The History of Matches

The first known mention of a type of match was back in AD 577 China and was invented by Northern Qi. The matches were small sticks of pinewood with sulfur mixed in. The court ladies who cooked for the militay forces ran out of timber for cooking and heating and were searching for a way to start a fire. In the Netherlands today, matches are referred to as lucifers.

In Europe around 1530, matches appeared again and in 1805, K. Chancel who was an assistant to a Professor in Paris, invented a self-igniting match. The end of the match to ignite was made out of potassium chlorate, sulfur, sugar, and rubber. When the tip of the match was dipped into a small asbestos bottle that was full of sulfuric acid, this caused the match to ignite. The match was never popular because of the dangers it had to use them and they were very expensive to make.

English chemist John Walker was the inventer of the first friction match in 1826. Earlier efforts had been tried in the 1680's by Robert Boyle and an assistant with sulphur and phosphorus but their efforts resulted in failure. John Walker's efforts showed him that by combining a mixture of antimony sulfide or stibnite, potassium chlorate, gum, and starch, and then striking this substance against a rough surface would cause the substance to ignite. This process of igniting was later patented by Samuel Jones and he named the matches lucifer matches. The early matches did have several problems. The flame was unsteady and there was an unpleasant odor produced by the match when it was lit, so in 1830, a Frenchman named Charles Sauria came up with the idea of adding white phosphorus to remove the odor. These new matches had to be kept in an airtight box and were very popular but for all of the facory workers who were involved in the manufacture of these new matches, they were affected with several bone disorders, and in just one pack of the matches, there was enough phosphorus that could kill a person. When the public became aware of these dangers, a campaign began to ban the matches.

János Irinyia chemistry student from Hungarian, invented the noiseless match in 1836. After his professor's experiment failed, another idea came to Irinyia to place lead dioxide into the head of the phosphorus match instead of potassium chloride and then placed phosphorus in warm water and shook it in glass foil until it liquefied and then was at thegranulated stage. Next, he added lead and gum arabic to the phosphorus, poured the paste-like substance into a jar, took pine sticks and dipped them into the substance and let them dry. Later that evening after the pine sticks had dried, he lit all of them to see how they well they burned and all of them lit evenly. Irinyi eventually sold his invention to a match manufacturer by the name of István Rómer, a match manufacturer and who was also a rich Hungarian pharmacist living in Vienna purchased both the production and the invention rights from Irinyia. The production of matches was now going strong.

The noiseless match along with the other types of matches made earlier posed a danger to anyone that used them and these early made matches were also dangerous to those who worked in the manufacturing companies that actually made the matches because of the use of white phosphorus and the way of the element phosphorus would stick to the skin A burn from phosphorus is much more greater than other types of burns because phosphorus becomes absorbed into the body. For safety reasons, this lead to the search for a replacement for the white phosphorus match and the "safety match" was created. In 1844, the safety match was invented by the SwedeGustaf Erik Pasch, and then later on the quality of the match was improved by Johan Edvard Lundström. Johan and his younger brother Carl began large scale match industry around 1847, but the safety match that they had improved was not even introduced until around 1850-55. The brother's match company produced around twelve million match boxes in 1858.

In 1898, Savene and Cahen who were french chemists, developed another safety match by using phosphorus sesquisulfide and once they proved that this substance was non-poisonous and would not explode when ignited and would be okay to use to make "strike-anywhere" matches, they deviced a patent for the safety match substance. In the United Kingdom in 1898, other inventers Albright and Wilson, developed a safer way of making larger quantities of phosphorus sesquisulfide to sell commercially and then began selling the substance to match makers.

Sources:

wikipedia.com