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Did lighters or matches come first? It depends on how you define "lighter" and "match". A flintlock mechanism can be used as a lighter. In 1662, these were being manufactured as lighters in Vienna, separately from a gun. You had to load the mechanism with a fuel of resinous wood and sulfur each time. But this sounds better than the next invention, dripping acid on zinc to generate hydrogen gas, and igniting it with static electricity (1780). In 1823, this was improved by Döbereiner in Germany by using a platinum catalyst to react hydrogen and oxygen and reach ignition temperature. So you carried around a little glass jar of acid, zinc, and flammable gas, but people needed portable fire so much that these were manufactured for nearly 60 years - and over 50 years after John Walker's practical strike-on-sandpaper match came onto the market in 1826.
ReplyDeleteThat may have been a matter of price - these first matches cost 50 for a shilling, when few men earned more than a few shillings a day, which may have made the reusable hydrogen lighter look better. Or perhaps it was that the flaming head was apt to fall off a Walker match, so it wasn't so safe after all. There was a lot of room for improvement, and it took most of the 19th Century to perfect the match - not only making it work better and be either strike-anywhere for convenience or strike only on a special surface provided for safety, but also finding a formula that didn't poison the workers making the matches.
There were earlier "matches", but nothing like the modern sense of self-lighting without a fuss. As early as 950, the Chinese made sticks treated with sulfur that you'd touch to a coal or light with a flint. In 1805, a match was invented in Europe that was dipped in a small vial of sulfuric acid to light; this was improved with a tiny glass capsule of acid in each match, crush the tip to light. John Walker's 1826 invention was the first match or lighter that I can see as better than carrying around a box with flint, steel, and tinder. But I'm not a smoker, and have never needed to keep making fire all day...
The development of lighters seems to have paused for the rest of the 19th century. I see no reason the 1940's Zippo lighter - naptha fueled, with a wick, a chimney, and a hinged cover - could not have been made a century earlier, except I suspect the flint and steel sparker of that day was too feeble to light a liquid fuel without fussing. In it, a sharp bit of hard rock (the flint) struck steel and scraped off bits of iron, with the scraping heating the iron bits so they caught fire. In 1903, ferrocerium was invented. This inverted the sparker: a sharp bit of steel hit the ferrocerium "flint" and scraped off bits, and the ferrocerium bits burned much hotter than iron bits. This made naptha-fueled lighters practical, but modern matches of both the strike-anywhere box type and the strike-on-a-special-surface "safety match" type (often in matchbooks) were perfected first.
The final improvement (so far) is the butane lighter. It replaces the naptha with a self-pressurizing fuel, so no wick is needed, it it usually has a plastic fuel tank instead of metal, and otherwise isn't much different from the WWII Zippo.