Fire is something we have come to take for granted these days, but have you ever stopped to wonder how on earth we managed to learn how to control this powerful element without which our lives would be very different indeed?Actually, come to think of it, the basic ability of how to conjure up fire forms the very basis of our existence although, as with many other positive developments, fire too is exploited and horrendously misused by ‘rouge’ elements of modern day society.

When imagining how man first made fire, the image that springs to mind is generally of fur clad cave people industriously rubbing sticks together to make a spark. The spark leaping to ignite a prepared pile of dry tinder perhaps comprised twigs, leaves and other naturally combustible materials.

Yet, if you think a little harder, these ancient people must have got the idea of doing this from somewhere.

Archaeological evidence shows that cooking fires were known and used approximately 790,000 years ago by Early Stone Age people living in what is known as the Lower Paleolithic period in the Middle East. But it is quite likely that cooking fires were used in Africa way before this date, possibly even as long ago as one million years.

History books talk about the ‘invention’ of fire by man but ‘invention’ is really the wrong word as natural fire was around long before man learnt how to use it.

Lightening strikes caused forest fires and grass fires in the ancient as well as the modern world. And our ancestors must have been terrified by such natural occurrences as they would have been by the sight of volcanic eruptions spewing fire, smoke, ash and lava — both up into the atmosphere and in boiling rivers down the sides of mountains to destroy all forms of life in vast areas of land.

The sight of such natural fires, along with burning gases escaping from underground cavers, must have made an incredible impression on ancient people as such events still do make on people today who have, at least most of them, some knowledge of how and why these natural fire events happen.

It goes without saying that ancient people quickly learnt that fire is hot, that it burns everything in its path, including trapped birds and animals which are rapidly cooked in the ensuing heat. Perhaps an ancient cave dweller called Al or something similar, noted that the aroma of cooking meat in a forest fire smelt much better than the raw stuff his wife usually served up for dinner. He tried munching on a leg of cooked deer, after he’d scrapped away the outer burnt bits of course, and enjoyed it so much that he figured out that this was the way to go about it — hot, tasty food beating cold raw meat any day!

The problem, of course, would have been that he could not expect forest fires to burst out every time he felt hungry so he had to work out a way around thisproblem. Being cleverer and more daring than the rest of his clan, perhaps Al came up with the brilliant idea of dragging burning branches from the edge of forest fires back to his cave, making sure that his companions stocked up on unburnt wood to feed to the fire to keep it going on the way.

With careful monitoring Al’s cooking fire could have been kept burning for weeks on end but, inevitably, after a torrential downpour of rain or a snowstorm, the now necessary fire would go out and panic would ensue as it might take months, even years, before another convenient forest fire happened along to enable him to start all over again.

Having got used to cooked food plus keeping warm on cold winter nights, Al set out on a quest to learn how to make fire for himself and, by incredible chance, saw the unlikely sight of sparks flying from a heap of extra dry twigs ferociously kicked up by a giant deer fleeing from his hunting arrows. He thought, ‘Ah ah! If I rub two sticks together as fast as I possibly can, a spark might leap out and start a fire which would solve my problem.’

So, Al sat down right there and spent the next few days figuring out exactly how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together. And when he had mastered this, he went happily back to his home cave to be immediately appointed as the ‘respected clan leader who knows the secret of fire’.

The secret obviously didn’t remain secret for long, the fact that his wife, called Ab by the way, loved to gossip made sure of this, which is when Al’s cousin Aw, who enjoyed fiddling around with bits of stone, accidentally discovered that it was much simpler, faster too, to strike a fire spark from a couple of bits of flint stone and so elbowed Al aside as clan leader.

What happened to Al after this is unknown, but Aw did very well for himself and his clan indeed, even going as far as trading precious flint stones for goods, handmade reed flutes for example, so that his son Ao could entertain them all with fireside music in bad weather and so the story went on down the centuries until, around 6,000BCE when people started living in houses rather than caves.

House dwellers still needed to cook of course, much preferring to cook inside in bad weather which is when they realised that smoke is pretty nasty stuff if it hangs around in doors which is when Ay, the great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-daughter of Ao made her husband Oz, think of ways to let the smoke escape without opening the door and this sensible man came up with making a hole in the roof which was the precursor to chimneys as we still know them today.

Back to manmade fire though, fire being the subject of the day: people all over the world stuck to either starting fires by rubbing two sticks together or by using a flint stone right up until as recently as 1826 when a gentleman called John Walker, messing around with a horrible concoction of antimony sulfide, potassium chlorate, gum and starch, stirring the mess with a stick to which it stuck in a huge glob, took the stick out to clean it, banging it on the ground to remove the glob which, much to his amazement, suddenly burst into flames.

Mr Walker was so excited by his discovery that he spent his time showing it off to all and sundry, quite forgetting to patent his product. One Mr Samuel Jones, an associate of Mr Walker, was not so slow on the uptake, rushing to patent the invention of the very first matches in his own name. He christened them ‘Lucifers’ due to their terrible stink and explosive display they gave off when struck and they were sold with the warning that they (not tobacco products) were dangerous to health!

A French chemist, Charles Sauria, improved on the notorious Lucifers in the 1830s by adding white phosphorous to the recipe — this got rid of the awful smell but, unknown to its inventor, poisoned people wholesale and, after a worldwide campaign against them, they were eventually banned in 1910 when the Diamond Match Company obtained the American patent for the world’s first non-poisonous match as the type still in use today.

There are other ways of lighting fires than using matches of course, and it is interesting to note that many of these, lighters for example, still use Aw’s flint stone to strike the initial spark which makes one wonder that perhaps we haven’t progressed as far as many people like to imagine!