How Does a Lighter Make Fire?
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When is your birthday? If it is today, Happy Birthday, Wonder Friend! We love celebrating birthdays and one of the things we most look forward to is blowing out birthday candles on the birthday cake! Do you look forward to this tradition, too? It is fun to gather around the table with those you're closest to and wait excitedly for a family member or friend to reach for a lighter to light the candles on your cake. Before you know it, each candle is lit and everyone is singing "Happy Birthday" to you!
Have you ever given any thought to how lighters work to produce a flame so easily and consistently? The science behind the lighter is both simple and fascinating.
To produce a flame, a lighter needs both fuel and a way to create a spark to ignite that fuel. Modern disposable lighters combine those two elements in a simple, cheap package that allows us to create fire on demand easily.
The lighter traces its history back to at least the early 1800s, when a German chemist named Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner created a lamp-like device that used a platinum catalyst to spark flammable hydrogen gas into a hot, bright fire. Unfortunately, his device was too large and dangerous to become very popular.
Inexpensive, disposable lighters became possible after Carl Auer von Welsbach patented ferrocerium in 1903. This cheap, man-made metallic material produces a large spark when scratched. It is often misidentified as flint in modern lighters. Read More
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