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Sweden is the world’s leading exporter of matches, manufacturing around five million boxes daily—the equivalent of about 250 million matchsticks.
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The original matches—small sticks of pine impregnated with sulphur—were first used in china in the sixth century.
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Matchbox collectors are called phillumenists.
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“Third on a match” means bad luck. The superstition dates back to WWI when it was believed that if three soldiers lit their cigarettes using the same match, a sniper would see the match strike, take aim at the second soldier lighting up and pick off the ill-fated third.
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Five hundred billion matches are used each year.
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A lawsuit was filed against Match.com in 2005, claiming that the dating website secretly employs people as bait to send fake messages and go on as many as three dates per day to keep paying clients returning. Both the suit and the plaintiff’s love life failed to ignite.
- Up until the early 1900s, matches were made using toxic amounts of white phosphorous, causing an epidemic of a deadly bone disease known as phossy jaw.
- The safety match separates reactive materials, with red phosphorus on the matchbook’s outer striking strip and potassium chlorate on the match head, making undesired ignition virtually impossible.
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Most wooden matchsticks are made from aspen or white pine with a single tree yielding anywhere from 400,000 to one million sticks.
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If all of the three-inch Matchbox toy cars ever built were parked bumper to bumper, they would stretch around the equator more than six times.
This article first appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
