What sort of tools would be used? Was some sort of “fire starting kit” a common item? Maybe a gift on your 15th birthday or something? My question is regarding Roman and Medieval times.
Or maybe in villages, there was always a fire burning somewhere and if people needed to start their own they’d go “borrow” some fire via torch or something?
Or did most people know how to do the boy scout thing of rubbing sticks and some type of easily flammable cloth?
Flint and tinderbox?
For the time period and societies names flint and steel would have been very common. The easiest thing to use with this is something called tender cloth, basically pure carbon in cloth form. (This is made more or less the same way one makes charcoal)
Flint and steel. But fires were often kept burning. There was no other light source aside from the sun. I don’t know when slow burning wicks came into use. These could be carried, smouldering, and then by blowing on them they would fire up enough to ignite something.
Colonial Colonists often carried hot coals with them in a coal carrier. Colonists didn’t normally run around like Surviorman eating worms and making fire with a spindle stick and piece of leather. 
They enjoyed their comforts just like we do.
http://www.goosebay-workshops.com/phy/clim/34624/coal-scoop-2.jpg
They also had a basic match called a Spall.
http://www.goosebay-workshops.com/MAKING-FIRE-FOOTWARMERS-BRAZIERS
What is the best fire starter today. I’ve not started a fire in many years, not even a candle. But, I’ve an emergency kit in the garage and in the car. Neither have a fire starter. What current fire starter will store best for years?
Waterproof matches. Or you can just put regular matches in a tightly sealed plastic container.
Magnesium fire starter kits never go bad if they are stored properly and are fairly easy to use.
For most people a simple disposable lighter will suffice. Next choice might be a ferrocerium starter with or without the magnesium tender bars. You can start a fire with 0000 steel wool and a car battery (other batteries such as a 9 volt will work as well.) Probably more important than what fire starting method you use is learning to build a fire and doing so enough times that you are comfortable having to do so under stress.
Concur - as long as the storage conditions are fairly stable*, a disposable lighter is about as simple as it gets, and probably more reliable than matches.
*That is free from excessive damp (the metal parts will rust), not experiencing excessive shock or vibration, and not experiencing extremes of temperature (such as inside a car - wild temperature fluctuations may end up causing mechanical failure that vents the butane gas)
The gas can easily leak out of a lighter. Waterproof matches are coated with wax. I have some that are at least 15 years old, have just been sitting around, and I just lit one without a problem. Much easier than using magnesium fire starter, much more reliable than lighters.
Very true. And in northern climates, letting your fire go out in the middle of winter could be a major cause of concern.
Often times, if your fire went out, you would go over to your neighbor’s house to “get a light.” I’m not exactly sure what device you would use to carry the flame back to your house… perhaps a piece of wood soaked in oil, a lantern, or a torch.
Decades ago, I was substitute teaching a class of fourth graders. They were reading a story set in the 1700’s, and someone starts a fire. One boy asked me if they had lighters back then. I said no, and he said, “Well, I know they didn’t have matches, so he couldn’t have started a fire!”
I explained about flint, and I also had the kids rub their hands together to learn about friction and heat.
In a community it’s pretty much a guarantee that somewhere in the town/city/village someone had a fire pretty much perpetually. It’d be very unlikely the whole village would lack flame at a given time. (And if so, they’d be able to get it restarted pretty quickly in any case.)
But anyone who had need to travel or such prior to matches and lighters would have had flint and steel or something very similar, and some charcloth to help build a fire.
With flint and steel it is very easy to get sparks, the hard part is getting them to ignite, a piece of charcloth makes it very easy because it is easy to cause it to catch fire from sparks, and then if your charcloth is right by a small tinder pile it’s an easy way to get the tinder lit and then from there a proper fire will grow.
When I was a kid my grandfather had a flint and steel survival tool that looked very similar to this (that example is actually a magnesium tool which would work better but the concept is the same); and I remember playing with it at a very young age and with no real instruction I could make sparks pretty easily. I hadn’t learned how to build a fire yet, but generating sparks was easy enough, and once you understood how to actually build a proper fire and how to use tender and some equivalent of charcloth to get a fire reliably started it’s very easy to use the sparks to get the whole thing going. Not as easy as a match but it’s world’s easier than friction methods or things of that nature.
There are ways to carry a live ember too - for example, a dried hoof fungus will smoulder for hours or days without either going out or burning too fast - Otzi the ice man had pieces of this in his kit (although I don’t think it’s clear whether they were just for use as tinder, or were for carryng a live ember from place to place)
I think torches/candles were common for lower class people but my understanding is back to Roman era and earlier the wealthy typically had lots of oil lamps and things of that nature going, which with servants and such are easier to keep burning and to refuel than a bunch of candles. As long as you have servants making regular rounds your lamps should never go totally out, you’d probably turn some off to conserve oil (but I guess a truly wealthy patrician family might not) but you’d keep a few turned on very low to provide some level of illumination in the home if someone had to get up and move around at night.
I’ve never played with a Roman era oil lamp, but I know a simple oil lamp of modern design with modern lamp oil will burn for over 100 hours on half a gallon of oil, so there’d have to be some serious dereliction of duty for all the lamps in a wealthy Roman’s house to go out.
Colonial reenactor here.
I can get a flame in about 10 to 15 seconds with flint, steel, some dry tinder and a bit of char-cloth. Char-cloth is made ahead of time in batches by putting small squares of cotton fabric in a covered tin and setting it in the hot coals. This turns the cloth into carbon. I make a small “bird’s nest” of jute fiber, and place a 3/4 inch square of char-cloth in the middle. With the flint and steel, sparks are struck onto the char-cloth. As soon as the char-cloth catches a spark, I blow into the nest of tinder until it bursts into flame.
It took longer to type that than it does to start a fire.
Indeed, much of today’s society is devoted to preventing a fire.
Flint and steel. Forget matches and lighters. Both can leak, get wet, etc. and then where will you be? Learn to use flint and steel and you’re set for any need. They come in fancy and simple.
If you ever tour colonial or frontier houses/cabins, look up the walls next to the fireplace. You’ll often see musket balls imbedded in the walls, because somebody tried to get a fire started using the lock mechanism of a flintlock. And forgot it was loaded.
Reading all these I keep thinking of the book(s) Clan of the Cave Bears and Valley of Horses especially the second book -they are a series for those that don’t know- when the main character accidentally finds flint when she’s making arrowheads. She finds some nice stones/rocks and while chipping away at these she notices that they make sparks. These books are set in ancient human times by the way. And the Author had gone into intense research for her books, so I’m guessing something like that happening was probably common.
Before that, isn’t it true that ancient humans would take the fire if it happened by nature? Say a tree got struck by lightening didn’t/wouldn’t they go out and gather the fire as if they were gathering nuts or fruits? And then they probably kept it safe afterwards?
Beyond that, and into the more ‘modern’ days of human I agree with everyone else that people used flint and steel and probably just the old ‘boy scout’ rubbing two sticks together.