Get Cozy by the . . . Coal?

November always marks a change in the seasons where I live.  Summer lingers well into September, October sees a glorious burst of color, and November is gray, gray, gray.  Seems like a perfect time to bring in the firewood, strike up a blaze, and get cozy.  It's easy to think of the young ladies and gentlemen of nineteenth century England sipping tea and reading books, perhaps in that lovely library Marissa sketched out for us this week.  But I have to keep reminding myself that the fire I enjoy is not necessarily the one they enjoyed.

For one thing, fireplaces back then could be a great deal larger than the one in my home, although the London townhouses certain boasted smaller, more compact models, often courtesy of the Adams brothers.  My fireplace happens to be made of red brick with a slate hearth, but theirs was more likely to have been made from stone, perhaps framed in wood.  If you were wealthy, that stone might be marble in shades from pristine white, midnight black, or serpentine green or perhaps granite. 

If you were poorer, it was more likely to be of a lesser stone, or even those gathered from the land around you.  The older and larger the house, the more likely the fireplace might be large enough to roast an ox inside.  Townhouses might have inserts of cast iron with decorative tiles at the back.  They might also have bricks inserted in the flue to help guide the smoke upward, a design perfected by Count Rumford.

The fuel might also be different from today.  I tend to burn wood scavenged from downed or pruned trees, but my fire is mostly ornamental, not for heating or lighting my house or cooking my food.  The amount of wood needed by a large household for heating and cooking purposes would be prohibitively difficult to procure and store.  So, many households in England burned coal brought around by industrious individuals or peat cut from nearby bogs.  The glow might be similar, but the crackle of burning wood is very different from the pop of coals or the hiss of peat.  And coal fires were at least partly responsible for the choking fogs that enveloped London later in the century.

Makes me want to curl up by my fire with a good book.

(Lead picture by P.G. Champion)

A Match Made in . . . Stockton-on-Tees?

I live in a surprisingly sunny place for Washington State. We have 300 days of sun a year, and almost all of the 60 rainy days come between November and February. I hate these dark, dreary, drizzly days and tend to turn on far too many lights and crank up the heat to levels that would cause the more environmentally conscious to swoon. But if I’d been a nineteenth century miss, it would not have been nearly this easy to light a house or warm a room.

We’ve talked about the candles needed to brighten spaces and fireplaces needed to warm them. What was trickier was to actually light those candles and fireplaces. Early in the century, many households were still using some form of tinderbox. These metal boxes held a stone (often flint) and a piece of metal to strike against it to make a spark. They also held some form of tinder, such as fabric or small pieces of wood. The idea was to use the spark from the flint and steel to catch a piece of tinder on fire, then use it to light the candle or fireplace.

Tinderboxes gradually gave way to more mechanical methods of lighting tinder, such as strike-a-lights, which looked like a pistol. You inserted the tinder in the cylinder and pulled the trigger and the flint inside struck a spark and ignited the tinder. There were even smaller sizes to carry in your pocket so you could use them wherever you went. The biggest problems with tinderboxes were keeping them stocked with tinder and keeping that tinder dry enough to take the spark.

Another way to spark a light was to use a chemical process. Instantaneous light boxes and phosphorous boxes used vitriol and phosphorous, respectively. A stick of wood was inserted in the chemical and then struck against a surface to create friction. No more need to strictly dry tinder! Unfortunately, the chemicals could get quite messy, not to mention dangerous, if their bottles were broken.

In 1826, John Walker of Stockton-on-Tees, England, invented friction matches. A chemist and apothecary, he coated sticks with antimony sulfide, potassium, chlorate, gum, and starch. No more need to carry bottles! No more worries about wet tinder! The sticks would burst into flame when struck against anything. There lay the benefit and the danger. Now you could start a fire anywhere, anytime, even if the matches rubbed against fabric, say the inside of your pocket!

Still, friction matches were popular enough that silversmiths and other artisans rushed to create match safes, metal boxes and cylinders to keep the matches from igniting until you were ready. The safes were still used to protect matches when safety matches came until widespread use in Britain, after 1862. Don’t you love this one from 1895 in the head of a gentleman’s cane?

Makes you appreciate that light switch on the wall, eh?