How Was Fire Discovered?

Fire has been known to man since the very earliest times. In certain
caves in Europe in which men lived hundreds of thousands of years
ago, charcoal and charred bits of bone have been found among
stones that were evidently used as fireplaces. But how did men learn
the trick of making a fire? We can only guess. Early man probably
knew how to use fire before he knew how to start it. For example,
lightning might strike a rotten tree and the trunk would smolder.
From this he would light a fire and keep it going for years. We can
take a pretty good guess as to how the cave men learned to start a
fire. In trampling among the loose stones in the dark, the first men
must have noticed sparks when one stone struck another. But it may
have taken many generations before anyone among these early men
had the idea of purposely striking two stones together to produce a
fire! Another way we have of knowing how early men discovered
fire is to observe the primitive people of today. Some of them are in
a stage of development that our forefathers reached thousands of
years ago.
Let’s look at some of these primitive methods. In Alaska, Indians of
certain tribes rub sulphur over two stones and strike them together.
When the sulphur ignites, they drop the burning stone among some
dried grass or other material. In China and India, a piece of broken
pottery is struck against a bamboo stick. The outer coating of the
bamboo is very hard and seems to have the qualities of flint. The
Eskimos strike a common piece of quartz against a piece of iron
pyrites, which is very common where they live. Among the North
American Indians, rubbing two sticks together to produce fire was a
common method. The ancient Greeks and Romans had still another
method. They used a kind of lens, called “a burning glass,” to focus
the rays of the sun. When the heat rays were concentrated in this
way, they were hot enough to set fire to dry wood. An interesting
thing about fire in early days, is that many ancient peoples kept
“perpetual” fires going. The Mayas and Aztecs in Mexico kept a fire
perpetually burning, and the Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans kept
fires burning in their temples.