Talking about friction as a means of producing heat, I should like to mention that at the last Paris Exhibition I saw water made to boil, and coffee prepared from it, by the heat resulting from the friction of two copper plates within the liquid.
That then is the earliest history I can give you of the production of fire, and at once from that history I come to the reign of the tinder-box. The tinder-box constitutes one of the very earliest methods, no doubt, of obtaining fire. I have searched for some history of the tinder-box, and all I can say for certain is that it was in use long before the age of printing. I have here several rare old tinder-boxes. I intend showing you in the course of these lectures every detail of their construction and use. I have no doubt this very old tinder-box that you see here (Fig. 3 A) was once upon a time kept on the mantel-piece of the kitchen well polished and bright, and I do not doubt but that it has lit hundreds and thousands of fires, and, what is more, has very often been spoken to very disrespectfully when the servant wanted to light the fire, and her master was waiting for his breakfast. I will project a picture of it on the screen, so that you may all see it. There it is. It is a beautiful piece of apparatus. There is the tinder, the steel (Fig. 3 _b_), the flint (_c_), and the matches (_d_) complete.
It was with this instrument, long before the invention of matches, that our grandfathers obtained light. I want to show you how the trick was managed. First of all it was necessary to have good tinder. To obtain this, they took a piece of linen and simply charred or burnt it, as you see I am doing now (Fig. 4). (Cambric, I am told, makes the best tinder for match-lighting, and the ladies, in the kindness of their hearts, formerly made a point of saving their old cambric handkerchiefs for this purpose.) The servants prepared the tinder over-night, for reasons I shall explain to you directly. Having made the tinder, they shut it down in the box with the lid (Fig. 3 A) to prevent contact with air. You see I have the tinder now safely secured in my tinder-box. Here is a piece of common flint, and here is the steel. Here too are the matches, and I am fortunate in having some of the old matches made many years ago, prepared as you see with a little sulphur upon their tips. Well, having got all these etceteras, box, tinder, flint and steel, we set to work in this way:--Taking the steel in one hand, and the flint in the other, I must give the steel a blow, or rather a succession of blows with the flint (Fig. 3 B). Notice what beautiful sparks I obtain! I want one of these sparks, if I can persuade it to do so, to fall on my tinder. There! it has done so, and my tinder has caught fire. I blow my fired tinder a little to make it burn better, and now I apply a sulphur match to the red-hot tinder. See, I have succeeded in getting my match in flame. I will now set light to one of these old-fashioned candles--a rushlight--with which our ancestors were satisfied before the days of gas and electric lighting. This was their light, and this was the way they lighted it. No wonder (perhaps you say) that they went to bed early.