The friction match

Some inventions arrive in the world wearing a crown, claimed at once by a name, a patent, a fortune. Others are set down on a trade-counter and left there, the way a man might leave a loaf of bread, on the understanding that anyone who needs one may come in and buy one. The second kind is rarer than the first, and harder to credit, because it asks of the inventor a temperament against which the whole century is leaning.

THE CHEMIST OF STOCKTON

John Walker was born in Stockton-on-Tees on the twenty-ninth of May 1781, son of a grocer-and-druggist of the same name, apprenticed in the pharmacy trade at Whitby and at Durham, qualified as a chemist, and on his father's death in 1818 he took over the shop at 59 High Street. The shop sold the usual things: tinctures and powders, gum-arabic, oil of vitriol, the senna and rhubarb of the country trade. At the back was a small laboratory, and in the laboratory, between 1824 and 1826, Walker had been working on a tip-paste of antimony trisulphide and potassium chlorate bound in gum and water. He had been working at it because, like every chemist of his generation, he kept a tinder-box on his bench and resented the fifteen minutes it cost him each morning to coax a flame out of flint and char.

THE BENCH, IN SPRING LIGHT

On the afternoon of the seventh of April 1827, the spring light off the Tees comes flat and clean through the laboratory window. On the bench: a stoneware jar of the tip-paste, drying; a bundle of three-inch splints of waxed Norfolk pine; a sheet of emery-faced glasspaper of the watch-and-clock-makers' grade, folded twice; a brass scale; a glass of distilled water. Walker is forty-five years old. He has the chemist's habit of writing everything down. The splint-heads have been dipped and dried and dipped again, and the heads now carry a hard grey-brown bead the size of a small pea. He has tested them on the previous batch. Drawn between the folded glasspaper, the bead takes fire in something under a second, and the splint burns clean for the length of a paternoster.

THE SECOND BEFORE THE LEDGER

The principle is plain enough to him: the friction raises the bead to its autoignition temperature, the chlorate yields its oxygen, the antimony sulphide burns. He understands too what this means outside the laboratory. The kept-burning hearth of every cottage in the country, banked each night against the cost of re-lighting, becomes unnecessary; on his own rough reckoning, a saving of perhaps a seventh of a winter's coal in any house that uses one. The English patent law of 1827 will sell him a fourteen-year monopoly on the manufacture for about £130, and the English market in fire-igniters is, by his estimate, half a million households at five shillings a year. The arithmetic is not difficult. He does the arithmetic in his head, standing at the bench with the glasspaper between his fingers, and what he feels is not temptation but its opposite, a kind of cold clarity. To take the patent is to make every cottager in the country wait fourteen years for the saving. The widespread availability is the whole point of the thing. The widespread availability is what a patent prevents. He has trained as a druggist, in a trade whose first principle is that a remedy withheld is a remedy denied; fire-on-demand, by the same principle, is not a thing he believes a man can in conscience own. He sets the glasspaper down. He will not patent it. The decision takes perhaps the length of a breath, and is not, in his own mind, a decision at all; it is the working out of a sentence he has already written.

THE SALE

At twenty past four, Mr Hixon, a Stockton solicitor who has been buying the splints for his study fire for the past month, comes into the front shop. He asks for a dozen and a fresh piece of glasspaper. Walker takes a waterproof tin tube down from the back shelf, counts twelve splints into it from the new batch, folds a six-inch square of glasspaper into the tin, seals the lid with a wax-paper top, and writes the entry in the day-book in the small upright hand of a man who has kept accounts since he was an apprentice: Hixon. 1 doz frict. lts. 1s glass papr 3d. He charges a shilling for the tin and threepence for the paper. The bell on the shop door rings as Hixon steps out into the High Street. By every careful judgment of the history of fire-technology, this is the first commercial sale of the friction match.

LONDON, TWO YEARS LATER

On the nineteenth of April 1829, in a patent office in London, a man named Samuel Jones, who has come down to Stockton, seen the Friction Lights on the counter at 59 High Street, and gone home with a tin in his pocket, takes out a patent on a close-related formula: a little less antimony, a little more chlorate, a slightly different glasspaper holder. He calls his match the Lucifer. The name takes. By the middle of the 1830s the Lucifer is the commercial standard of the British trade, manufactured at Manchester and at London, sold in coloured tins through the chandlers and the tobacconists, advertised in the London papers. Jones grows comfortable on the patent. The splint and the bead are Walker's; the name on the tin, and the fourteen years of rent, are Jones's. Walker, asked by a friend why he had not secured the priority for himself, gave the answer that has come down through the Stockton record: he held that fire-on-demand should not be owned.

THE SHOP, UNTIL 1859

Walker went on selling the Friction Lights from the counter at 59 High Street for the rest of his life, never altered the formula, never raised the price beyond the shilling-a-dozen at which he had first set it. He kept the day-book. He kept the laboratory at the back of the shop. By 1840 the British match industry was turning out a hundred million matches a year, and a clerk in Stockton could light his pipe in the time it took to draw a splint across a piece of paper, and the kept-burning hearth was beginning, in the towns at least, to go out. Walker died at the shop on the first of May 1859, in his seventy-eighth year. The shop was pulled down in 1909. The site, on the modern High Street, carries a bronze plaque set there by the Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council in 1977, on the 150th anniversary of the sale, which reads: Here in 1826 John Walker, chemist, invented the friction match.

THE LEDGER

There is a kind of inventor who measures his life by the rent his cleverness collects, and there is another kind who measures it by the number of strangers, unknown to him, whose mornings he has made shorter. The first kind is more numerous, and is remembered by his estate. The second is rarer, and is remembered, if at all, by the thing itself, going on being used. The day-book is in the Preston Park Museum at Stockton, open at the page for the seventh of April 1827; the line in Walker's small upright hand still legible across the column, Hixon. 1 doz frict. lts. 1s glass papr 3d.