
need to touch that screw cap. You just move the
felt pad out of the way like you bend it
out the way, and then you would see some packing
(36:02):
material inside the lighter. It kind of looks like cotton wadding,
but it's this very specific type of packing material. So
you would then take some lighter fluid Zippo as its
own specific brand it would prefer you to use, and
you would saturate that packing material. You would squirt the
(36:23):
lighter fluid into the packing material itself. Once it was saturated,
you would move the felt pad back into place to
cover it up, and you would probably want to give
the lighter a pass or two with a clean cloth
to remove any excess fuel that might have spilled on
the outside of it. Then you would replace the lighter
inside the case. You want to also give the case
(36:43):
a pass or two with a clean cloth, then wait
a little bit to allow the lighter fluid to heat
up to room temperature, and then you could use the
lighter again and it would be totally refueled. While the
purpose of a wick is to hold fuel and the
wick itself isn't really meant to burn up, over time,
carbon deposits on the wick will make the wick less effective.
(37:03):
It won't absorb fuel, and then you'll get sparks when
you're trying to use your lighter, but it won't actually light.
So if you're using a Zippo like lighter, what you
would do is you use some tweezers or a pair
of needle nose players to grab hold of the end
of the wick, and you would pull it out a
little bit so that you get a clean section of
wick inside the chimney of that lighter. Wicks are several
(37:27):
inches long, so you can do this a couple of
times with each wick. And when you do that, you
would then snip off the end of the burnt wick,
the carbon infused wick UH to remove that part so
that you get a nice clean section inside the chimney,
and then you're good to go for a good while longer. Now,
if you've done that a couple of times, there might
(37:49):
not be enough wick left inside the lighter to do
it again, and you need to replace the wick. The
replacement process is similar to what you would do if
you were refueling, but as some extra steps. So you
take the lighter out of the case, and rather than
just moving the felt pad on the bottom aside, you
would actually remove that screw at the end. It's called
(38:11):
the flint screw again sparrow cerium, not flint, but whatever.
You take out the felt pad because now it's no
longer held there by the screw. UH. You would also
take out the packing material, and the packing material typically
comes out in three or four wads of the stuff. UH.
You would need to feed a new wick into the lighter.
You could either do it from inside through the fuel chamber,
(38:34):
or you could put it down through the chimney and
you get that so enough of it's poking out the
top so that you've got the the clean wick at
the top of the chimney, and then you would need
to replace the packing material. You'd kind of have to
do it in a way so that the packing material
is all around the wick, so it has good exposure
(38:57):
to that packing material, because remember it's the packing material
the whole the fuel. The fuel then wicks into the wick,
so you want to make sure it has really good
um exposure to all of that. So you're packing the
material all around the wick until it's all replaced. Then
you would put the felt pad back in place, and
you would re insert the flint screw, and then you
(39:18):
could put it back inside the case and it would
be good to go. Now, the reason I went through
all that process wasn't to talk about Zippo the brand
or anything. I'm not here to sell Zippo lighters, but
rather to explain how lighters like the Zippo differ from
other types of lighters, specifically those that use buttane, because
(39:40):
not all lighters are created equal, and betane lighters work
on slightly different principles from these style lighters, the wick
based lighters. I'll explain more in just a moment. But
first let's take another quick break. Before the break, I
(40:02):
mentioned butane lighters, and they use butane as the fuel,
and the basic type still uses a piece of ferrocerium
to generate sparks to ignite that fuel. So in some
ways they're very similar to the other types of lighters
I just mentioned, but there are some key differences between
butane lighters and the NUFA or lighter fluid based ones
(40:23):
I had just been talking about. At room temperature and
under normal atmospheric pressure, butane is a gas. It's naturally
colorless and odorless. It's a hydrocarbon that's found in natural gas.
It's also a byproduct during the process of refining petroleum
to produce gasoline, and it is ignitable. But if you
(40:44):
were to compress butane just a little bit, it liquefies.
And it doesn't take too much pressure to convert mutane
from a gas to liquid at room temperature about three
and a half atmospheres of pressure. So if you sell
bututane in a container that can hold that pressure, you
apply that much pressure to it, at least the gas
(41:05):
condenses into a liquid. Now I wish I could tell
you when someone thought to use butane as a fuel
for lighters. But honestly, there doesn't seem to be any
record of when someone thought of that idea first. There
are a lot of very general, vague descriptions. Some sources
go really vague. They say something like sometime in the
(41:26):
nineteen fifties people started using butchane for lighters. Others say
it dates back a little earlier than that, with the
invention of the butuane lighter coming somewhere in the nineteen
thirties or nineteen forties, whenever they were first manufactured, and
whomever it was that figured it out. They work on
a pretty ingenious principle. So inside a butane lighter, the
fuel chamber is sealed, so it acts as a low
(41:49):
pressure container that keeps mutane in liquid form because it's
under that three and a half atmospheres of pressure. A
tube from the fuel chamber to the chim me, you know,
the part where the flame comes up, acts as a
conduit for this fuel. And the tube has a valve
and a nozzle, so there's a valve and then right
(42:10):
after the valves nozzle, so when the lighter is not used,
the valve is shut. So the bututane remains in liquid form,
there's nowhere for it to go. On a classic butane lighter,
you've got the striking wheel, just like in the other
lighters I've described, and rather than a wick, you have
the end of a nozzle. And then there's this little
button that you're supposed to hold down like you spin
(42:31):
the wheel, and when your thumb comes down at the
end of the spin, it presses this button and you're
supposed to hold it down. That button is the release
for the valve that closes off the tube from the
fuel chamber. When that valve opens, there's a lower pressure
pathway for the but tane to move through, and we
know that fluids will move from an area of high
(42:53):
pressure to an area of low pressure. So when this
valve opens, the but tane moves up the tube and
it hits the nozzle. The mutane then boils off into
butane gas. The spark from the striking wheel uh and
the flint or pharaoh's cirium ignites this escaping butane gas.
So as long as you hold down the button, you
(43:15):
keep the valve open, and the buttane gas continues to
come out and feeds the flame. It provides the fuel,
so the fuel is constantly being replenished as long as
you hold down the button. When you let go of
the button, it closes the valve, thus cutting off the
fuel to the flame, and the flame goes out. Buttane
lighters don't require a wick, so there's no need to
(43:37):
replace wicks over time. There's no wick to replace. Many
buttane lighters have a means of adjusting how wide that
valve will open when you press down on a button.
That affects how much butane gas can escape at any
given amount of time, so it affects how big the
flame will be. More fuel means bigger flame. Less fuel
(43:59):
means smaller flame, so if you restrict the valve you
get a very low flame. You open the valve as
much as you can, the flame would be much larger.
Another advantage was that butane didn't give off an unpleasant
odor the way earlier fuels were. They were smelly, but
butuane didn't smell. It burned without making any sort of
(44:19):
smell at all. Really, one disadvantage is that it's trickier
to refuel a bututane lighter. Some beautane lighters are marketed
as disposable, which really just means there's no way to
refuel them at all once they're out, so you're meant
to throw them away and buy a new one. And
when I say there's no way, people have figured out ways.
(44:40):
But typically you're meant to just use it and then
toss it, which is pretty wasteful. Perhaps the best known
of these is the Big Lighter, which was first produced
in the early nineteen seventies. The bit lighter was seen
as an inexpensive alternative to the more fashionable lighters like Zippo.
Other bututane lighters are meant to be reusable, and they
(45:01):
include a second valve. This is typically on the base
of the lighter, the underside of the lighter, and this
valve allows buttane gas to get injected into the fuel chamber,
but prevents it from coming back out. Now, typically if
you were refueling a butane lighter, you would hold the
lighter upside down. You'd use something pointy to kind of
(45:21):
open up the valve and bleed it of any old
butane gas, and then you would get a butane refill
can which has a nozzle on the end. The nozzle
goes into the valve of the lighter and you would
just insert the bututane can into the lighter, and after
just a couple of seconds, like five seconds, it would
(45:42):
refill the fuel chamber on the butane lighter, and you'd
want to wait a little bit for the fuel inside
the lighter to reach room temperature and then you can
start using it again. Over time, a new variant on
the butuane lighter showed up. This is the piece of
electric lighter. I told you we kind of come back
to it. So remember how I said. Quartz is an
(46:03):
interesting material. If you apply mechanical stress to it, the
quarts generates an internal electric charge. Well that's a manifestation
of the piece of electric effect. So a piece of
electric lighter uses this particular phenomenon in order to generate
a spark. So there's no ferro serrium in a uh
in a in this kind of lighter, or or flint
if you prefer, there's none of that instead. A piece
(46:26):
of electric lighter typically has a button on the lighter.
If you push down on that button, you would probably
feel a click, kind of like a click pen. But
what's happening is that the button is typically doing two things.
It's transferring the force you've just exerted on the button
onto some piece of electric material, and maybe not directly,
it might pull back and then release a spring loaded
(46:48):
hammer which then strikes this piece of electric material that
makes the material generate an electric charge, and that creates
a difference of voltage between two little electrodes and causes
a small spark to fly between them. And at the
same time, pushing down on the button also releases a
valve that opens up the pathway to the fuel chamber,
(47:12):
so beutane gas escapes at that same moment, so the
beautane gas starts to come out of the chamber through
a nozzle at the same time as a spark is
flying across the nozzle and that ignites the escaping gas
and you get a flame. So you see this in
a lot of different types of lighters, including like pocket lighters,
(47:34):
but also the utility lighters that I think about, like
the ones that have the very long stems and use
them to light candles or fireplaces, that kind of thing. Uh,
they typically have the piezo electric approach as opposed to
a faroh cirium kind of lighting system. So you can
find lighters like this that actually fit into lighter cases,
(47:56):
like the ones made famous by Zippo. So if you
preferred that mechanism to the faro syrium traditional type of lighter,
you could swap them out, and you can take out
one lighter and you put another one in the same case.
And a neat thing about this particular type of lighter
is that although it uses an electric spark to ignite
a flame, there's no need for a battery or anything
like that. There's no source of electricity apart from the
(48:19):
piece of electric material. So as long as that material
is inside the lighter, and as long as the mechanism
that exerts mechanical stress onto the material is still working,
you should still be able to generate sparks. One other
type of lighter I should mention before I close out
this episode works on yet another principle, and this would
(48:39):
be the old fashioned car cigarette lighters. And you don't
typically see these in cars anymore, at least not as
a standard option, but it used to be a really
common feature. So they look like little knobs that are
typically somewhere in the dashboard and you would push it
in and it would remain pushed in for a short
while before it would hop back out, kind of like
(49:01):
a toaster. You would then pull the knob out of
the dashboard and the other end from the handle would
be glowing red hot, and you would apply that into
whatever it was he wanted to light, which more often
than not was a cigarette, and the heat was greater
than the ignition temperature of the material and it starts
to burn. Now, I have a distinct memory of being
(49:23):
a kid and my dad patiently explaining to me that
the cigarette lighter on the dashboard of our old Dodge
Dart would in fact get super super hot. He was
trying to teach me to be careful and not to
play with it, right, because this was in the nineteen
seventies when such things were common, And I remember I
(49:43):
was a particularly dumb kid, No big surprise there. You
guys all know who I am. And I immediately didn't
believe him. So I touched it and I burnt myself
because I was dumb. But I learned a valuable lesson,
one that my dad was telling the truth, and to
that the facts. Car cigarette lighters get really really hot.
But how do they get hot. Well, in the end
(50:06):
of the car cigarette lighter, the business end, the end
that lights stuff. There's a coil of wire, and it's
typically made from something like nichrome, which is nickel chrome,
and it's a generic term for a group of alloys
that are made up of surprise, surprise, nickel and chrome
and sometimes other stuff like iron. This material has a
(50:26):
pretty high resistivity. That means it's resistant to electrical current
flowing through that material and quick refresh. You can think
of all materials everywhere as being on a spectrum of conductivity.
At one end extreme end of that spectrum, you have
stuff that allows electricity to pass without any resistance at all.
(50:49):
The electrons just flow through it, there's no problem there.
These would be super conductors, and typically we don't see
superconductors unless we have some very special circumstances involved, such
is cooling stuff down to near absolute zero. On the
opposite end of the spectrum, you have material that pretty
much prevents any electrical current from passing through that material
(51:10):
at all. It just stops. These would be insulators. Nichrome
resists the flow of electricity. It allows it to move through,
but it resists the flow, and in the process the
metal heats up as some of that energy from the
electricity gets converted over into heat. So if you had
a coil of this stuff, and you passed an electric
(51:30):
current through it, the stuff heats up. And that's the
basic principle behind inventions like the electric stove and electric
space heaters. They use wires or uh components like this
with high resistivity to convert electrical current into heat. Now, well,
when it's not in use, the car cigarette lighter isn't
in contact with the electrodes that would otherwise push electric
(51:54):
current through the lighter. But when you pressed the lighter in,
it would engage with those electrodes and the current would
come from the car's overall electrical circuit. Inside the lighter
is a spring, so it compresses as you push it in,
and there's a little retaining clip that would engage when
it was pushed all the way in and would hold
(52:14):
the cigarette lighter in that compressed state, so it's in
contact with those electrodes. But the clip, the retaining clip
was made from a bimetallic material. Now, as the name implies,
bimetallic stuff is made up of two metals, and in
this case, it's a strip that's made up of two
different materials that expand at different rates when they get hot.
(52:38):
So you press the lighter in the current goes through
the nichrome wire, the wire heats up and the biometallic
restraining clips starts to get hot until one side of
the clip begins to expand faster than the other and
it starts to curl away. Eventually that bends the clip
enough so that the spring is released and the cigarette
lighter pops back out from the dashboard. It disc engages
(53:00):
from the electrodes and you're able to pull it out
the dashboard and that end is super hot. These days,
you typically seen car manufacturers offer this as an electrical
outlet rather than a cigarette lighter, and you could plug
something again, like a converter so that you can plug
in your your cell phone chargers, that kind of stuff.
But occasionally you can find car manufacturers that offer it
(53:23):
as an option or you can get as an aftermarket
thing for your vehicle. But really we've seen a massive
decline in car cigarette lighters over the years, as we've
also seen a decline in cigarette smoking in general, which
I considered to be a good thing. So there you
have it. That's how lighters work, and I think it's
a good idea to have a few lighters just in
(53:44):
case of emergencies. Such as loss of power. A good
piezo electric lighter, particularly one of those utility lighters I
was talking about that half a long stem that could
be really handy if you need to light stuff like
candles or lamps in the case of a power power failure.
It's also good to know how to use pharaoh sirium
like pharaoh sirium sticks or fire starter sticks. I think
(54:05):
it's a must have component if you ever plan on
doing stuff like camping, or you want to have like
a survivalist gear package, you gotta have fire starter sticks.
It's a reliable way to generate the sparks you need
to start campfires. You don't have to worry about water
ruining your matches, or you don't have to carry combustible fuel,
which in itself could be a danger. The good old
(54:27):
fire sticks will really serve you well in those cases.
But that wraps up this episode. If you guys have
suggestions for future topics for tech stuff, let me know.
You can get in touch with me on social media
Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is
text stuff h s. W LL look forward to hearing
from you, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(54:53):
Tex 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, wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to text Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
iHeart Radio and I love all things tech. And today
we're going to talk about lighters. And this is sort
of a sequel to our last episode, which was about matches.
(00:29):
Alimona is not in the studio and I'm happy to
report that nothing in my line of vision is currently
on fire. So we're going to pick up where we
left off in that last episode. And in that episode,
I described an invention that used chemistry to create a flame,
(00:49):
to ignite a flame. Now, this particular invention I talked
about in the last episode is a pretty dangerous contraption.
It used sulfuric acid, which by itself is dangerous can
seriously injure and disfigure you. But it was using sulfuric
acid and zinc in order to generate hydrogen gas, and
hydrogen gas is also potentially really dangerous. Hydrogen gas is
(01:13):
lighter than air, but unlike helium, hydrogen is extremely flammable.
It's the stuff that contributed to the famous Hindenburg disaster.
But now we're going to switch over to some other
technologies and developments that made the modern lighter possible. Because,
if you remember in that last episode, though the version
(01:33):
I just mentioned was not really practical, they sold a
few thousand of them, but it wasn't something that could
easily be used, and it certainly wasn't something you could
carry around in your pocket. So our next advance in
the making of fire would date back to the beginning
of the twentieth century, so the early nineteen hundreds. That's
(01:54):
when an Austrian scientist named Baron carl Aur von Velba
was working with some mixtures of rare earth elements to
see what you know, they would do, so what scientists
do sometimes just trying stuff. Well, one of those elements
he was working with was a metal called serrium c
(02:17):
E R I U M, and it's a relatively soft metal.
It's silvery white in color, but it does tarnish when
it's exposed to air, so it doesn't stay silvery white
for very long. And it's soft enough then you can
actually cut this stuff with a knife, so it's a
pretty soft metal. Velbot discovered that creating an alloy, which is,
(02:40):
you know, a combination of different metals and other components.
But if you create an alloy using iron and cyrium,
it was actually mostly iron about seventy iron cirium that
you would create a substance that could ignite sparks if
it was struck or scratched by a harder material. And
he called this stuff pharaoh cyrium, and he classified it
(03:04):
as a mish battle, which is sort of a Germanic
word that essentially means mixed metal or alloy. These days,
pharao cyrium and mish metal has a slightly different spelling.
Typically are frequently used to describe the same thing. Also,
a lot of folks will refer to this stuff as
flint in modern lighters, but that is misleading. Flint is
(03:27):
something very different, and this merits a quick explanation so
that you guys can understand and appreciate the difference between
flint and pharaoh cirium. Alright, so let's start off with quartz.
This stuff is the most abundant mineral found at Earth's surface,
so we humans have tons of experience with quartz. If
(03:49):
you take one part silicon to two parts oxygen, that's quartz.
And it's a durable mineral, and it has some really
super interesting properties. It's heat resistant, so it's a good
component to use in materials where you want to have
something that can stand up to great amounts of heat.
It also has a really interesting quirky phenomena that's associated
(04:13):
with it and some other materials. If you exert a
mechanical stress on quartz, in other words, if you hit it,
it then accumulates an electrical charge, or if you expose
quarts to an electrical charge, it will exert an internal
mechanical strain. It will vibrate. So you can make quartz
(04:34):
pulse at a consistent frequency by applying an electrical charge
to it, which is why quartz crystals are used in
analog watches and clocks. The predictable, repeatable vibration that frequency
is always going to be the same is a great
way to keep track of the passing of time, and
(04:54):
so you use that as sort of the uh, the
foundation for all the other time keeping elements. But this
is not an episode about clockwork. So we'll get back
to piece of electric because it will play a part
later on in our episode, but let's leave that off
(05:15):
for now. Now. More than that, quartz comes in many
different varieties and one of those varieties is flint. Flint
contains a lot of impurities, so it doesn't look like
pure quartz at all. It doesn't look like what we
think of when we think of the word quartz. Flint
tends to be dark gray in color, but it can
(05:36):
have other colors in it as well, like brown or red,
sometimes even whi er yellow, and typically is much closer
to opaque than what we think of when we think
of quarts. We tend to think of something that's at
least translucent with quartz, but flint tends to be almost opaque.
And like courts in general, flint has no flat surfaces
(05:57):
of internal weakness, no Planer weakness inside court flint or cowards.
That means that you do not observe cleavage with quartz
or flint, which is, you know, actual geological kind of
term here. So in other words, if you were to
strike this material hard enough to break it, you would
(06:18):
see what's called a conchoidal fracture, that's a smoothly curving fracture.
Surface Glass is a type of material that has conchoidal
fractures as opposed to Planer fractures or cleavage. By breaking
quartz or flint in very precise ways. You can fashion tough,
(06:40):
sharp objects, stuff that can stand up to somewear and tear,
and it can have a very sharp edge to it,
which is why flint was a valuable material in early
human history. It could be chipped to shape into stuff
like arrowheads spear points, as well as into cutting tools
like access is now getting back to making fires. The
(07:03):
property we're interested in with flint is that if you
were to strike flint against iron, you can create sparks.
But why is that, Well, it's not because of the
flint necessarily, it's actually more because of the irons. The
iron is pyrophoric, which means it's a material that will
(07:24):
ignite under room temperature. And that probably sounds really weird, right.
I Mean, we've all come into contact with iron, We've
all seen iron objects, and most of the time I
think we could agree that's not you know, currently on fire.
So what actually gives here? What's happening and why do
(07:46):
I say that iron is pyrophoric. We'll see when iron
encounters air, it begins to oxidize, and with iron, that
means it develops a thin layer of iron oxide on
the outside surface of the iron itself. Iron oxide is
known by another name rust. So the rusting process is
a chemical reaction, and it's an exothermic chemical reaction, if
(08:10):
you remember from our last episode. An exothermic reaction is
one that in the process of this chemical reaction going on,
releases heat. But if you're talking about any appreciable amount
of iron, as in more than just a tiny speck
of the stuff, that heat dissipates pretty quickly. The relative
mass of the iron is great enough that the heat
(08:33):
becomes a non factor. And this is really important. We
have to consider the ratio of a any given amount
of irons mass relative to the surface area that is
exposed to the air. If the iron has more than
a little mass, that heat can dissipate through the rest
of the hunk of iron. You know, all the iron
(08:54):
atoms that are not exposed to air will just sort
of absorb that heat and nothing else happens apart from
the external surfaces rusting. And once they rust, they've got
this sort of protective layer, and thus the rest of
the iron atoms aren't exposed to oxygen anymore. Rusting really
is just a similar process to burning. That burning is
(09:14):
also a chemical reaction. In which material oxidizes. It is
just that burning happens a lot faster and with you know,
flames and stuff. When you strike iron with a flint,
the flint is actually hard enough and typically sharp enough
to cause very tiny shards of iron to shear off
(09:35):
of whatever it is you're striking. While any part of
those tiny pieces that were previously exposed to oxygen still
have an iron oxide coating, the rest of those small
pieces haven't been touched by oxygen at all, So these
are pure iron with no iron oxide arm and as
soon as that surface makes contact with oxygen, the oxidizing
(09:58):
process begins immediately. So now we're talking about iron in
which the ratio of surface area of exposed iron compared
to the mass of that iron has been flipped. It's
very little mass, and much of it is exposed to oxygen.
The mass of the shards is so low that it
cannot dissipate that heat, So the exposed surface oxidizes at
(10:23):
a rate faster than heat can dissipate. So since the
heat can't dissipate, it builds up. It builds up super
super fast, and those tiny shards of iron get hot,
hot enough to glow and to reach the ignition temperature
of some other fuel source, like the tinder of a
camp fire. That all happens in the blink of an eye,
(10:44):
and that is a spark. The spark you see are
these tiny pieces of iron that are oxidizing and they're
generating so much heat that they cannot dissipate that the
metal itself begins to glow from that heat. So when
you strike iron against flint, you're creating tiny flying shards
of white hot iron particles, and that's why you're able
(11:08):
to use those to light a camp fire. For example.
Flint was also used in early firearms. Flint would be
in the striking arm of a gun like a flint
lock rifle or a flint lock pistol, and so you
would have this little hammer that would have flint attached
(11:29):
to it, and you would have a little cup, essentially
a little receptacle cup, and the when you pull the trigger,
the hammer would come down and strike inside the cup.
It would hit another surface that would be made out
of pyrite, which is a mix of iron and silicon.
The collision would create sparks, which ignites a small amount
(11:49):
of gunpowder. It leads into the chamber of the firearm
ignites a larger amount of gunpowder, which causes an explosion
and then propels a projectile out of the weapon. So
that's where you get your flintlock pistols and your flintlock rifles. Now,
technically you don't absolutely have to use flint. If you
want to use iron to generate sparks. You really just
(12:11):
need something that's hard enough and sharp enough to shear
off those tiny particles of iron. That's the secret. It's
not the flint, it's really the iron. Flint happens to
have that kind of hardness to it naturally, and there's
a whole lot of flint that's available readily out in
the world. It's close to the surface of the planet,
(12:31):
so it's easy to find, so it's a very common
pairing with iron or steel. Also, remember steel itself is
an alloy of iron and carbon and sometimes some other
stuff too, and carbon steel is mostly iron like iron,
and tends to be fairly brittle as far as steel goes,
(12:52):
so it's frequently used in flint and steel kits. In fact,
steel is typically better than playin old iron is because
as iron has a tendency to bend rather than break
when it's struck by a harder surface, So you want
something that's a little more brittle that will shear off
a bit. Because bending doesn't produce sparks, It just you know,
(13:12):
dentse it. Adding carbon makes iron less bindy. So in general,
the harder the steel and the sharper the flint, the
better sparks you're gonna get when you strike the two
of them together. Also, if you've ever seen anyone use
a machine like a grinder to shape iron or steel,
you've likely seen showers of sparks that come down as
(13:33):
a result. Those sparks come from the same process I
just described. Tiny fragments of pure iron are glowing white
hot as they oxidize upon exposure to the air. All right,
but what about pharaoh cyrium. I mentioned that earlier. Well
for starters, pharaoh Cyrium is not a mineral like flint is.
And to be fair, some people don't refer to flint
(13:54):
as a mineral, they just call it a rock. But
pharaoh cirium isn't a mineral or a rock. It's an alloy.
It's made up of two metals, and the combination of
iron and syrium turned out to be really useful. You've
got iron, which will oxidize rapidly when exposed to air,
and you've got cirium, which has a low ignition temperature,
so that oxidizing process will ignite the serrium and make
(14:17):
the sparks more practical, makes it more likely that you're
able to use them to do something like light of fire.
And after he first developed pharaoh cirium, Welsbach would tweak
this alloy to try and fine tune it to make
it more effective as sort of a spark making fire
starting material. He discovered that adding another soft metal called
(14:40):
lanthanum in very small amounts meant that Pharao cirium would
create brighter sparks and thus be even more effective as
a way of starting fires. Now, in most lighters, the
quote unquote flint in the lighter is actually a piece
of pharaoh cirium. It's not flint, it's pharaoh cirium. And
(15:00):
then most lighters use some sort of wheel made out
of a harder material like steel that's a striker. So
turning the steel wheel causes the wheel to rub or
strike against the pharaoh cyrium quote unquote flint quickly, and
that throws off sparks. There's usually some other piece of
(15:21):
the lighter that holds the pharaoh cirium to a positive
pressure against the wheel so that it remains in contact
with the wheel even as you start to wear down
the pharaoh cirium. So there's usually some sort of spring
or something that exerts pressure on that pharaoh cirium to
make sure it remains in contact with the wheel, because
(15:41):
if the pharaoh cirium loses contact with the wheel, the
wheel will just spend freely. You won't get any sparks
at all because the material that gives off the sparks
isn't in contact with the striking surface anymore. Bells box
discovery created an alternative to relying on chemistry to generate
a flame. The arc would do it if only you
(16:02):
have a supply of fuel. So one of the early
inventions to use pharaoh sirium as a way to start
fires was called the Pisto lighter. I actually have an
outtake where I said pistoleter because it's spelled like leader,
but lighter. It's a lighter. Uh is from a company
called Ronson, and it was called the Pisto lighter because
it had sort of a pistol grip. In fact, it
(16:24):
looked kind of like a little handgun, a little pistol,
but instead of shooting bullets, this thing shoots sparks. Ronson
would actually play an important part in the early history
of lighters, so it makes sense to talk about them
for just a minute. The company was founded just before
the turn of the twentieth century by Louis Vincent Ironson
(16:44):
or Ronson, h Leopold Hertzig and Max Hecked, though at
the time the company they called they formed was called
the Art Metal Works, and the company mainly made stuff
out of iron, ranging from lamps to decorative items. But
Aaronson was a bit of a chemist and an engineer,
(17:04):
and he kept liking to, you know, to to to
fiddle and and mess with stuff and try and figure
out different ways of accomplishing things. He worked on creating
better matches before he started making you know, lighters, and
UH we talked about some of those attempts in the
last episode, not about his work in particular, but the
attempt to move away from things like white phosphorus as
(17:27):
your active component in a match. While n the company,
UH introduced the pistol lighter, and inside this lighter was
a length of pharaoh syrium um like a surface of
pharao syrium inside what would be the barrel of this pistol,
and then also inside of it was a spring loaded
(17:48):
file of harder material, and so you could pull back
on this and it would have the spring compress and
a little catch would be put in place to hold
the spring there, and the file would be in its
h back position. You'd pull a trigger that would release
the spring, and the spring would thus expand and would
(18:11):
push the file against the pharaoh serrium inside the barrel
of this pistol lighter, and sparks would fly out the end.
As a result. The pistol lighter didn't create a sustained
flame like a modern lighter. It was more of a
spark stick type of thing. So the idea was you
would aim this at, say the tinder for a camp fire,
(18:32):
or maybe a motor engine. At the time, there were
cars that and and motors that required you to have
uh an actual external ignition source to to make them work.
Scary times, but if all went well, when you pull
the trigger, the sparks from the pistol lighter would ignite
whatever it was you were aiming. At and you would
(18:54):
have your camp fire started, or your motor would begin
if it didn't work on the first past, and you
could pull the file back to the starting position, compressing
the spring, activating the catch, and you'd be ready for
a second go of it. To create a sustained flame,
a lighter would need an additional component, one of the
three components that make up the fire triangle, and that
(19:17):
would be fuel. I'll explain more in just a moment,
but first let's take a quick break. All right, we're
back now. There are three main components that I want
to focus on with the early lighters that could create
(19:39):
a sustained flame. One is the piece of faro syrium, which,
as I just mentioned, frequently gets referred to as the flint,
even though flint and pharao sirium are very different things,
and technically it's again not flint. In flint and steel
that gives off the sparks when you're striking them together,
it's really the steel, not the flint. If you slam
(20:02):
two pieces of flint together, you can sometimes get sparks
because sometimes you have trace other elements in there that
will create them. But the second component is the striker,
which in many lighters is a wheel that has a
ribbed outer edge and that is pressed against the pharao serium,
or rather I should say the pharaoh cerium is pressed
against the wheel. And so typically you would put like
(20:24):
your thumb on the wheel, for example, and and you
would spin it the wheel pretty quickly by bringing your
thumb down, and that would end up striking against the
pharao serrium and then you get a spark. The third
component is a wick, as in a wick like like
what you would find in a candle, and the purpose
of the wick is to transfer small amounts of some
(20:47):
sort of fuel such as uh nuff the from a
fuel container section of the lighter to the area where
the wheel and the pharaoh cerium are generating sparks. And
clearly you want that to be a separate area from
the main source of fuel. Otherwise you're being igniting all
the fuel in one go, and that would be wasteful
and probably pretty darned dangerous. So the wick is sort
(21:10):
of like a fuel highway. It's very similar to the
way wick works with a candle. So let's talk about
the physics involved in that for a second, because candles
are something I never really thought about in the sense
of how do those work? I mean, why would you
even bother encasing a wick in wax? Why not just
burn the wick material? What the heck is going on here?
(21:32):
All right? So, when you light a candle, you light
the end of the exposed wick, and that part is
easy to understand, right. It starts to burn, So the
wick itself is starting to burn, and the heat from
that burning wick melts wax at that end of the candle.
At the top of the candle, the wick starts to
absorb that liquid wax, so it wicks away the wax
(21:57):
into the wick itself. The lick it wax. If you
were to try and light it on fire, it would
only burn if you were using really high temperatures, far
hotter than what a burning wick would be able to create.
The liquid wax in the wick continues to heat up
and it starts to vaporize. And while liquid wax only
(22:18):
burns its super high temperatures, wax vapor is different. It's
flammable at the right temperature of of a candle. So
the vaporizing wax is what you're actually seeing burn when
a candle is burning, and the vaporizing wax also has
the effect of cooling the wick underneath. As it vaporizes,
it's carrying heat away, so the wick doesn't just burn away.
(22:40):
That's why the wick can remain serviceable even as the
candle continues to burn. It doesn't just burn up and
become useless. So the wick remains a conduit for the
liquid wax. So if you just set fire to a wick,
if it didn't have any candle around it, it would
just burn up pretty quickly and then you'd be in
the dark again. But a candle isn't burning up the
(23:02):
wick as its primary fuel. It's burning up the wax, right,
So a lighter wick serves the same purpose as a
candle wick, which is again to convey fuel through absorption
or wicking from the fuel container to the combustion area.
The fuel for early lighters was, as I said, neftha
(23:23):
or nf thea uh. That's a term that originates from
the Middle East, particularly around Azerbaijan and Iran, and it
was used to describe a particularly volatile type of petroleum
found in those regions, But then it would get applied
to all sorts of different stuff after that, Like it
was described as early as the first century by smarty
(23:47):
pants eggheads like Pliny the Elder, but later folks would
use that term to refer to all sorts of different stuff,
and it confused the matter, like alchemists and scholars in
the Middle Ages would use it to describe pretty much
any liquid with a low boiling point. For our purposes,
we're talking about a hydrocarbon fuel. In nineteen twelve, the
(24:07):
Ronson Company introduced the Wonder light, and unlike the pistol light,
this lighter actually contained fuel and used a wick so
that the sparks would ignite the fuel that was in
the wig and create a sort of permanent match. That's
what they called it. Now, it was much easier to
light stuff like lamps and candles that way. You weren't
(24:29):
just shooting sparks. You had a sustained flame and you
could use that to light other stuff. And there may
well have been other lighters in a similar vein of
this type uh that might have even been invented before
the wonder Light. But as it turns out, this is
one of those topics where it's really hard to find
a definitive history on the subject, and it's also difficult
(24:50):
to trace back who created the very first version of
whatever particular incarnation you're looking at. But in ninety six
Ronson introduced a super cool lighter, a pocket lighter called
the Banjo. This lighter had a button essentially a lever.
So imagine a little lighter where you've got a lever
(25:10):
and you push down on the lever, and when you
do that, it has sort of a double action result.
One is that this pushing down would also turn a
striking wheel that would rub up against some pharaoh cyrium
and thus create a spark. So pushing down on the
lever you get a spark out of it. But the
other effect was that it lifted a cap off of
(25:31):
the wick for this lighter. So when the lever is
in the up position, you know, unpressed, the cap is down.
Pushing down on the lever creates the spark and reveals
the wick, and the same go so the spark can
hit the wick that's got fuel on it, and then
the wick can light. Letting go of the button, as
long as you hold the button, the light is the
(25:53):
light still remains, the flame is still lit. But leting
go to the button means the cap comes down and
it extinguishes the fire because it cuts off the supply
of oxygen, which is again one of the three things
we need in order to sustain a fire. You need
the fuel, you need the heat, and you need an oxidizer.
So you remove the oxidizer, the flame goes out. This
(26:14):
made the Banjo the first automatic pocket lighter in the world.
In the company would release a tabletop version of the banjo,
so this was one that you would not carry around
with you in your pocket. Uh. It would be a
piece on a desk or a table that you would
use to light various things, typically cigarettes. I don't like
(26:35):
talking about that because I don't like cigarettes, but that
was the typical application of the time. As for fuel, well,
I found a manual on how to care and refuel
a Banjo lighter, and boy howdy did it raise my
eyebrows because according to the manual, you could use quote
high grade gasoline benzene or energen as fuel. Gasoline. That
(27:02):
lighter must have smelled terrible, so to refuel. Uh. It
had two screw caps on this lighter, a big one
and a small one, so you would want to unscrew
the larger of the two screw caps and that would
open up a access to the fuel chamber, and presumably
you would then use a funnel and you would very
(27:23):
carefully refuel the lighter or else risks spilling something like
gasoline all over it and turning it into a very
dangerous one use item. The other screw cap, the smaller one,
was for the chamber that held the piece of pharaoh
syrium in place, so that the strike wheel would maintain
contact with the pharaoh cyrium. And so imagine that you've
(27:44):
got this little piece of this material that when it's struck,
it gives us sparks, and it's being held against this
wheel through the use of a spring that's slightly compressed.
Uh So the screw cap opened up the chamber where
the spring was. So if your Pharao syrium ran out,
you know, you're spinning the wheel and no sparks are
(28:05):
coming out, probably means that there's no more far as syrium,
or that it's been worn down so far that's no
longer making contact with the wheel. You would unscrew the
screw cap, you take the spring out, you would take
out whatever little remnants of the Pharao serrium you had
in there. You put a new piece into that chamber.
The new piece of Pharao syrium. You would put the
(28:25):
spring back into the chamber and you would have to
compress it down a little bit as you screwed the
screw cap back in place, and it would again hold
the new piece of Farris serrium against that striking wheel,
so that you would have the sparking material right there
ready to go for the next time you need to
use the lighter. So you can actually use these things
(28:46):
indefinitely as long as the other components held out. The
banjo sold for five dollars according to most sources I
came across. Now, you know me, I had to find
out how much would be if we were to purchase
it today, right, because this was five dollars back in
nineteen twenty six. So according to inflation calculators, five dollars
(29:10):
back in nineteen twenty six would be about the same
amount as seventy two dollars today if we we factor
in inflation, So this would be a lighter that would
cost seventy two bucks. That's a pretty expensive lighter. But
I guess if you're thinking that this could potentially replace
the need for matches for like ever, maybe that could
(29:31):
be a deal. If you're going through matches like crazy.
These days, the original Ronson banjo lighters, if you can
find them in good condition, can sell for a couple
of hundred to several hundred dollars. They are sought after
by collectors uh. Since nineteen twenty eight or so, the
only Ronson banjo lighters that have been made have been
(29:51):
replicas out of Japan, so those obviously are not as valuable.
It's only the ones between nineteen six and nineteen twenty
eight that were originally made by Ronson that will fetch
those higher prices. Lighters like the banjo have lids so
that the fuel doesn't just gradually evaporate away. If you
(30:11):
kept that wick exposed to air, then fuel would start
to evaporate over time, and you would continue to see
it wick away from the fuel chamber and then and
evaporate into the atmosphere. So you would end up running
out a fuel much faster, So you want to have
some sort of cap that keeps that from happening. Another
brand would make this style of lighter incredibly famous, particularly
(30:35):
in America. That brand was Zippo, and Zippo's founder was
a guy named George G. Blaisdell, and the story goes
that in the early nineteen thirties, Blaisdell saw a guy
at the Bradford Country Club where Blaisdell was hanging out
uh in Pennsylvania struggled to light a cigarette from an
(30:57):
Austrian built lighter. But the lighter was kind of unwieldy
and it looked like it required two hands to operate.
It was made out of very thin metal, so that
thin metal was actually soft enough where if you were
gripping it too tightly, you could dent the lighter just
through trying to use it. So Blaisdel saw the opportunity
(31:18):
to improve upon that design and create a pocket lighter
for the United States because he also saw that people
really like cigarettes and they were going through matches like crazy,
So if you could market something like that, you could
really make some money. So Blaisdell then goes and purchases
the United States production and distribution rights for that Austrian
(31:40):
lighter manufacturer, so now Blasdel has the rights to make
and sell those style lighters in the US. However, it
didn't go over so well. He gave them a chrome
plating to kind of make them more attractive and a
little more durable. And he tried to sell them, but
the lighters just didn't work very well, so he ultimately
(32:01):
decided to scrap that approach entirely and to make his
own lighters. So he rented out a small work space
and he hired three people and they collectively tried to
build a prototype for a new type of lighter. Blaizel
sunk nearly three bucks Princely some in nineteen two to
purchase used equipment machining equipment in order to design and
(32:22):
build this lighter. Together, they built a lighter that had
a hinged top. If you open the top, it would
expose the striking wheel and the wick to the to
the air uh and the wick itself was housed inside
a chimney like chamber to protect it from the wind,
so you could use the lighter even if you were
out in on a windy day. You can also open
(32:45):
the lighter with one hand. You could flick it open.
All it took was the spin of the wheel to
strike against the ferres sinium flint to cause a spark
that would ignite the fuel on the wick in the chimney,
and you get a nice bright flame. So if you practiced,
you can flip open the lighter with one hand. You
can roll the wheel with your thumb, or if you're
(33:05):
trying to be you know, like serious cool person, you
flipped open and then you strike that wheel against your
hip or your thigh or something, and you light it
and then you do your cool you know, I meant
to do that kind of face. I can't. I can't
do that face because I if I meant to do it,
it didn't happen, And if it happened, I'm just as
(33:27):
surprised as you are. Anyway, the flame would stay active
with the Zippo lighters until either all the fuel was
gone or you flipped close the lid in order to
cut off oxygen to the flame, so you didn't have
to do anything to keep it lit. You know, you
you roll the striking wheel as soon as those sparks
ignite the fuel on the wick, it was gonna stay
(33:50):
lit until you either closed it or you ran out
of fuel or something else happened, like maybe I don't know,
you dunked it in water or something. Blaze don't liked
the sound of the word zipper. He felt that just
had a really good zing to it, so he decided
to take a kind of a variant on that. Then
he named the lighter the Zippo. The original price for
(34:14):
a windproof zippo was a dollar n two, which means
that today it would cost you about thirty six dollars. Now,
if you wanted to go out and buy a brand
new zippo today, prices start somewhere around twenty bucks and
they go up from there, reaching more than a hundred dollars.
For certain limited edition zippos, they're known not only for
(34:36):
their iconic hinged top and the fact that they'll stay
lit once you light them, but also for the types
of artwork that are featured on them. I think my
own personal favorite is one that is the brass Necronomicon lighter.
But then I'm also the guy who wrote how Cathulu
works as well as how the Necronomicon works for how
stuff works dot Com. By the way, I don't own
(34:59):
a zip bow, but if I did, that's probably the
one I would go for. Now. If you were to
open up a modern Zippo lighter with the traditional fuel,
so for example, let's say that you need to replace
the wick or you need to refuel the zippo, here's
how that that would go you would open up the case,
and the Zippo case is just that, it's a case.
(35:20):
It's it's not the lighter itself. The lighter is inside
the case, and you can actually pull the lighter out
lifting it out of the case. You turn the lighter
upside down and on the underside you're gonna see a
felt pad being held in place by a screw that's
actually in an inside of a tube. That tube holds
(35:41):
the pharaoh cirium uh or or flint screw. It's a
piece that has the pharaoh cyrium at the very end
of it. UH. If you're just refueling, you don't even
need to touch that screw cap. You just move the
felt pad out of the way like you bend it
out the way, and then you would see some packing
(36:02):
material inside the lighter. It kind of looks like cotton wadding,
but it's this very specific type of packing material. So
you would then take some lighter fluid Zippo as its
own specific brand it would prefer you to use, and
you would saturate that packing material. You would squirt the
(36:23):
lighter fluid into the packing material itself. Once it was saturated,
you would move the felt pad back into place to
cover it up, and you would probably want to give
the lighter a pass or two with a clean cloth
to remove any excess fuel that might have spilled on
the outside of it. Then you would replace the lighter
inside the case. You want to also give the case
(36:43):
a pass or two with a clean cloth, then wait
a little bit to allow the lighter fluid to heat
up to room temperature, and then you could use the
lighter again and it would be totally refueled. While the
purpose of a wick is to hold fuel and the
wick itself isn't really meant to burn up, over time,
carbon deposits on the wick will make the wick less effective.
(37:03):
It won't absorb fuel, and then you'll get sparks when
you're trying to use your lighter, but it won't actually light.
So if you're using a Zippo like lighter, what you
would do is you use some tweezers or a pair
of needle nose players to grab hold of the end
of the wick, and you would pull it out a
little bit so that you get a clean section of
wick inside the chimney of that lighter. Wicks are several
(37:27):
inches long, so you can do this a couple of
times with each wick. And when you do that, you
would then snip off the end of the burnt wick,
the carbon infused wick UH to remove that part so
that you get a nice clean section inside the chimney,
and then you're good to go for a good while longer. Now,
if you've done that a couple of times, there might
(37:49):
not be enough wick left inside the lighter to do
it again, and you need to replace the wick. The
replacement process is similar to what you would do if
you were refueling, but as some extra steps. So you
take the lighter out of the case, and rather than
just moving the felt pad on the bottom aside, you
would actually remove that screw at the end. It's called
(38:11):
the flint screw again sparrow cerium, not flint, but whatever.
You take out the felt pad because now it's no
longer held there by the screw. UH. You would also
take out the packing material, and the packing material typically
comes out in three or four wads of the stuff. UH.
You would need to feed a new wick into the lighter.
You could either do it from inside through the fuel chamber,
(38:34):
or you could put it down through the chimney and
you get that so enough of it's poking out the
top so that you've got the the clean wick at
the top of the chimney, and then you would need
to replace the packing material. You'd kind of have to
do it in a way so that the packing material
is all around the wick, so it has good exposure
(38:57):
to that packing material, because remember it's the packing material
the whole the fuel. The fuel then wicks into the wick,
so you want to make sure it has really good
um exposure to all of that. So you're packing the
material all around the wick until it's all replaced. Then
you would put the felt pad back in place, and
you would re insert the flint screw, and then you
(39:18):
could put it back inside the case and it would
be good to go. Now, the reason I went through
all that process wasn't to talk about Zippo the brand
or anything. I'm not here to sell Zippo lighters, but
rather to explain how lighters like the Zippo differ from
other types of lighters, specifically those that use buttane, because
(39:40):
not all lighters are created equal, and betane lighters work
on slightly different principles from these style lighters, the wick
based lighters. I'll explain more in just a moment. But
first let's take another quick break. Before the break, I
(40:02):
mentioned butane lighters, and they use butane as the fuel,
and the basic type still uses a piece of ferrocerium
to generate sparks to ignite that fuel. So in some
ways they're very similar to the other types of lighters
I just mentioned, but there are some key differences between
butane lighters and the NUFA or lighter fluid based ones
(40:23):
I had just been talking about. At room temperature and
under normal atmospheric pressure, butane is a gas. It's naturally
colorless and odorless. It's a hydrocarbon that's found in natural gas.
It's also a byproduct during the process of refining petroleum
to produce gasoline, and it is ignitable. But if you
(40:44):
were to compress butane just a little bit, it liquefies.
And it doesn't take too much pressure to convert mutane
from a gas to liquid at room temperature about three
and a half atmospheres of pressure. So if you sell
bututane in a container that can hold that pressure, you
apply that much pressure to it, at least the gas
(41:05):
condenses into a liquid. Now I wish I could tell
you when someone thought to use butane as a fuel
for lighters. But honestly, there doesn't seem to be any
record of when someone thought of that idea first. There
are a lot of very general, vague descriptions. Some sources
go really vague. They say something like sometime in the
(41:26):
nineteen fifties people started using butchane for lighters. Others say
it dates back a little earlier than that, with the
invention of the butuane lighter coming somewhere in the nineteen
thirties or nineteen forties, whenever they were first manufactured, and
whomever it was that figured it out. They work on
a pretty ingenious principle. So inside a butane lighter, the
fuel chamber is sealed, so it acts as a low
(41:49):
pressure container that keeps mutane in liquid form because it's
under that three and a half atmospheres of pressure. A
tube from the fuel chamber to the chim me, you know,
the part where the flame comes up, acts as a
conduit for this fuel. And the tube has a valve
and a nozzle, so there's a valve and then right
(42:10):
after the valves nozzle, so when the lighter is not used,
the valve is shut. So the bututane remains in liquid form,
there's nowhere for it to go. On a classic butane lighter,
you've got the striking wheel, just like in the other
lighters I've described, and rather than a wick, you have
the end of a nozzle. And then there's this little
button that you're supposed to hold down like you spin
(42:31):
the wheel, and when your thumb comes down at the
end of the spin, it presses this button and you're
supposed to hold it down. That button is the release
for the valve that closes off the tube from the
fuel chamber. When that valve opens, there's a lower pressure
pathway for the but tane to move through, and we
know that fluids will move from an area of high
(42:53):
pressure to an area of low pressure. So when this
valve opens, the but tane moves up the tube and
it hits the nozzle. The mutane then boils off into
butane gas. The spark from the striking wheel uh and
the flint or pharaoh's cirium ignites this escaping butane gas.
So as long as you hold down the button, you
(43:15):
keep the valve open, and the buttane gas continues to
come out and feeds the flame. It provides the fuel,
so the fuel is constantly being replenished as long as
you hold down the button. When you let go of
the button, it closes the valve, thus cutting off the
fuel to the flame, and the flame goes out. Buttane
lighters don't require a wick, so there's no need to
(43:37):
replace wicks over time. There's no wick to replace. Many
buttane lighters have a means of adjusting how wide that
valve will open when you press down on a button.
That affects how much butane gas can escape at any
given amount of time, so it affects how big the
flame will be. More fuel means bigger flame. Less fuel
(43:59):
means smaller flame, so if you restrict the valve you
get a very low flame. You open the valve as
much as you can, the flame would be much larger.
Another advantage was that butane didn't give off an unpleasant
odor the way earlier fuels were. They were smelly, but
butuane didn't smell. It burned without making any sort of
(44:19):
smell at all. Really, one disadvantage is that it's trickier
to refuel a bututane lighter. Some beautane lighters are marketed
as disposable, which really just means there's no way to
refuel them at all once they're out, so you're meant
to throw them away and buy a new one. And
when I say there's no way, people have figured out ways.
(44:40):
But typically you're meant to just use it and then
toss it, which is pretty wasteful. Perhaps the best known
of these is the Big Lighter, which was first produced
in the early nineteen seventies. The bit lighter was seen
as an inexpensive alternative to the more fashionable lighters like Zippo.
Other bututane lighters are meant to be reusable, and they
(45:01):
include a second valve. This is typically on the base
of the lighter, the underside of the lighter, and this
valve allows buttane gas to get injected into the fuel chamber,
but prevents it from coming back out. Now, typically if
you were refueling a butane lighter, you would hold the
lighter upside down. You'd use something pointy to kind of
(45:21):
open up the valve and bleed it of any old
butane gas, and then you would get a butane refill
can which has a nozzle on the end. The nozzle
goes into the valve of the lighter and you would
just insert the bututane can into the lighter, and after
just a couple of seconds, like five seconds, it would
(45:42):
refill the fuel chamber on the butane lighter, and you'd
want to wait a little bit for the fuel inside
the lighter to reach room temperature and then you can
start using it again. Over time, a new variant on
the butuane lighter showed up. This is the piece of
electric lighter. I told you we kind of come back
to it. So remember how I said. Quartz is an
(46:03):
interesting material. If you apply mechanical stress to it, the
quarts generates an internal electric charge. Well that's a manifestation
of the piece of electric effect. So a piece of
electric lighter uses this particular phenomenon in order to generate
a spark. So there's no ferro serrium in a uh
in a in this kind of lighter, or or flint
if you prefer, there's none of that instead. A piece
(46:26):
of electric lighter typically has a button on the lighter.
If you push down on that button, you would probably
feel a click, kind of like a click pen. But
what's happening is that the button is typically doing two things.
It's transferring the force you've just exerted on the button
onto some piece of electric material, and maybe not directly,
it might pull back and then release a spring loaded
(46:48):
hammer which then strikes this piece of electric material that
makes the material generate an electric charge, and that creates
a difference of voltage between two little electrodes and causes
a small spark to fly between them. And at the
same time, pushing down on the button also releases a
valve that opens up the pathway to the fuel chamber,
(47:12):
so beutane gas escapes at that same moment, so the
beautane gas starts to come out of the chamber through
a nozzle at the same time as a spark is
flying across the nozzle and that ignites the escaping gas
and you get a flame. So you see this in
a lot of different types of lighters, including like pocket lighters,
(47:34):
but also the utility lighters that I think about, like
the ones that have the very long stems and use
them to light candles or fireplaces, that kind of thing. Uh,
they typically have the piezo electric approach as opposed to
a faroh cirium kind of lighting system. So you can
find lighters like this that actually fit into lighter cases,
(47:56):
like the ones made famous by Zippo. So if you
preferred that mechanism to the faro syrium traditional type of lighter,
you could swap them out, and you can take out
one lighter and you put another one in the same case.
And a neat thing about this particular type of lighter
is that although it uses an electric spark to ignite
a flame, there's no need for a battery or anything
like that. There's no source of electricity apart from the
(48:19):
piece of electric material. So as long as that material
is inside the lighter, and as long as the mechanism
that exerts mechanical stress onto the material is still working,
you should still be able to generate sparks. One other
type of lighter I should mention before I close out
this episode works on yet another principle, and this would
(48:39):
be the old fashioned car cigarette lighters. And you don't
typically see these in cars anymore, at least not as
a standard option, but it used to be a really
common feature. So they look like little knobs that are
typically somewhere in the dashboard and you would push it
in and it would remain pushed in for a short
while before it would hop back out, kind of like
(49:01):
a toaster. You would then pull the knob out of
the dashboard and the other end from the handle would
be glowing red hot, and you would apply that into
whatever it was he wanted to light, which more often
than not was a cigarette, and the heat was greater
than the ignition temperature of the material and it starts
to burn. Now, I have a distinct memory of being
(49:23):
a kid and my dad patiently explaining to me that
the cigarette lighter on the dashboard of our old Dodge
Dart would in fact get super super hot. He was
trying to teach me to be careful and not to
play with it, right, because this was in the nineteen
seventies when such things were common, And I remember I
(49:43):
was a particularly dumb kid, No big surprise there. You
guys all know who I am. And I immediately didn't
believe him. So I touched it and I burnt myself
because I was dumb. But I learned a valuable lesson,
one that my dad was telling the truth, and to
that the facts. Car cigarette lighters get really really hot.
But how do they get hot. Well, in the end
(50:06):
of the car cigarette lighter, the business end, the end
that lights stuff. There's a coil of wire, and it's
typically made from something like nichrome, which is nickel chrome,
and it's a generic term for a group of alloys
that are made up of surprise, surprise, nickel and chrome
and sometimes other stuff like iron. This material has a
(50:26):
pretty high resistivity. That means it's resistant to electrical current
flowing through that material and quick refresh. You can think
of all materials everywhere as being on a spectrum of conductivity.
At one end extreme end of that spectrum, you have
stuff that allows electricity to pass without any resistance at all.
(50:49):
The electrons just flow through it, there's no problem there.
These would be super conductors, and typically we don't see
superconductors unless we have some very special circumstances involved, such
is cooling stuff down to near absolute zero. On the
opposite end of the spectrum, you have material that pretty
much prevents any electrical current from passing through that material
(51:10):
at all. It just stops. These would be insulators. Nichrome
resists the flow of electricity. It allows it to move through,
but it resists the flow, and in the process the
metal heats up as some of that energy from the
electricity gets converted over into heat. So if you had
a coil of this stuff, and you passed an electric
(51:30):
current through it, the stuff heats up. And that's the
basic principle behind inventions like the electric stove and electric
space heaters. They use wires or uh components like this
with high resistivity to convert electrical current into heat. Now, well,
when it's not in use, the car cigarette lighter isn't
in contact with the electrodes that would otherwise push electric
(51:54):
current through the lighter. But when you pressed the lighter in,
it would engage with those electrodes and the current would
come from the car's overall electrical circuit. Inside the lighter
is a spring, so it compresses as you push it in,
and there's a little retaining clip that would engage when
it was pushed all the way in and would hold
(52:14):
the cigarette lighter in that compressed state, so it's in
contact with those electrodes. But the clip, the retaining clip
was made from a bimetallic material. Now, as the name implies,
bimetallic stuff is made up of two metals, and in
this case, it's a strip that's made up of two
different materials that expand at different rates when they get hot.
(52:38):
So you press the lighter in the current goes through
the nichrome wire, the wire heats up and the biometallic
restraining clips starts to get hot until one side of
the clip begins to expand faster than the other and
it starts to curl away. Eventually that bends the clip
enough so that the spring is released and the cigarette
lighter pops back out from the dashboard. It disc engages
(53:00):
from the electrodes and you're able to pull it out
the dashboard and that end is super hot. These days,
you typically seen car manufacturers offer this as an electrical
outlet rather than a cigarette lighter, and you could plug
something again, like a converter so that you can plug
in your your cell phone chargers, that kind of stuff.
But occasionally you can find car manufacturers that offer it
(53:23):
as an option or you can get as an aftermarket
thing for your vehicle. But really we've seen a massive
decline in car cigarette lighters over the years, as we've
also seen a decline in cigarette smoking in general, which
I considered to be a good thing. So there you
have it. That's how lighters work, and I think it's
a good idea to have a few lighters just in
(53:44):
case of emergencies. Such as loss of power. A good
piezo electric lighter, particularly one of those utility lighters I
was talking about that half a long stem that could
be really handy if you need to light stuff like
candles or lamps in the case of a power power failure.
It's also good to know how to use pharaoh sirium
like pharaoh sirium sticks or fire starter sticks. I think
(54:05):
it's a must have component if you ever plan on
doing stuff like camping, or you want to have like
a survivalist gear package, you gotta have fire starter sticks.
It's a reliable way to generate the sparks you need
to start campfires. You don't have to worry about water
ruining your matches, or you don't have to carry combustible fuel,
which in itself could be a danger. The good old
(54:27):
fire sticks will really serve you well in those cases.
But that wraps up this episode. If you guys have
suggestions for future topics for tech stuff, let me know.
You can get in touch with me on social media
Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is
text stuff h s. W LL look forward to hearing
from you, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(54:53):
Tex 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, wherever you listen
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TechStuff News
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Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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