Walker · 1827
The friction match
On the seventh of April 1827, on the trade-counter of his chemist-and-druggist shop at 59 High Street in Stockton-on-Tees in County Durham, John Walker, forty-five years old, sold to a Mr Hixon, a local solicitor, a box of about fifty *Friction Lights*: small wooden splints tipped with a paste of antimony sulphide, potassium chlorate, sulphur and gum, which would, when drawn briskly between a folded piece of glasspaper, ignite. The price was a shilling for a box and threepence for the piece of glasspaper, a waterproof tube. The entry in Walker's day-book of the seventh of April 1827 reads: *Hixon. 1 doz frict. lts. 1s glass papr 3d.* This is the first commercial sale, by every careful judgment of the history of fire-technology, of the friction match (the *Lucifer*, the precursor of the modern strike-anywhere match). Walker had developed the formula at the back of his shop between 1824 and 1826. He refused, by his own statement to friends, to patent the invention on the principle that fire-on-demand should not be owned. The patent of 1829 was taken out by Samuel Jones of London on a slightly modified formula; the *Lucifer* trademark was Jones's. Walker continued to sell the original *Friction Lights* from his Stockton shop until his death in 1859.
It is twenty past four on the afternoon of the seventh of April 1827, in the back-laboratory of the chemist-and-druggist shop at 59 High Street, Stockton-on-Tees, in County Durham, in spring light off the river Tees. He is forty-five years old. He is John Walker, born at Stockton on the twenty-ninth of May 1781, son of the Stockton grocer-and-druggist John Walker the elder, apprenticed in the pharmacy trade at Whitby in his youth, took over the family shop on his father's death in 1818.
On the workbench in front of him is the batch of Friction Lights he has been developing for about three years. The splints are three-inch lengths of waxed Norfolk pine. The tip-paste is a jar of antimony trisulphide (Sb₂S₃) mixed with potassium chlorate (KClO₃), powdered sulphur, and gum-arabic in distilled water, applied to the splint-head and dried. The accompanying piece of glasspaper is the emery-coated paper of the watch-and-clock-makers' trade, folded.
He thinks: the principle is that the friction of the splint against the glasspaper raises the tip-paste to the autoignition temperature of about a hundred and sixty degrees Celsius. The potassium chlorate is the oxidiser. The antimony sulphide is the combustible. The reaction runs to completion in about a second once initiated.
He thinks: the fire-on-demand application is the principle. The previous fire-igniting technologies (the tinder-box-and-flint of the previous five hundred years, the sulphur-impregnated-paper-and-spark of the late eighteenth-century Promethean of Samuel Jones, the electrical-Volta-spark of the 1799 Volta cell) all require, in the operator's hand, either a previously-prepared fire-source or a complex spark-generating apparatus. The friction match requires only the splint and the glasspaper. The fire is in the splint.
He thinks: the commercial scope is the scope of every fire-using household in the country. The household fire-source of 1827 is the kept-burning-hearth (so that the morning fire can be re-lit from the previous night's embers) or, on a clean morning, the fifteen-to-thirty-minute fuss of the tinder-box. The friction match makes the kept-burning-hearth no longer necessary. The implication for the domestic fuel-budget of every house in the country is, by my rough calculation, about a fifteen per cent saving on winter coal.
He thinks: the patent is the question. The English patent law of 1827 allows me to take out a fourteen-year monopoly on the manufacture for the fee of about £130. The English market in friction-fire-igniters is, by my estimate, about half a million households at five shillings a year, or about £125,000 a year. The patent would give me about £80,000 of rent over the fourteen years.
He thinks: the patent would also stop, for fourteen years, every other domestic supplier from making the match. The widespread availability of matches is the public benefit. The widespread availability is incompatible with the fourteen-year patent rent.
He thinks: I will not patent it.
Mr Hixon, the Stockton solicitor, comes into the front shop at twenty past four on the seventh of April 1827. He has been buying the jars of Friction Lights for the past month for the private use of his study fireplace. He asks for a dozen of the splints and a fresh piece of glasspaper. Walker takes a waterproof tin tube down from the back shelf, fills it with twelve splints from the batch, folds a six-inch square of glasspaper into the tin, and seals the tin with a wax-paper top. He writes the entry in the day-book: Hixon. 1 doz frict. lts. 1s glass papr 3d.
Walker continued to sell the Friction Lights from the Stockton shop for the rest of his life, never patented the formula, and never increased the price beyond the original shilling-per-dozen. The patent on a close-related formula was taken out by Samuel Jones of London on the nineteenth of April 1829, two years after Walker's first commercial sale; Jones's standing Lucifer match, with a slightly-different antimony-and-chlorate formulation and a slightly-different glasspaper holder, became the commercial standard of the 1830s. By 1840, the British friction-match industry, principally at Manchester and Stockton-on-Tees, was producing about a hundred million matches a year. Walker died at his Stockton shop on the first of May 1859, seventy-eight years old. The shop at 59 High Street, Stockton, was demolished in 1909; the site is now a bronze plaque on the wall of the modern Stockton High Street, put up by the Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council in 1977 on the 150th anniversary of the first sale, with the inscription: Here in 1826 John Walker, chemist, invented the friction match. The original day-book entry of the seventh of April 1827, in Walker's own hand, is in the Preston Park Museum at Stockton.