In 1669, a Hamburg alchemist, Hennig Brandt, evaporated a tub of urine by boiling it and was quite surprised to see the residue glow mysteriously in the dark and then catch fire.
That residue was phosphorus.
Brandt was looking for the key to immortality, which he thought was hidden in that precious bodily secretion that had the same color as gold.
Disappointed, he left the discovery aside, which instead attracted the attention of the British physicist Robert Boyle.
In 1680, Boyle immersed a piece of wood in sulfur and then rubbed it on a piece of paper on which he had applied a little phosphorus.
The heat generated by the friction ignited the phosphorus, which in turn transmitted the flame to the wood.
The match was officially born.
However, phosphorus was scarce in those days and its ignition was very difficult to control, so matches remained a curiosity, an expensive novelty, of which there were only a limited number.
One day in 1826, the English chemist John Walker, owner of a chemist's shop in Stockton-on-Tees, was at the back of the shop, where he was trying to make a new explosive.
While stirring a mixture of antimony, potassium chlorate, gum and starch with a wooden stick, he noticed that a teardrop-shaped drop had dried on the tip of the stick.
To quickly scrape it off, he rubbed it against the stone floor of the laboratory.
The stick caught fire: in an instant and completely by chance, the rubbing match was born.
Walker never patented his invention.
It was another Englishman, Samuel Jones, who realized the commercial potential of the invention and mass-produced the first matches, which he called "Lucifers".
But the great diffusion began in 1830, when phosphorus matches appeared in France, which however were harmful to health.
The Parisian chemist Charles Sauria eliminated the disgusting smell of the match (derived from the combustion of sulfur), extended the duration of the flame, but inadvertently spread a sort of epidemic of a deadly disease, known as "phosphoric necrosis of the jaw".
Hundreds of workers who worked in match factories contracted this terrible disease in which the jaw bone disintegrated.
Only in 1911 were safer matches produced, based on phosphorus sesquisulfide. [anon]
See Also