Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/251

Rh us how certain fungi were used to carry fire from one part of the country to the other. The tinder-box long held its position as a great discovery in the arts. The pyxidicula igniaria of the Romans appears to have been much the same implement, though a little ruder than the flint and steel which Philip the Good put into the collar of the Golden Fleece in 1429 as a representation of high knowledge in the progress of the arts. It continued to prevail till 1833, when phosphorus-matches were introduced, though I have been amused to find that there are a few venerable ancients in London who still stick to the tinder-box, and for whom a few shops keep a small supply. Phosphorus was no new discovery, for it had been obtained by an Arabian called Bechel in the eighth century. However, it was forgotten, and was rediscovered by Brandt, who made it out of very stinking materials in 1669. Other discoveries had, however, to be made before it could be used for lucifer-matches. The science of combustion was only developed on the discovery of oxygen a century later. Time had to elapse before chemical analysis showed the kind of bodies which could be added to phosphorus so as to make it ignite readily. So it was not till 1833 that matches became a partial success. Intolerably bad they then were, dangerously inflammable, horribly poisonous to the makers, and injurious to the lungs of the consumers. It required another discovery by Schrötter, in 1845, to change poisonous waxy into innocuous red-brick phosphorus in order that these defects might be remedied and to give us the safety-match of the present day. Now, what have these successive discoveries in science done for the nation, in this single manufacture, by an economy of time? If before 1833 we had made the same demands for light that we now do, when we daily consume eight matches per head of the population, the tinder-box could have supplied the demand under the most favorable conditions by an expenditure of one quarter of an hour. The lucifer-match supplies a light in fifteen seconds on each occasion, or in two minutes for the whole day. Putting these differences into a year, the venerable ancient who still sticks to his tinder-box would require to spend ninety hours yearly in the production of light, while the user of lucifer-matches spends twelve hours, so that the latter has an economy of seventy-eight hours yearly, or about ten working days. Measured by cost of production at one shilling and sixpence daily, the economy of time represented in money to our population is twenty-six millions of pounds annually. This is a curious instance of the manner in which science leads to economy of time and wealth even in a small manufacture. In larger industries the economy of time and labor produced by the application of scientific discoveries is beyond all measurement. Thus the discovery of latent heat by Black led to the inventions of Watt, while that of the mechanical equivalent of heat by Joule has been the basis of the progressive improvements in the steam-engine which enables power to be obtained by a consumption of fuel less