Matches & Phosphorus

The history of friction matches dovetails with the discovery and refinements for isolating the element phosphorus. In theory, you could make your own matches using ye olde alchemical recipe for phosphorus (it was supposed to produce -- you guessed it -- gold), which involves collecting a vat of urine, allowing it to sit to the point of putrefaction, and then boiling it down into a paste. The paste is then heated to a high enough temperature so that the vapors can be condensed in water into phosphorus. Once you have the phosphorus, you've got an essential ingredient for one form of match, since phosphorus can spontaneously ignite upon exposure to air. I very highly recommend not isolating phosphorus, however, because the allotrope isolated using this method is white phosphorus, with a lethal dose of ~50 mg (it's toxic well below that level and causes chemical burns).

Other matches were made using antimony sulfide, but phosphorus was the pyrophoric element-of-choice, ironically because its vapors smelled less toxic. Modern matches are made using the less-poisonous allotrope, red phosphorus. As you might guess, there is a lot of interesting history between the discovery of phosphorus and the invention of the safe safety match. Tell me more...