Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in FIRE, HEAT AND FUEL To make and to use fire belongs to mankind alone. None of the animals, not even the manlike apes, such as the gibbon, orang and chimpanzee, know how to use fire, much less how to make it. But when the first man was evolved, something like a million years ago, his first real exploit that set him above the monkey family was to use fire. Then, with the coming of modern man, or Homo-sapiens (which means man- wise), came the knowledge of how to make a fire when and where he wanted it. Origin of Ways of Making Fire.?It is easy to guess that before primitive man had learned how to make fire for himself he obtained it from the hot ashes, or lava, that was thrown out, or flowed down, into a valley from some volcano, or that he found a tree ablaze which the lightning had struck, or the dried grass burning where a meteor had fallen. As to the method he first employed to make a fire it seems reasonably certain that it was either by striking two stones together or by rubbing a stick of wood against another and softer piece. The concussion method, as the first is called, was carried on through the ages, with the slight modification of using a piece of steel in the place of one of the rocks, until the middle of the last century when matches came into general use. The first friction match was, however, invented as far back as the fifteenth century. Robert Boyle, who was one of the first of the real chemists, discovered, in 1680, how to obtain phosphorus, and under his direction Godfrey Hawk- witz made a match by dipping a wood splint in sulphur and then securing a bit of phosphorus to it. The reason phosphorus is used is because it ignites at a very low temperature; in fact, yellow phosphorus will take fire when it is exposed to air, while red phosphorus mus...