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Historians
often speculate how the world would have developed
without the discovery of the fire. It is widely believed
that without it our life at present would be completely
unrecognizable. There probably would be a few arts and
crafts, but no real industry and leisure. It is possible
that human beings would have been little different from
wild animals, differing from them only in speech,
writing and agriculture. Possibly, they would have been
migrating creatures, moving from place to place in
search for food and warm shelters.
Modern day
anthropologists have attempted to generalize the place
of man and his supremacy over the animal kingdom. One of
the general ideas put forward by them is that human
beings are the only tool-using creatures. They triumphed
over the animal world because of their discovery and
mastery over the use of fire, which helped them shape
tools and assisted them in their climb to supremacy.
Animals share to a lesser extent with humans various
traits like speech, trade and instinctive use of tools.
However, we find that there is no animal on earth, which
can generate and control fire.
How did man
invent fire? Anthropologists have researched deeply into
this fascinating subject, but no precise answers have
been given. How exactly did mother Nature communicate
the secrets of making fire to people in different parts
of the world is difficult to determine and this will be
a matter of endless speculation. Ancient remains show
that the early human beings knew about fire at least a
million years ago. However, it will not be known how did
they learn to use it for the first time. Researchers,
looking into the origins of fire have found that ancient
languages of people from different parts of the planet
contain words for fire and cooking, which would have
been quite impossible if they had not known about fire
and its uses.
The most common
method of creating fire during the early phases of
civilization was by friction, but the humans achieved
that in different ways, and each method appears to have
been geographically limited. It is possible that the
early humans discovered – by the trial and error method
– that rubbing two dry branches together made fire. From
this idea, they developed the “fire-plough,” which is
still used for making fire with slight variations in
different areas. In principle, the fire-plough merely
consists of a piece of wood with a chisel-edge. This is
rubbed violently and continuously in a groove, made of
another piece of wood, until the friction produces heat,
which is raised to the point of ignition until the
minute shavings of dry wood formed in the groove catch
fire and burst into flame. The early humans soon
discovered that the presence of a good draught of air
caused the first precious sparks of flame to glow and
with this knowledge they developed simple tools, such as
hollow-tubes and fans, to blow air on the sparks to
raise them to a flame.
If it had not
been for fire, human beings would not have known “family
life,” for it would have interfered with their quest for
finding food and comfort, over the desire to procreate.
But when humans learned the art of making fire and to
keep it alight, the life turned very different. Cooking
followed quickly; later followed the discovery that fire
helps to preserve the food for long periods by acting as
an excellent sterilizer. Fire helped humans to conserve
their energies and gave them the leisure to develop
other fundamental needs of civilization and acquire more
knowledge about their surroundings.
What is fire?
What makes the flame? What happens when a piece of wood
burns? Where does the wood go? Are the ashes, which are
left behind just parts of wood or something more? It is
possible that the curiosity of the early human beings
was aroused in the same manner, but it took them
thousands of years to find satisfactory answers to these
questions. During the early ages, many ingenious
explanations were offered, but all of them wide of the
mark. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century
that the principles behind burning were understood. The
answers to these questions laid the foundations of
modern chemistry.
Chemistry was
preceded by alchemy. The ancient alchemists rightly
guessed that fire was one of the four elements, from
which all substances were compounded. The other three
elements were water, earth and air. They considered fire
as a substance, whereas, we know today that it is a
chemical action and does not exist by itself. The theory
of four elements is believed to have originated for the
first time from Aristotle. The Arab alchemists
elaborated upon this theory by adding their own ideas
and rules, which they put on top of existing claims.
Some regarded that the burning of a substance is due to
an imponderable fluid present in it, which they called
as “Caloric.”
In the early part
of the eighteenth century, a German scientist by the
name of Stahl put forward the famous “phlogiston” theory
that explains the effect of fire on a metal, which was
to expel the “fatty-earth” or the “terra pinguis”
leaving a residue behind, which he termed as “calces.”
Phlogiston became the eighteenth century ether, which
could not be seen, but was invented in order to explain
a phenomenon. Non-inflammable substances contained no
phlogiston. This theory became the “swan-song” of
alchemy. Charcoal was supposed to be rich in phlogiston,
which explained why when metal-ores were heated with it,
the pure metal was restored. Later, Bessemer used this
principle to produce steel.
Finally, it was
left to two renowned scientists, Priestly and Lavoisier
to discover the true meaning of burning. In 1774, while
working on one of his experiments, Priestly managed to
isolate oxygen. A few years later, Lavoisier performed a
few classic experiments, which established the nature of
combustion. He established that ordinary materials
burned only in the presence of oxygen; and oxygen
present in a container increased their weight by exactly
the same amount as the air decreased in weight. The
concentration of oxygen present in the air decided the
speed of combustion. In ordinary air oxygen is present
to the extent of twenty-one percent. Normally, burning
will not occur if the oxygen level falls down below six
percent.
It is important
for us to realize that if the concentration of oxygen in
air were to be raised even by a small proportion, things
would be burning all over the world and life would
become intolerable. On the other hand, if the
concentration of oxygen fell down even by a small
percentage, then few objects would burn under normal
conditions. This concentration is kept exact by a
remarkable control of Nature and the reason why the vast
majority of substances require air to burn is because
oxygen is an element, with which all the others have a
close affinity.
Fire has played
significant role in religious ceremonies across the
world. It is believed that the custom of extinguishing
candles during the Holy Week and lighting them on Easter
Sunday is a relic of the ancient past when early human
beings kept “undying fires.” It is also worthy to note
that the Story of Creation in the Bible makes no mention
of fire. Fire is frequently mentioned in the Old
Testament and in the New Testament; it became an
accepted part of Hell. Many preachers of the nineteenth
century delighted in those texts from the Bible to
preach violent Hell-fire and brimstone sermons, which
made quite a few people suffer from nightmares. Others
criticized the passages of Hell from the Bible as
symbolic in nature and ridiculed the efforts of the
overzealous preachers to turn symbolism into realism.
Since then, Hell has always been an unpleasant subject
in the Christian Church. Now, even the most conservative
Church leaders have stopped preaching about Hell-fire in
their sermons for fear of loosing their regular flock of
churchgoers.
Today, we use
fire so casually and so cheaply that it is easy to
overlook its significance and the role it has played in
shaping our daily lives. Almost all our tools and modern
equipment would not have been there, for there are
hardly a few, which do not require at some stage or the
other the use of fire in manufacturing them. Without
fire there would be no power to run our factories, no
plastics and no rubber. And, without power, there would
be starvation, as there would not be enough uncooked
food to meet the requirements of modern human
population.
On the negative
side, there has been merciless destruction brought about
every year by uncontrolled fires, which has resulted in
thousands of deaths and causing damages equaling
millions of dollars worth of property. These figures –
though they appear tremendous – are negligible when we
compare them with the benefits we receive from
controlled fires. Today, every village, town and city of
the civilized world has fire brigades to fight
deliberate or accidental fires that have gone out of
control. |
