Chapter 4- Strike a Light

In chapter 4 it begins with the phosphorus lucifer. What is the phosphorus lucifer? I am asking myself the same question. It turns out that the phosphorus lucifer was a match, originally discovered by Robert Boyle. He first discovered it by coating a piece of paper with phosphorus and a piece of wood with sulfur and rubbing it together and creating a fire. Later on, chemists like John Walker made advancements to the original experiment and created the match. After eighty years of being on the market it was the world's best selling match, but in 1910 it had been outlawed. The phosphorus lucifer was very popular in the war era, as they used them to light fires and much more. The matches were made with white phosphorus, until in the 1850's when the first safety matches were made. They relied much less on red phosphorus. People relied on the matches for everyday tasks like cooking, heating, and lighting there homes. The phosphorus made it very easy to light matches, and were extremely cheap. A person could by 1,200 matches for just the price of one penny.

Matches have been around since the Roman Empire, usually consisting of a small wooden stick and covered with sulfur on one end. How did one get a flame on a cold winters night? Flint and tinder. Knocking the flint against a piece of metal of  some sort would knock of incandescent sparks and like the tinder on fire.
In 1825, a new match was developed, called the Eupyrion feuerstoffe. The problem with these although was that one must have carried around a bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid to ignite the matches.
Phosphorus was always referred to as an instant flame device, the problems that occured included low control over the flammability and its high cost.