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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.

   

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