A HARMLESS RIVAL TO THE DEADLY LUCIFER.

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 3782, 2 December 1898, Page 4

A HARMLESS RIVAL TO THE DEADLY LUCIFER.

The insignificant little lucifer match, packed tight "with dozens of his fellow 8 in a cardboard case, plajs no unimportant part in the economy of the world. Useful though the match undoubtedly is, its destructive effects are enormous. It would be difficult to ascertain accurately the loss of human life directiy due to lucifer matches. A solution of match-heads has, time and again, served the purposes of the suicide. Many any innocent babe has been sacrificed by sucking the poisonous heads of wax vestas. Smokere who, as the phrase goes, 'smoke more matches than tobacco,' run some risk by their repeated match-striking operations, an authentic case being on record of a man suffering from disease of the jawbone, due to inhailing phosphorus vapour from matches. The patient, it is stated, frequently used more than one hundred matches a day in lighting and relighting the pipes and cigars he smoked. It is in the manufacture of the the lucifer match that its most destructive characteristics are displayed. That terrible disease known as * phossy jaw ' is the constant dread of the unfortunate match-makers. Stringent sanitary measures, added to close and careful inspection, have proved unequal to stamping out ' phossy jaw,' although the number offatalcaseshas diminished. The Belgian Government recently took the sensible course of offering a substantial money prize to the inventor who would produce a match which fulfilled the following three conditions:— lt must not contain phosphorous or other poison ; it must strike everywhere. Two German scientists, Mr S. H. Rosenthal and Dr S. J. von Kourocki, who for the last three years have been experimenting together in Berlin, have, according to the London ' Daily Chronicle,' succeeded in producing a match which not only complies with the strict conditions laid down by the Belgian Government, but can also be manufactured as cheaply as the ordinary ones and by the same machinery and staff. In short, the new match fulfils all the conditions necessary to make the invention of world-wide importance and interest. To abolish necrosis is to relieve humanity of much suffering ; and to give to the world a uon -poisonous, cheap and 'strike-every-where' match is to confer blessing that cannot fail to be appreciated. Like maay other great discoveries of the age, this one was ultimately made by accident, and if its value and usefulness are borne out, we shall no doubt meet with the new matches ere long. The discovery was only made on the Ist September, and within seventeen days hereafter it was patented, or provisional patents were obtained, in twelve different countries, which to a certain extent goes to prove that there is some real value in the in-