“In our world, fire has been gradually ‘closed’ (…) in modern cooking, fire has not only been dominated: it has been enclosed and compartmentalized,” says Bee Wilson in The Importance of the Fork (Turner, 2013). We press a button or turn a knob and the stove turns on. A good flame comes out of it or, simply, the heat necessary for cooking. One of those enclosures was the one that led to the invention of the match, which encapsulated an instant of tiny, portable fire, and which is now 180 years old.
In many homes, the matchboxes that added color to the kitchen counter (or the extractor hood) are long gone. And although they have not yet fallen completely into oblivion, they are already surrounded by a nostalgic light of what is about to go out, a moment that attracts collectors who stop to appreciate the aesthetics of their period graphics (folk, as in the case of the Valencian matches El Globo, as pointed out by Rafael Gayano Abad in El Folklore in the Valencian matchboxes, 1989) and, to large and small entrepreneurs, to manufacture new, luxurious and designer matches.
But the beginnings of the match were not easy. In 1826, inventor John Walker was working on a formula that would allow him to quickly light a fire and, accidentally, a small wooden stick with which he had stirred the preparation fell to the ground in such a way that the friction ignited it. That was quite a discovery, since although different accelerants were known at the time, it had not yet been possible to apply them to wood. Thus, Walker began to sell his own matches, at one shilling for a box of 50, which consisted of splinters or pieces of cardboard dipped in antimony sulfite, potassium chlorate and gum, accompanied by sandpaper to light them.
However, today we would consider that a proto-match. The first ones that contained phosphorus were patented by Charles Sauria in 1830, in Massachusetts. Phosphorus, an element that synecdoche would end up naming matches, is highly toxic, gives off a virulent stench and is extremely flammable. So there was still a pending challenge for match inventors: creating the safety match. The solution came in Sweden, one of the countries with the fewest hours of daylight and the coldest, thanks to the chemist Gustaf Erik Pasch, who changed the white or yellow phosphorus for the red phosphorus that we see today in the heads of matches, and that It can only be turned on by dragging it vigorously along the band of rough fabric that covers both sides of the boxes that contain them.
But it was not Pasch who became world famous for his safety matches, but the brothers Carl and Johan Lundström, who founded their factory in the Swedish city of Jönköping (which was known as ‘The City of Matches’) and patented them and sold in very colorful colorful boxes that they invented, a success of industrial design, since 1844. Their innovation was a great success at the Paris World’s Fair of 1855, and they won a silver medal for their matches, the production of which was safe for humans. workers. The Lundström brothers did not give up their efforts to improve matches and even found a way to eliminate the pungent smell of burning sulfur by soaking their heads in wax or paraffin and, later, in a solution of starch, antimonite and potassium chloride.
Mechanization would come with an employee of the brothers’ factory, Alexander Lagerman, who built in 1880 a machine capable of producing matchboxes, which were made by hand, and in 1892 he obtained a machine that soaked the wood in the planned solutions. and, later, he cut it into the shape of matches. He managed to move the factory from manufacturing 4,000 matchboxes per year in 1844 to 7 million in 1896.
The Lundströms would soon see that one of their competitors would rise as a giant and come to control everything: Swedish Match, owner today of Golondrina matches, perhaps one of the most used in Spain and the Netherlands. Today, the Swedish cities of Vetlanda and Tidaholm produce matches for the entire world, according to the Sydved lumber company, which supplies them.
In Spain, where phosphorus was a state monopoly from 1892 to 1956 leased to private family initiatives, the Fierro Group, despite the technological backwardness and labor rights that the sector was experiencing, was one of the first to successfully internationalize both in the Latin American and North African markets, explain Águeda Gil-López and Elena San Román, from the Complutense University of Madrid in David and Goliat. The Spanish match industry in international perspective (1892-1956).
However, the match factories were not exempt from revolts. In both Sweden and Spain and in other countries around the world, match factory workers were women, as they were considered to have better manual skills in manipulating the small pieces of wood, as they were made by hand for decades. Before the invention of safety matches, women were also the workers who made them, and they suffered from different respiratory diseases, such as tissue necrosis or the so-called ‘chronic phosphorism’, or even degenerative lesions in the liver due to from inhaling the toxic fumes of white phosphorus, which also causes accidental fires. In fact, the matchmakers were an active group within the labor movements of the time and in factories such as Cerillas Zaragüeta e Hiriart (A Coruña) or La Fosforera de Tarazona (Zaragoza).
