Today’s post has three points:
- We are currently so regulated that cool shit is lost, forgotten, or never invented. “Never invented” worries me; how can we know what we didn’t discover?
- Nobody learned a fucking thing in high school chemistry.
- Doing cool shit is worth it, because obviously.
Suppose you’d never seen a kitchen match. Suppose they hadn’t been invented.
Link goes to matches on Amazon. You pyromaniac!
It’s not like we’d lack the secret of fire. People started fires before they had matches. There’d be lighters and so forth. (Note: When I wander about the woods I have several ways to start a fire. I carry them in addition to matches. That said, starting a campfire with my trusty FireSteel is a PITA. It’s a good backup, but matches are easier.)
Suppose that I, in a fit of Curmudgeonly innovation, invented a heretofore unknown technology called kitchen matches. A handy device I’d love to share with the world! How would that discussion go?
“I just invented a new way to start a fire.”
“Really? Is it safe?”
“Sure is. I dipped a strip of wood in a mix of phosphorus sesquisulfide and potassium chlorate. When I slide it across sandpaper it bursts into flames. Very convenient! I’m gonna’ call them ‘Lucifers’!”
“You’re bizarre.”
“I carry them in my pocket. Here, have some. I’m giving them away as a marketing gimmick. I’m going to be rich.”
(Recoiling in fear.) “Are you mad!?! You carried them in your pocket? You’ll burn your nuts off! Also, there’s no child safety feature. Don’t you care about children?!?! And what about fumes? They’re made with the kind of shit that’s known to the State of California to cause cancer. What if these get in the hands of an arsonist? The liability is huge! Some drunk, mentally ill, minor is going to light one and stuff it in the gas tank of a Prius… then every lawyer in creation will sue you to death. Go back to using a magnifying glass like normal people.”
Luckily, matches were invented long before society lost its goddamn mind. What we think of as a common “safety friction match” is well over a century old. Otherwise, some committee would be regulating them right now.
How many cool and useful things only exist today because they were invented before the limp dick chickenshit buzzkills of today got a chance to eliminate it?
Every generation should be inventing totally new things. We’ve become stupid and risk averse. We’re largely coasting along with variations on a theme. For example, your smart phone/panopticon device doesn’t have the same level of brand new awesome experiences as lunar landings of 1969 or even a Harley Davidson in 1903. (Steve Jobs’ sweater aside, cell phones are variations on a theme. Pretty much every house in America had a phone with long distance service three generations ago; long before Pac Man was invented. Making it battery operated is a variation on a theme. For that matter, do you think the DMV would allow motorcycles on the road if they’d just been invented in 2019?)
Anyway… back to my story. Matches are one universe. I discovered the alternate universe fire starter that really pleases me.
How to start a fire while looking like a wizard, not using matches, and playing with chemicals.
Get yourself a handy dandy, somewhat nasty, chemical called potassium permanganate!
Potassium Permanganate (don’t mess with this shit if you’re a snowflake or idiot.)
[Warning: People are stupid! I tried to buy potassium permaganate locally. It should be available at a pool supply store or water treatment place, but people are so fuckin’ stupid I didn’t get far. It sucked and I got depressed. Nobody learned a fucking thing in high school chemistry and it shows. One salesdrone tried to tell me potassium gluconate (a dietary supplement) is the same as potassium permaganate (something you will only ingest once) because they both have potassium. I was offended by such concentrated dumb: “There is iron in a dietary supplement and iron in a steel bar. If I hit your skull with the steel bar will it make your diet better?” We’re living in Idiocracy! Accept that our society is mostly chimps living in the wreckage of a declining world and order online.]
Potassium permanganate is about a buck an ounce in the 20 oz. bottle (photo is a link or click here). There are many varieties but the chemical you want is potassium permanganate and nobody cares about the brand name. Make sure it’s powdered. For some reason, companies like to mix chemicals into liquids instead of powders; I don’t know why.
The bottle shown above is what I bought. It’s about as cheap as I could find and it should last a long time.
It’s a real genuine chemical. Pay attention.
STOP READING NOW IF YOU’RE A DUMBASS.
This isn’t a bullshit wuss substance like when some dweeb uses food coloring and thinks they’re a chemist. This shit will jack you up. It’s nasty in a variety of ways and if you’re an idiot stay away from it. Read the warnings, act accordingly, etc…
The remainder of this post assumes the reader belongs at the adult table. If you’re triggered or too stupid to use dangerous things, go away: browse Facebook or eat crayons or whatever window lickers like to do. Also, if you’re too stupid to use chemicals you probably shouldn’t be playing with fire regardless of how you start it. Sheesh!
OK so potassium permanganate is groovy stuff that you should handle with care. It’s a powder so it’s not going to leak but it does like to dissolve… keep it dry! It also happens to be a dye, if it gets wet and on your clothes they’ll be new and interesting colors… forever. It’s odorless, it’s pretty dense so a little goes a long way, and it does a lot of useful things. YouTube has a zillion videos of survivalist types using it start fires and treat water and (inexplicably) making some sort of solution to soak their feet(?!?). The point is, it’ll start fires.
When you want to start a fire, put down your bottom kindling (newspaper, bark, branches, whatever) and arrange a flat spot in the middle. Then carefully pour about three quarter’s a teaspoon or so in the spot. (Don’t sniff the powder into your nose for fuck’s sake! You promised you belonged at the adult table; don’t make me demote you.) Also don’t get it on your hands and rub your eyes. In fact, as a general rule don’t do stupid things.
Now, add more wood but always leave a little spot where you can see all the way down to the powder. Soon you’ll have your fire materials nicely stacked up with a teeny weeny “chimney hole” that leads all the way down to a little bit of powder.
Don’t go overboard. A half-teaspoon is way more than a match. A full teaspoon is ample, more is dumb. You’re starting a fire, not fighting zombies.
Now it’s launch time. The secret ingredient is glycerine.
Glycerine: totally harmless.
Unlike potassium permanganate, glycerine is harmless. Don’t worry about children, pets, or hippies getting into it… it’s just lotion. Like all pointless lotions, there are a million variants and you can probably find it at a local pharmacy. What you’re looking for is gel. The link above is about the cheapest I could find; $8 for the bottle which is plenty for a long time. (Note: you can also use ethylene glycol which is car antifreeze. But that’s going to smell worse, can accidentally poison pets, is a fluid that can leak, and you’ll have a bottle of that crap to manage instead of a convenient gel.)
Pop open your bottle of glycerine, aim it down the little chimney you made, and squirt a tablespoon or less onto the powder. Ideally, it’ll hit the powder and ooze off to the side. Don’t overthink it; the chemicals know what to do.
The ensuing exothermic reaction is satisfying. First there’s a brief delay. Then a little smoke. The amount of smoke is dependent on how much of the two reagents you added and how they mixed. If you somehow created a pool of glycerine on top of the powder and there was no way for the glycerine to ooze to the side you’ll get excess smoke… which kinda’ sucks. (I did an experiment with a toilet paper roll and found that out.)
After 3-8 seconds or so it’ll burst into flame. Very hot, impressive, and excellent at starting fires. You’ll get far more “oomph” from this stuff than a matchstick. Think “short term blowtorch”.
So there you have it. I’ve tested it a couple dozen times in my woodstove (the weather sucks lately). It’s easier than matches. With a match I’ve got to build the tinder and fire materials and then shove my arm waaaaaaay in there to get the feeble little match to the bottom; at which point it’s a race to light the paper before it burns my fingertips or goes out. With the “powder at the bottom of the chimney” method I just slime glycerine from waist height and it all works out.
Also, the delay is handy. I dump the glycerine, close my stove door on unlit wood, shuffle to a comfy seat, and wait. A few seconds later it bursts into fire without any smoke getting into my living room’s air (even a match makes a bit of smoke).
The best part is it looks like I’m a damn wizard. Doing cool shit is worth it, because obviously.
Go ahead and try it yourself.
A.C.
*Editorial Note #1: This post has Amazon links because I did research to select what I wanted and I’ve tested the products listed. If you order anything from Amazon via links on my blog, I get a tiny kickback. It doesn’t cost you a penny and I appreciate it. (Keep me in mind when Christmas shopping season rolls around!)
*Editorial Note #2: Amazon is a corporation and we’re in an age of corporate madness. It’s rare for any corporation to stick to their knitting and Amazon tends to drift between “don’t be evil” and “bend over deplorables”. Living in the hinterland, Amazon is my lifeline. I crave things that are impossible to buy locally. Alas, in 2019 all companies interject politics where it’s not needed. They may someday kick me off their system for “wrongthink”. My compromise is to enjoy it while it lasts but never let the scorpion on the frog’s back. (I mention this because they hosed Claire Wolfe and that was gold plated bullshit.)
Chemistry is awesome! I have so many ways to start a fire, while a new one is cool, my stores, not to mention my wife, can’t handle another. I will file this in my huuuuuge binder. Thanks!
Keep up the good work! We need normal human beings who don’t lose their shit over chemicals. Chemicals are a place where America has regressed more than almost anything else. An illiterate dirt farmer in 1940 could whip up crude paint, lubrication, or cleaning fluid out of shit they found in a general store. It’s not rocket science. The schooled but ignorant of 2019 can’t bake a fucking cake without premixed ingredients.
I blame the education system (which is really an indoctrination system). Just about anyone who doesn’t have an explicit science based background (or an interest in the subject) has been brainwashed to think all chemicals are bad. Their vague uninformed definition of “bad” has the sophistication of a cargo cult of Bantu tribesmen worshiping a mocked up airplane made of mud.
I hate the rampant “un-knowledge” of chemicals. It’s a superstitious religious belief system bordering on fear of witchcraft. It’s just a sea of dumbasses who don’t know the difference between a base and acid, fermentation and fusion, or a solution and a salt. These dicks are why every new thing is default viewed with suspicion. The TidePod eating failures can be coaxed to believe the dumbest shit, sign protests against dihydrogen monoxide, and oppose damn near anything that has too many syllables.
Keep that binder y’all. We’re going to need it when the lights go out on civilization.
In a related vein, Chromium Trioxide (known to CA….) dissolved in propionic anhydride is a stand back jack! A couple of grams CrO3 in 20 ml of propionic anhydride, stir briefly, and then in about 15-20 seconds, a 2 second torch, 3 feet high comes out of the 50 ml pyrex beaker and then you have an empty beaker . Whew.
Just to be sure, I did it a second time. works like a charm. Glycerine may do the same, or just blow up in a flash. Be safe.
Do not eat the ash, it contains a Darwin award!
“Do not eat the ash, it contains a Darwin award!”
Winning quote of the day!
“Keep that binder y’all. We’re going to need it when the lights go out on civilization.”
One of the reasons I still keep actual maps in the car.
people get too weird about chemicals. when I tell someone I used ammonium hydroxide to color oak, potassium dichromate to color cherry or nitric acid to age pine the look at me lie I am some kind of freak who is out to destroy the world. There are some colors that you just cant get any other way short of leaving the wood out for 50 years.
Dont be a ass hat, wear the proper PPE and neutralize when you’re done, no biggie.
Yep. I also note that folks will freak if you use chemicals with their basic names to treat wood but think it’s completely safe to use a corporate name. “Ammonium hydroxide is horrible… so I used Titebond II, Thompson’s Water Seal, and Baehr paint.”
For what it’s worth, the stuff I mentioned in this post is also a dye. It might work on wood, I just never investigated.
Dihydrogen monoxide…corrodes steel, erodes rocks, can be deadly if inhaled or if ingested in quantity.
Try buying “strike anywhere” matches today.
You can find the “strike on box” matches that only ignite with the scratch pad they provide, but the honest-to-goodness ‘strike on your fly’ or ‘strike with your thumbnail’ matches are damned difficult to find, partially because of DOT shipping regs.
At least, that’s the way it is in my part of the world.
I did notice that. I used to make a point of carrying only “strike anywhere” when camping… in case the box gets nuked. When “strike anywhere” got harder to find I moved on to backups of magnesium rods and whatnot. Plus Zippo lighters which are unreliable but fun to use. Now I’m going to add powdered exothermic chemicals for exothermic reactions. If regulators were trying to “nudge” safety they completely blew it; which is pretty much the whole point of “unintended consequences”.
We have had a huge issue in GA with public pressure forcing closure of medical equipment sterilization plants because of fear of ethylene oxide emissions. The facts be dammed; scary chemicals, close the plant.. I can’t wait for the unintended consequences.
Bingo! Not scared of germs which kill a zillion humans every year but very afraid of substances with multi-syllable names.
I just had a mental image of someone using the glycerin as a lotion and then messing with the permanganate…
Great Scott! I didn’t add that as a warning! Ugh… that’s a mistake one would only make twice.
I remember an episode of the original Lost in Space series where they land on a planet similar to Earth—or they think it’s Earth or something like that—and Will goes to the local hardware store and buys a bottle of carbon tetrachloride for getting the engines started again. Obviously that made an impression because it has stayed with me for many decades. Also, I minored in chem in college. Do you ever listen to the KunstlerCast or Peak Prosperity podcasts? They often have David Collum as a guest. He’s a chem prof at Cornell and funny as hell.
I haven’t heard those podcasts. I’ll add them to my “to do” list.
AC: thank you for another delightfully educational piece. I hope you are considering the recipe given by “another Jim”.
I’m thinking that using a friend’s address would be a good idea if ordering in bulk. I had to stop doing so with cases of ammo when he figured out TPTB would think he was a terrorist. Or something.
Way Back When: high school chemistry teacher hauled us outside and did the permag/glycerin trick with (I think) some intermediary stuff topped with a strip of friggin’ magnesium. Woo-hoo! Room temp to 4,000 F in a few seconds!
“limp dick chickenshit buzzkills” is either a bumpersticker waiting to happen or a bitchin’ band name.
Forever and a day ago, a chemistry teacher/scout leader showed me this combo at a camporee. It was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. A few weeks later I went to the local pharmacy to buy the ingredients.
A dumb ass 15 year old stood at the counter asking for the ingredients with not a clue. The assistant at the counter looked me up and down, then went for the Pharmacist. A distinguished professional walked solemnly to the counter.
Hello, there young man. Why would you want Potassium Permaganate?
Well Sir, if you put glycerin on it, it starts a really hot fire.
Yes, I know. Why is that important to you?
Well this weekend it is supposed to rain really hard and there is going to be an Order of the Arrow ceremony. I want to make sure we have a good ceremonial fire!!
Blink Blink. OK so you will also want some sulfur for smoke and some magnesium for color and ……..
Inch an hour rain and it would have taken thermite to top that fire.
Oh man… the “god old days” when a pharmacist knew chemistry! That sounds great!
I’ve discovered my assumptions about pharmacists (the dude’s gotta’ know chemistry) is out of date. Nowadays, a pharmacist is very very very good at following proper procedures. This may include moving objects from one sort of packaging (bulk) to another (consumer) or it may not (and they’re good at reading the interaction data from the database)… but any knowledge of elements and reactions and so forth is at best residual.
Ironically, the guy at the paint counter is about the same. They used to know stuff but now only know how to “dispense”. They can tint and blend paint but are no more clear on details (for example; the difference between oil based, polyurethane, and varnish) than me. They just know what the label on the paint jar says. If the label said “apply this paint only to zebras” they’d draw a total blank if I showed up with a horse.
Those “green” tipped matches are supposedly strike anywhere. I use them to get the stove going, but in reality they’re slightly less dependent on a strip than one would expect. Usually takes 3 or 4 strokes to ignite the damned things. I have good ol’ fashioned red tip kitchen matches in hard cases in all my gear bags.
The green one will strike on some surfaces with effort. In my youth I remember red tipped with a white dot. It was great fun as a scout to light them off your jeans’ zipper. Now I consider all matches to be in one category (strike most places and carry a little striker board if you can) and other gadgets in a different category of “it’s complicated”. Obviously I don’t need anything special for my home wood stove… that’s just a testing area.
Ok, several thoughts.
I have actually been told, by somebody who did not APPEAR to need a metronome to remind him to breathe, that I should avoid ‘chemicals’ in food.
I manfully refrained from collapsing the vacuum flask he called a head.
There is a long out-of-print series of kid’s books (children’s books are the likes of THE HUNGRY CATERPILLAR, kid’s books are something kids might read voluntarily) by a man named Phillip Turner. In one of the books, the boys make friends with a retired Admiral and his friend/manservant “Guns” Kelly. The admiral owns a pair of brass cannon from an old wreck, and he and the boys proceed to make black powder and fire them, during which they find it necessary to evade the nannies. This infuriates the Admiral, who seems to feel that if the British Nation could trust him in charge of a modern Battleship, they should trust him with black powder.
The Title, BTW, is THE GRANGE AT HIGH FORCE. All the books in the series are worth looking up. The boys get up to things like building a ballista.
I’ll check it out.
In my camping bag I keep a couple of old dead cell phone lithium batteries and a carbide miners lamp with carbide. The batteries are small, light, useless otherwise and burn like hell when broken and exposed to moisture. That’s my response for a “To Build a Fire” moment. The carbide lamp is light and fire for when the batteries die. As for strike-anywhere matches, the farm and fleet type stores carry them, along with calcium carbide and other useful items.
Topical solutions of permanganate are used to treat abscesses and ulcerated skin, and is a pretty good fungicide against athlete’s foot.
A year or two back, I went looking for strike anywhere matches, which I remembered as “kitchen matches” or “Ohio blue-tips”. Not an electronic sausage. I went online and found out what was going on with the shipping restrictions, because dumbass stuff like this happens, which seems to be the makers and sellers shooting themselves in the foot:
https://www.99boulders.com/why-ill-never-buy-strike-anywhere-matches-online-again
When I was in high school, we visited LANL (aka Los Alamos, where hard drives get lost) for gee-whiz science days, and got a presentation from an explosives chemist who SHOWED us the difference in power between black power and blasting caps (indoors), got me to demonstrate to everyone that TNT will not go off no matter how hard you hit it with a hammer, and got someone else to show that the white tips off kitchen matches make a very satisfying bang if you cut them off and tap them with a hammer. He told us that he and his brother used to grind up the match tips, put them on the inside of a large bolt head, tighten the nut down on top of that, and throw it off the garage roof onto the concrete driveway. It would blow the nut off.
One generation from “hitting TNT with a hammer” to “USPS flat-out prohibits their shipment. Also, the UN has them [strike anywhere matches] listed on their list of dangerous goods (UN 1331).” (Quoting from the link.)
I get depressed Millenials can’t use a clutch and now this?
Incidentally, your reply is the first time “blow the nuts off” was a phrase associated with a happy memory.
I haven’t been to a gun show in a few years but it used to be there were people selling strike-anywhere matches in the big boxes (complete with “get them before the government makes them illegal!!1”) signs.
Back in grade school I had a friend (not a mythical friend-of-a-friend, someone I actually knew and hung out with after school) who broke the heads off a whole bunch of strike-anywhere matches and put them in his pants pockets. He was going to do something silly with them but he forgot momentarily he had them in there and wiped his hands off on his pants like you do, and wound up with some pretty serious burns.
For people like him, safety matches make a lot of sense.
Divad & AC:
Stop it!
““blow the nuts off” was a phrase associated with a happy memory” made me
A)laugh hard enough to scare the cat, and
B) want strike-anywhere matches even more than I wanted them before they would make me blow my nuts off.