John Walker was an Englishman born in 1781. He became a surgeon’s assistant but found that he was too squeamish to deal with surgical operations and turned to chemistry instead. He became keenly interested in finding a way of obtaining fire easily. Back then it was not yet possible to transfer a flame onto a slow burning substance, like wood.
One day he was experimenting with a mixture of sulphide of antimony, chlorate of potash, and gum. He stirred it with a wooden splint coated in sulphur. The splint caught fire upon accidental friction against the hearth, and that is how he accidentally invented friction matches.
The price of a box of 50 matches was one shilling. With each box was supplied a piece of sandpaper, folded double, through which the match had to be drawn to ignite it. He refused to patent his invention and everybody was free to make them.
In 1829 Isaac Holden independently arrived at the same idea. By that time Walker had sold no less than 250 boxes of friction matches, as recorded in his sales book. Walker never became famous or rich from his invention and was only credited for it after his death in 1852.
