Friction match

Before the friction match, fire required labor. Starting a flame meant striking flint against steel to create sparks, catching those sparks on tinder, and coaxing the smoldering material into flame—a process that could take minutes even with practice. John Walker, a chemist in Stockton-on-Tees, discovered by accident that certain chemical mixtures could ignite from friction alone. He created instant fire: a stick that burst into flame when scraped against a rough surface.

The adjacent possible for the friction match required advances in chemistry that had only recently occurred. Potassium chlorate, a powerful oxidizer, had been characterized in the late 18th century. Antimony sulfide could serve as fuel. Walker knew these chemicals from his work as a druggist. The accidental discovery came when he scraped a wooden stick coated with an experimental paste against his hearth. The stick caught fire. Walker immediately recognized the practical value.

His formula combined antimony sulfide, potassium chlorate, and gum arabic into a paste. Wooden splints were first dipped in sulfur—which would conduct the flame down the stick—then tipped with the ignition mixture. Once dried, the match could be struck against any rough surface. Walker sold his first box of 50 matches on April 7, 1827, for one shilling, each box including a folded piece of sandpaper for striking.

Walker, already financially comfortable, refused to patent his invention despite encouragement from Michael Faraday and others. He believed fire should be freely available to all. This decision opened the field to competitors and improvers. Charles Sauria in France replaced Walker's antimony sulfide with white phosphorus in 1830, creating matches that ignited more reliably but at terrible cost—white phosphorus proved lethally toxic to match factory workers.

The friction match transformed daily life in ways difficult to appreciate today. Heating homes, cooking food, lighting lamps—every fire-dependent activity became trivially easy. The match was perhaps the first modern convenience: a manufactured product, sold in standardized packages, that saved time and effort on a task everyone performed daily. The safety match, developed later with phosphorus moved to the striking surface, solved the toxicity and accidental ignition problems while preserving Walker's fundamental insight: chemistry could produce fire from friction.