Abstract
ONE of the world's largest collections of heating and lighting appliances has recently been presented to the Smithsonian Institution together with an endow-ment for its maintenance. It begins from the fire drills with which primitive peoples started a flame by friction, and goes on to some of the latest appliances for lighting and heating. A description of the col-lection has been issued by the Smithsonian Institu-tion. After the fire drill, the account passes to the percussion method, in which a hard stone, such as flint, gives a spark when struck against steel. The steel used was frequently made in an artistic form, and was called a ‘briquet’. Some of these briquets dating from about A.D. 500 were unearthed in a farm in France in 1902. One specimen is inlaid with gold, and has bits of ruby-coloured glass embedded in it. There are also pistol-action lighters, which employ the principle of the flint and steel but simplify it by means of a trigger. This way of starting a fire came into general use about 1700, and was developed from the flint-lock gun, the first of which appeared in England about 1626. Illustrating the period pre-ceding matches, when light was obtained by chemical action, the collection contains a Dobereiner jar, introduced about 1823. Flame was produced by letting hydrogen come into contact with certain other substances. The lamps range from one about the size of a thumb to another as tall as a man. The latter was obtained from a Buddhist temple. Another curiosity is a rolling lamp which was used at Hindu weddings; the light remains upright when the globe is rolled along the ground. There is also a horological lamp which tells the time of night by the amount of oil consumed.
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Ancient Heating and Lighting Appliances. Nature 138, 71 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138071a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138071a0