Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/492

478 could be done only by the exercise of a good deal of skill and patience, A great deal of vexation and trial of nerves and temper has been saved to the world by the invention of matches, and the comforts of our homes increased in many ways. Perhaps, therefore, the comparison I suggested between friction-matches and Sunday-schools is not so incongruous as it may at first seem.

There were some devices known in those days for obtaining a light or fire artificially, but they were inconvenient, somewhat expensive, and not in general use. The tinder-box was one of them.

A gentleman not much older than myself told me not long since that when he was in college one of his classmates was rich in the possession of a tinder-box by means of which he could strike a light and a fire in case of emergency, and he gave me a humorous account of the process of striking a light, involving considerable skill, much patience, and, as he said, some swearing.

A great many boys have been taught in Sabbath-schools not to swear, but a great many more have doubtless, by the use of friction matches, escaped numerous occasions and temptations to swear, and wives have no doubt by this invention been saved from innumerable scoldings for not covering up the fire properly at night.

There is one curious fact about matches which I do not remember to have seen mentioned. We speak of them as a recent invention, but they are only an improvement upon a very old invention. Travelers among savages have generally, if not universally, found that they possessed the art of procuring fire when they wished, by rubbing two pieces of wood together till the heat generated by the friction between them caused one of them to take fire. It is described as a pretty crude way of working, calling for considerable skill and some labor and patience. Perhaps the date of the invention may go back to the earliest use of fire by man. Yet the invention itself is essentially that which we practice when we strike a match. We rub the match upon another substance, and the heat generated by the friction between the two causes the match to take fire. The improvement which the civilized man has made upon the invention of his savage ancestor is to coat the end of a piece of wood with a little composition of matter which takes fire at a lower temperature than the wood itself, and burns more rapidly. Simple as the improvement is, it took the world a long time to get it, and its inventor made a most important contribution to the comforts of man.

I was forcibly impressed a few years ago with the value to the uncivilized man of the simplest inventions of the civilized man, as I watched an Indian at Lake Superior at work upon a birch-bark canoe. He had for tools only a knife, a hammer, and an awl, but I suppose he must have used a hatchet to procure the wood and bark of which the canoe was built. It was slow work even with these tools, and it was difficult to believe that he could have built the vessel with the