Show TRI matche M nde annual output puts northern country far in lead in this industry stockholm to most ot of us ua tho the mention of sweden suggests a northern land of ice and matches and the mention of the latter might well bring to mind that the beginning and the growth to prosperity of a great industry always Is brought about by the propinquity of natural resources A match Is composed 0 of two essential parts the chemical substances in the head bead and the wooden stick which holds them the head of the match produces the heat necessary to ignite the wood the wood furnishes the flame any sort ot of wood will burn but any sort of chemical substances will not on being rubbed produce sufficient heat it might therefore seem that the most important part of a match Is the head bead and that the te wood Is relatively of no importance the tact fact that sweden has attained supremacy in the making ot of matche matched a la Is due almost entirely to the great quantities of a certain kind of wood aspen wood for certain technical reasons this Is practically the only kind of wood fit at for use in safety match sticks most of the chemicals used are indeed imported into sweden history of friction matches friction matches have been in use for or only about a hundred years they were first invented by a frenchman named congreve and for or this reason the first matches sold on the streets 0 of london and paris were known as con graves and were regarded at first only as curiosities those these first matches consisted of wooden sticks coated at the end with sulphur and tipped with a mixture of sulphide of antimony chlorate of potash and gum as a binder they were ignited or struck by being drawn between the two faces of a piece of folded glass paper they were introduced trod into sweden in 1830 A few years later a student at up sala gala university sweden named lundstrom produced a new form of match in which phosphorus was used in place of sulphur this had bad certain advantages of ease of striking and so on but a great disadvantage lay in the highly poisonous character of the phosphorus used A short time later lundstrom in conjunction with another swedish chemist gustav erik pasch surmounted this difficulty and patented the first safety match in this new product the ordinary yellow phosphorus was replaced by another form of the element clement known as red phosphorus which Is made from the other variety by simply heating beating it for a long time in a closed vessel this red phosphorus differs from the yellow form only in requiring more friction tor for ignition and in being nonpoisonous the use of the red instead of the yellow phosphorus alorie alone would have justified the term safety as applied to the product but pasch conceived the idea of separating the chemicals which make up the head bead of the match on the head he put the chlorate of potash sulphide of antimony and certain other substances but not the phosphorus this mixture Is ignited only with great difficulty by ordinary friction but it if it Is drawn lightly across a surface coated with the red phosphorus it bursts into hame flame as easily qs as the old style match so the red phosphorus was placed on the sides of the box yearly output shown As the initial patent expired other factories sprang up throughout sweden under various ownerships to supply the enormous demands being made by the match users all over the world in 1917 however it seemed wise to amalgamate all these separate rles ries into one huse huge concern known as the associated swedish match manufacturers rs this company combines a capital of a million and a quarter dollars and Is by tar far the largest matchmaking concern in the world it Is known under the much less sinister term Imon konopol mon opol the yearly production Is cases of matches vich each containing small boxes this Is a total of more than five trillion boxes of matches and since each box holds about 70 matches more than XO trillion represents the number of matches made every year |