Crusies, Sluts, Phoebes, and Bettys
BY HENRY C. MERCER.
(St. James Lutheran Church, Chalfont Meeting, October 22, 1912.)
The contents of a tinder box
European wrought iron and brass tinder box dated 1734 with striker. Sold at Pook and Pook April 18, 2008
Four tinder boxes, 18th Century. Sold at Pook and Pook October 24-25, 2008
The same tests may be applied to all the old colonial lanterns, coffeepots, knife-boxes, candlesticks, tin kitchens, and in particular to the perforated glassless, cone-roofed tin lanterns, which in New England, dealers and bric-a-brac hunters have foolishly named after Paul Revere, but one of which made of sheet-iron two or three hundred years before he was born, is now in the Norwegian National Museum at Christiania.
All these articles, including the painted or lacquered Japanned ware of colonial times, which according to Swank's" History of Iron in all Ages," 1892 edition, was produced almost immediately after 1740 upon the discovery of the previously unknown process of rolling out sheet-iron can be more or less dated in this way. Many of them if rolled and tinned or japanned, are English, and not older than 1750, but if hammered and tinned are probably German, and might be a hundred years older, but if hammered and not tinned, or made of plain sheet-iron might date back into the sixteenth century or even earlier like the lantern at Christiania.
Colonel Paxson found in an old Philadelphia store a few years ago several original, unopened and superannuated packages of these gun-flints, at the same time that he met an old tinsmith, who in his youth in Philadelphia had made tinder-boxes. But as Mr. Snares' card shows, the proper tinder-flint was larger than a gun-flint, and not square, but round. Moreover, Snares' flints are black. These here are golden yellow and were probably made in France.
Snares' men had burrowed 40 feet vertically underground through three layers of flint, about 7 feet apart in the chalk, called "upper crust," "wall" and "floor," and I saw and photographed one of the miners who had just brought up on his head, a bundle of flint nodules without a windlass and by way of a set of primitive ladders and stagings. There is no time to describe this interesting survival of an ancient industry, which is situated within the area of a still older lot of diggings, close by, at a place called Grimes' Graves, where the ground has been disturbed to a great depth for several acres, by ancient British people of the Chipped Stone Age, who mined flint there for their stone implements. Just so they mined it at Cissbury in Sussex or at Speiennes in Belgium, and so our Indians mined jasper at Durham, near here, or at Macungie and Vera Cruz in Lehigh county.
Detail of the altarpiece of the Saint Georges church in Haguenau, Bas-Rhin, France. Photo taken by Pethrus. Note Joseph with flint, steel, and tinder. Painting done by Diebold Martin in the 15th century.
RETAINING THE SPARK
After you make the spark, as explained, you must retain it or out it goes. You must throw it into tinder and allow it to smoulder there. Tinder among our ancestors in colonial times, was generally an old piece of cotton or linen rag, a worn out handkerchief for instance, thrown on the kitchen fire till it blazed, stamped out on the hearth and then placed in the box or, on the other hand, fired and smothered in the box with the inner lid. The archeology of tinder itself is a vast subject. The savage people of the world having used a great and various multitude of tinders made of bird feathers, fungi, decayed wood, vegetable fiber and other things. But the tinder, here in question, might be called a civilized tinder, and though there were at that time in use in Europe and here by civilized people several other tinders, as for instance dried, rotten wood, or touchwood, or the dried fungus Polyporus igniarius, soaked in nitre, and sometimes called by the French name Amadou, or the so-called German tinder, a sort of inflammable, manufactured felt, and various slow-matches inherited from the middle ages, which may or may not have been older than the scorched rag, or known to the ancients, there is little doubt that the rag tinder here shown was more frequently used by our great-great-grandfathers than anything else.
PRODUCING THE FLAME
A glowing ember, or smouldering spark, is not a fire. Thus far you have only retained the ember, next you must transform it to flame or the whole operation fails.
When our ancestors did this by touching the sulphur-tipped splint, which might be called a match, as explained, to the ember, they were much in advance of primitive man, who had to blow up the flame on fuel laid against the tinder itself. The ancients had sulphur, which is one of the elements of the world, and can be found native all over the globe, especially near volcanoes, and the Mackenzie River Indians knew how inflammable sulphur was, and, according to Hough, above quoted, rubbed it on two pieces of pyrites when they clashed them together to make fire. But the idea of melting sulphur and tipping it on splints of wood, if not known to the Romans, probably dates back into the Middle Ages, as proved by specimens of similar "spunks" of considerable antiquity, or far older at least than the settlement of Pennsylvania, seen by Colonel Paxson in the museum at Berlin.
At all events, here in the midst of the tinder-box process, is the ancestor of the percussion match, which although it would not strike, yet carried a flame and was not, therefore, a slow-match, such as the old musketeers carried around smouldering in metal boxes in the 17th century, or such as were attached to the old match-lock guns, or as are used to-day to set off dynamite.
RETAINING THE FLAME
The last step in the operation after producing the fire is to retain it, which in this case you do in the flame of a candle. The latter whether molded or dipped, of wax or fat, is of immense antiquity, and need not be described here. When the fire-maker held the burning "spunk" in his hand he might transfer the flame direct to the kindling on the hearth, or he might light the candle with it before he lit the hearth fire, and because the "spunk" was far less apt to go out in the latter operation, than in the former, he probably lit the candle first. When that burned he was master of the house on a cold morning when all the fires were out, but that he used paper tapers to transfer the fire from these tinder-box candles, or to other candles, or to light the fire itself, the narratives of old people, and family traditions abundantly prove. Besides which we know that tinder-boxes are far rarer in the rubbish of old houses than we might suppose they would be, ten times rarer for instance, than spinning-wheels, showing that where a man lived in town, or near neighbors in the country, he could and continually did keep live embers in the great ash bed of the kitchen hearth, or where these failed, begged a pot or shovelful of fresh brands from his neighbor, or lit his candle with paper tapers, from the kitchen fire, without using the tinder-box at all.
In "Home-life in Colonial Days." by Miss A. M. Earle, a book containing valuable illustrations, and many interesting notes, but rendered almost useless by the negligence of the writer to quote authorities, the author says she never could produce fire with a tinder-box, and that Charles Dickens complained of spending half-an-hour at the operation. This was probably because she tried to strike with the steel rather than with the flint, or because the steel was not tempered, or the tinder was damp. Provided the tools are in good condition there is no difficulty in the operation.
The invention of the percussion match superseded the tinder-box in 1835, but did not abolish it. Here is a brand-new Whaler's tinder-box which I bought at a store in New Bedford in 1907, and it and another like it, packed in the provision basket in the whaleboat outfit at our Historical Society Museum, prove that when the whaler leaves the whale-ship armed with his harpoon, in an open boat upon the most dangerous fish hunt in the world, he dares not trust his life to a match, which may spoil, but he risks it on the flint and steel, for the spark is always there.
We still have the smoker's "strike-a-light," and another lot of tinder-boxes sold by John Kreider the gunsmith, in Philadelphia, as Colonel Paxson recently found, show that the wise hunter in the American Wilds, or the lonely fur-trader of the far northwest, when it comes to the point of life and death, now still in the year 1912 will not trust a match, but falls back on the primeval spark. Source: Text by Henry C. Mercer
