This was a paper cigarette dipped in a mixture of sugar and potash. Rolled within the paper was a tiny glass bulb filled with sulphuric acid. To light the match you pressed the bulb with pincers hard enough to break the bulb. This released the acid which set fire to the paper.] What Would We Do Without Matches? If one were to ask the man in the street what invention of the nineteenth century is his most constant and invaluable ally he might be mystified for the moment, but the undoubted answer would surely come in the single word “Matches.” These familiar objects, apart from their luxurious use by smokers, are the indispensable servants of mankind from the moment of rising in the morning till the household is wrapped in sleep, and it is to them we turn when disturbed in the hours of darkness. [Illustration: FIRST LUCIFER MATCH Invented by John Walker in 1827. It consisted of a stick of wood tipped with sulphur and then with a chlorate mixture. To ignite it the match was drawn rapidly through a folded piece of sandpaper.] [Illustration: MODERN SAFETY MATCH The first practical match was made less than a century ago.] No doubt “familiarity breeds contempt,” and it is difficult to imagine how man would fare, bereft of his box of matches. It might help the world to realize how much it owes to the inventors of the Lucifer Match, were it possible to cut off the supply of these magic fire producers for only one brief day. It requires no very vivid imagination to picture the consternation and confusion that such a step would produce, and there is a grim humor in wondering how the primitive methods of obtaining a light would serve the public convenience in these days of strenuous hustle. Seeing that fire has been employed by man since prehistoric days, one would expect that easy means of obtaining it would have been devised in the early ages. We find, however, that until the beginning of the nineteenth century nothing in the nature of a match was available, and the crudest methods were still in use. We know from Virgil that in the reign of the Emperor Titus fire was obtained by rubbing decayed wood with a roll of sulphur between two stones, but it is not till Saxon times that we have evidence of the use of the tinder box with its flint and steel. That this latter was still regarded as something remarkable, as late as the fifteenth century, is proved by its representation in the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, which was founded in 1429. Burning glasses had, of course, been employed from the most primitive times, but one can imagine the despair of an early Briton who had to wait for a sunny day before he could boil his kettle.