Why Fire Is the Greatest Tool of All Time – Popular Mechanics

Whether were staring into the depths of a campfire or watching a Space Shuttle burn 500,000 gallons of fuel as it rises off the launchpad, mankinds obsession with fire is so innate we almost take it for granted. Yet fire has catalyzed the human races most significant innovations; its helped us survive and flourish.

At the same time, the path that took us from hunching around a lightning-struck tree for warmth to carrying lighters in our pockets has many reminders of fires volatilityfrom the epic scope of The Great Chicago Fire to the explosion of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon. Fire comes with a big fat warning sticker, but nonetheless, its mans most essential tool.

Almost every primitive culture has a story about how man came to harness fire, and many of these stories involvecuriouslypetty theft. From the famed Greek myth of Prometheus snatching fire from Zeus and handing it to man (thanks for that, bud, and sorry about the whole bird-eating-your-liver thing), to the Native American story of Rabbit stealing fire from the bloodthirsty Weasels, to the Polynesian legend of Maui taking fire from the birds during a fishing trip for his mother, our desire to control the element has always run up against our better instincts.

Without fireand later, without combustionthere would be no skyscrapers, air travel, International Space Station, bourbon, or medium-rare steaks.

The themes of thievery make sense. In the days of early man, fire was our most valuable possession. Sculptor Paul Manship summed up this sentiment in his art. Behind his famous statue of Prometheus in New York Citys Rockefeller Center, he paraphrased the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, noting that fire proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.

Without fireand later, without combustionthere would be no skyscrapers, air travel, International Space Station, bourbon, or medium-rare steaks. The element has unlocked and enabled some of the greatest industrial and technological achievements in human history.

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Its impossible to know when the first fire was made, but we can speculate at its earliest major use: cooking, says Alan Rocke, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of the history of science and technology at Case Western Reserve University.

Cooking with heat broadened early mans palate by killing off potentially dangerous microbes in formerly unsafe foods. Fish and beef are at their juiciest and free of illness-causing bacteria at 145 degrees Fahrenheit. Rabbit is safe at 160F; chicken at 165F. Fire tenderizes meat (pulled pork falls apart at 205F), but at 330F it also triggers the Maillard reaction (browning) to give steak a mouth-watering sear.

Find Your Fuel

Keep seasoned woodmeaning it's been air or kiln driednear the fireplace (a couple of days indoors should dry out most pieces). Wood with rough surfaces will catch easier than smooth wood. For tinder, gather two handfuls of twigs and break them so they resemble a No. 2 pencil in length and diameter. Half a section of newspaper or a grocery store mailer will work as kindling.

Shape Your Kindling

After making sure your chimney's damper is open, tear the newspaper into two-inch-wide lengths and rub the strips between your fingers so they separate into ribbons. Put the ribbons in the fireplace in a mound the size of a tennis ball. Rest some of your tinder on top of the mound and lean more tinder on those twigs to create a little hut around the paper.

Prime Your Chimney Fuel

In wintertime, cold air coming down your chimney can suppress a fire and push smoke into your house. "Priming the flue" reverses the draft. To do this, roll up a spare piece of newspaper, light one end like a torch, and stick it up your chimney for a few moments. The rising hot air will push the cold air out of the chimney, allowing smoke to escape.

Light It Up

Light the paper. As it ignites, lean larger pieces of tinder against the hut. After those catch, add a fuel log on top of the hut, being careful not to smother the flames. To help the wood catch, blow air across the bottom of the fire where the newspaper meets the surface of the fireplace. Don't have a fireplace tool set? Use sturdy metal kitchen tongs to move the wood around.

Harvard professor and primatologist Richard Wrangham, Ph.D., suggests that the invention of cooking fed evolution itself by unlocking energy-giving nutrients for our ancestors evolving brains and bodies.

In fact, Wrangham suggests that our digestive tracts evolved as a result of discovering cooking. Human guts are 56 percent small intestine and 17 percent colon, while those respective numbers for chimps are almost the opposite: 23 and 52 percent. Translation: Chimp guts are better at breaking down plant fibers and meat collagen than human ones. We need blenders, food processors, and sweet, sweet heat to help our bodies absorb food in a way our guts can handle, says Rocke.

Around 10,000 BCE, our cavemen ancestors began to ditch hunting and gathering in favor of the farming life, and our usage of fire diversified. We started baking, defending our land from predators (the flashpoint of a sabertooth-warding wooden torch is 572F), and firing pottery (clay particles fuse at 1,650F). You can do some things with bowls made from reeds, says Rocke, but to make containers useful for cooking, you need fire.

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When wood reaches its flashpoint, the heat exorcises impurities like water vapor, sulfur compounds, and nitrogen compounds, leaving essentially pure carbon behindcharcoal. This substance burns hotter than normal wood, and throughout history, more heat has led to better tech.

The Hittites were some of the most prolific iron producers of the Bronze Age (33001200 BCE), and evidence suggests they were among the first ancient empires to discover that they could prevent their tools and weapons from rusting by forging steel from iron and charcoal. When charcoal fuses with iron ore, it acts as a reducing agent, attracting oxygen away from the metal. It also lowers irons melting point.

This lower heat threshold allowed the Hittites to produce more durable iron weapons on a mass scale. It also helped them gain trade leveragein the 13th century BCE, a Hittite king sent another ruler an iron dagger as appeasementand gave them a tactical edge over their bronze-bound opponents, including the mighty ancient Egyptians.

The invention of charcoal was a great asset to society because it enabled all these high-temperature processes, Rocke says. You can do some metallurgy without charcoal, but you cant make iron or steel, both of which require a blast furnace.

It isnt certain how the Hittites mass-produced malleable iron and steel, but archaeologists are confident that blast furnaces operated in China as early as the 5th century BCE. Blast furnaces liquefy metals at 3,000F. In ancient China, this meant the introduction of cast iron, the ultra-malleable, ultra-rust-resistant material the Western world has used in cannons, bridges, and, yup, the cast iron skillet in your kitchen that can withstand 2,000F.

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No image captures the intersection of fire and modern industry better than a burning oil derricks column of flame. After Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859, people began to refine that oil over a fire and distill it into some of the tentpole resources of modern life: kerosene, diesel, and gasoline, the last of which could be boiled off and condensed between 104401F.

Early on, Americans used these resources mostly to illuminate our cities and homes, but in the mid-to-late 19th century, gasoline became fuel for a more adrenal, exciting purpose: helping us go far and go fast. The liquid-fuel internal-combustion engine burns a mixture of gasoline and air to create a combustion that expands gases inside the engine to push the pistons and rotate the crankshaft.

This simple fire-powered design became the basis of modern transport, from the Wright brothers plane at Kitty Hawk, to the refurbished Challenger 2, which topped 448 miles per hour and broke the land speed record in 2018, to the 2,300-ton diesel engines that power container ships through the Panama Canal today.

Gasoline had great advantages over electricity or gaseous fuels: energy density, weight, volume, Rocke says. You needed those differences if you were going to put your power plant [your fuel source] on a moving object.

In 1900, just 22 percent of American automobiles were powered by gas; but thanks to Henry Fords mass-production methods, the invention of the self-starting ignition in 1912, and our newfound need for speed, the internal-combustion engine gained supremacy among autos. Fire was powering us toward modern life.

This modernization put fire and combustion at the crossroads of practicality and danger once again. The early 1900s were fraught with fatal conflagrations. Chicagos Iroquois Theater fire in 1903 killed more than 600 people, and in 1910, the Big Blowup wildfire in Idaho, Washington, and Montana killed at least 85 people as it reduced 3 million acresan area about the size of Connecticutto ashes.

These fires prompted changes: The Iroquois fire led to the invention of the emergency exit panic bar for doors, and the Big Blowup led to the development of some prescribed-burn containment techniques. But they also served as reminders of the risks that come with implementing combustion in our everyday lives.

Harness the Power of Fire

Today, Rocke suggests the advances wrought by fire have ironically taken us past it. Many energy and power advances of the 20th century dont involve combustion: Nuclear energy relies on a physical reaction rather than a chemical one, and renewable energies like solar, wind, and water power skirt combustions literal explosiveness. We understand now there are costs of powering the world with fire, from deforestation to pollution to climate change. Going forward, we have to reconcile these downsides with fires awesome potential.

Because it is awesome. Fire sparks the reaction between aluminum and ammonium perchlorate that turns solid rocket fuel into the driving force of space travel (NASAs rocket boosters reach 5,000F during launch). When fire is used to distill alcohol (which evaporates at 173F), were treated to things like Four Roses Single Barrel bourbon and Blantons Original.

Every time you strike a match, the stroke of friction between the match head and the box turns the boxs red phosphorus to white, and it takes just 86F for white phosphorus to combust. Then you have fire at your fingertips.

Its hard not to stare at that little flame. Simple combustion still inspires us at a basic, primal level, whether were throwing another log on the fireplace or sitting around a backyard bonfire. As Rocke affirms: Fire is so elemental, it will never go away.