Throughout history, mankind has looked for ways to control fire for the purpose of heating and cooking, as well as for a variety of military and industrial purposes. Early man learned to rub sticks together or to strike sparks from a stone, and also learned techniques for keeping hay or straw smouldering for long periods and transporting it from place to place. But all of these ways of starting a fire were cumbersome, and it was obvious that an easier technique would be a big step forward.
The first true self-striking match was invented fairly recently. Following on from experiments with phosphorus by the seventeenth-century alchemist Hennig Brandt, the French inventor Jean Chancel created a rather dangerous-sounding match in 1805. A stick was coated in potassium chlorate, sulphur, sugar and rubber, and then dipped into a glass bottle of sulphuric acid. The ensuing chemical reaction made the wood ignite, giving off noxious fumes as it burned.
However a simpler form of match had been in existence in China as early as the sixth century. The story is that the court women of the Northern Qi (a kingdom that was only briefly in existence) invented the match during a siege in which there was a timber shortage and it was necessary to preserve wood for cooking and heating. A short pine stick was dipped into sulphur. Two of these sticks had to be rubbed together in order to ignite one or both of them. This invention spread rapidly around China, where it was used for lighting stoves, lamps and fire crackers, among other things. The poet T’ao Ku lyrically described the matches as ‘light-bringing slaves’ in a tenth-century text, and they were also sold as ‘fire inch-sticks’.
It is thought that these matches may have been brought to Europe by Marco Polo or a contemporary traveller to China, as we know that they were sold in markets in Hangzhou, which he visited in the thirteenth century, but there is no confirmed record of such matches in Europe until AD 1530.