This thread about humans tool usegot me wondering about this. I’m wondering why people would have discovered that friction could be used to start a fire by rapidly turning a piece a wooden rod in a depression in another piece of wood. But I could see people trying to bore a hole in a piece of wood using a sharpen rock or piece of bone.
Anyone know if that would work?
It would work. Maybe not as well as you think but friction is friction. Modern day drill bits get very hot in use.
The problem is you have to generate heat faster than it dissipates. This might be much harder to do with a rock than with a stick. You can roll the stick between your hands, or use a bow.
I thought one of the problems might be rock and bone conducting heat better than then which is a good insulator. The stone or bone would conduct more of the heat generate. Someone would also have to find out that the heat was generated with a dulled bit. If the implement is well sharpened it could drill through the wood faster than a fire can get started.
We use rocks to start fires all the time. Ever heard of flint?
Flint cannot be used to start a fire. At least, not by itself. The combination of flint and steel can start a fire, and steel is so ubiquitous in our society that we think of flint as the “magic ingredient”, but it’s actually the steel that is sparking, and it’s easy for us to forget just how high-tech a material steel is.
Iron pyrite can be used to start a fire, hence the name.
Flint will spark against flint (although quite weakly) due to natural iron content within the rock itself.
You can get sparks from white quartz by hitting it with many other types of rocks. Using iron pyrite is interesting, I hadn’t heard of that before. However I was wondering about using rocks or bone to start a fire by friction.
Already commented on the other thread, but here goes: I have studied primitive firelighting for a couple of decades and researched and written several papers on it. I have found no instances of using bone or rock for friction fire anywhere (percussion fire is another matter). From extensive practical experience, I can suggest why. Friction fire depends on the person making fire removing copious small particles off the friction pieces and heating those particles to ignition point, using friction. Soft, easily broken down materials are needed for human muscle output to result in this. The softest, most porous woody materials in any given location are typically the best friction fire materials locally available. This is why even people in environments with sparse vegetation invariably used that sparse vegetation (or driftwood) to make friction fires. The Polar Eskimo used bone and stone extensively on technology that most other peoples used wood on. But even they used soft woods on the contact ends of their firelighting apparatus. They had to.
Bone is way too dense and hard (around 4 X the density of medium-dense wood) to work in friction firelighting, stone even more so. Even hard woods are too hard to break down properly, polishing and compacting instead, no matter how hard a skilled person works. Soft woods like willow or alder are at the harder end of workable materials, with stuff like slightly rotted wood, woody grass stalks, yucca etc. preferred instead.
Thank you Toxylon. I didn’t know softwoods worked better. So the question of how someone figured out that enough friction from wood against wood could start a fire remains open.
Nice.
Tangential, but if you’d like to see a lot of different approaches to starting a fire, watch old episodes of “Dual Survival”. The guy who never wears shoes is really good at it, but even he fails sometimes. (I haven’t watched the later seasons where he was replaced; they might be good too.) It’s a pretty silly show, but I could still learn things from it.
I remember trying to start fires without matches as a kid, and couldn’t even do it using a magnifying glass or telescope. Turns out I was lacking patience and knowledge (mostly about how to make a good fire starter bundle). It takes a bit of judgement and a lot of patience!
As kids we learned that hitting a piece of white quartz with other rocks would produce sparks. We tried mightily to start a fire that way without success. Flint and steel does depend on having proper tinder. I’m kind of surprised you couldn’t do it with a magnifying glass though.
No prob! Just a clarification: I was talking about soft woods, not softwoods. There are soft woods in both soft- and hardwoods, ie. wood from coniferous and broad-leaved trees. Any conifer with pitch is a poor candidate here, regardless of it’s softness, while many broadleaf trees or particular parts of them, yield the perfect, pitch-free, soft and porous material.
As to the origins of the invention, I have a theory: rub a piece of wood against another, and the contact surfaces get warm. Rub harder (hard to resist after the first observation), and the wood gets hot. Without any prior knowledge, one will progressively reach a point where the rubbed wood surfaces get mighty hot and even smell like smoke. Sure enough, there’s a huge leap from that into producing a viable flame (many little details must be right), but the idea is there for the taking, and at least one Palaeolithic Edison must’ve perspired until results emerged.
That makes so much sense, it seems obvious in hindsight. Oh well, I now know why our childhood efforts did not work. Ignorance fought, thank you!
Lack of diligence and inventiveness. I could make stuff (like paper or birchbark) smolder and turn black, but I couldn’t get a noticeable flame. What I was missing was a fire bundle to insulate the hot spot, concentrating the heat and blocking any wind.
Watching the Dual Survival guy do it, it’s clear that it also requires quite a bit of judgement. He very carefully selects the materials both in the fire bundle and whatever he’s using as the heat source. And he knows just when to stop applying the heat source and blow very gently on the fire bundle. A few trials and you’d probably get the hang of that, though.
Yeah, paper by itself scorches through but won’t flame up. Dried grass works well to get a bunch smoldering, and a little breath and bits of paper or tiny twigs can get it going. I spent way too much time setting things on fire as a kid. For a steel and flint tinder made from carbonized cloth was commonly used (kept in a little metal tinderbox). I had no idea about that, even working out how to use dried grass and how to light a campfire with matches took some time and seeing it done by others.
My totally unscientific theory is this:
Four guys were out on a hunting trip. They brought their fermented beverage of choice* and were sharing “this big!” stories about past hunts when one guy said “Hey, did you ever notice how your hands get warm when you rub them together?” Then the next guys says “I can make my hands warmer than your hands!” Then the third one says “But look what I can do with a stick.”
Provided with enough ego and alcohol, we all know four guys who would not stop until they burned down the entire savannah.
Primitive people worked wood all the time. They scraped it, filed it, chopped it, baked it, etc. I can’t imagine that it took very long at all for people to discover that wood gets hot when worked. It can’t have been a huge leap from that to trying to make fire with it, even if the details took some time to figure out.
Remember, primitive people weren’t stupid; they just weren’t educated. But they could and did solve many very complex problems using the technology of the day.
Aside from the smoothness aspect of steel, I think the heat conductivity part would be critical. If you are making friction fires, you want the heat to go into the tinder, not into the device you’re using. Using a steel rod instead of a wooden dowel is likely to result in a slightly warmer steel rod instead of a pinpoint of heat.
I’m not sure that follows.