MATCHES
Hazem Bahaa
Fire, one of the most vital elements for everyday life, for
thousands of centuries, humans used to rub sticks together to light a fire, and fire was one of the main elements that helped in the development of human beings.
Today, lighting a fire is absolutely no big deal, and we now
take it for granted, because we are now advanced
enough, we have developed methods of generating fires
chemically. It would probably be surprise to many people
to know that these chemical methods were actually invented by mistake.
" In 1680 an English man named Robert Boyle made
the first attempt of lighting a fire chemically, he discovered
that rubbing sulfur with phosphorus would generate fire
much easier. He explained that the fire was not caused by
friction, but by the characteristics of phosphorus and sulfur themselves. From now and then, a lot of fire generating devices were created from the idea of rubbing sulfur
and phosphorous, but they were all exhausting, dangerous and unpractical. In 1826, a chemist called John
Walker was preparing a pot of chemicals and he was stirring them with a wooden spoon, when he was done, he
noticed that a lump was formed on the end of the spoon.
As walker was trying to remove the lump by
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dragging the spoon on the floor, friction
caused the lump of chemicals – although
they did not contain any phosphorus or sulfur – to surprisingly burst into flame…the
idea of friction matches was born. So although that the first attempts to generate a
controlled fire failed, the matches that we
use today were invented by mistake. So now you could
start imagining how our life would have looked like if the
English pharmacist John Walker would not have tried to
remove the lump of chemicals formed on the edge of his
wooden spoon…
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