The Lighter Side of Tech

left off in that last episode. And in that episode, I described an invention that used chemistry to create a flame, to ignite a flame. Now, this particular invention I talked about in the last episode is a pretty dangerous contraption. It used sulfuric acid, which by itself is dangerous can seriously injure and disfigure you. But it was using sulfuric acid and zinc in order to generate hydrogen gas, and

hydrogen gas is also potentially really dangerous. Hydrogen gas is lighter than air, but unlike helium, hydrogen is extremely flammable. It's the stuff that contributed to the famous Hindenburg disaster. But now we're going to switch over to some other

technologies and developments that made the modern lighter possible. Because, if you remember in that last episode, though the version I just mentioned was not really practical, they sold a few thousand of them, but it wasn't something that could easily be used, and it certainly wasn't something you could carry around in your pocket. So our next advance in the making of fire would date back to the beginning

of the twentieth century, so the early nineteen hundreds. That's when an Austrian scientist named Baron carl Aur von Velba was working with some mixtures of rare earth elements to see what you know, they would do, so what scientists do sometimes just trying stuff. Well, one of those elements he was working with was a metal called serrium c E R I U M, and it's a relatively soft metal. It's silvery white in color, but it does tarnish when it's exposed to air, so it doesn't stay silvery white

for very long. And it's soft enough then you can actually cut this stuff with a knife, so it's a pretty soft metal. Velbot discovered that creating an alloy, which is, you know, a combination of different metals and other components. But if you create an alloy using iron and cyrium, it was actually mostly iron about seventy iron cirium that you would create a substance that could ignite sparks if

it was struck or scratched by a harder material. And he called this stuff pharaoh cyrium, and he classified it as a mish battle, which is sort of a Germanic word that essentially means mixed metal or alloy. These days, pharao cyrium and mish metal has a slightly different spelling. Typically are frequently used to describe the same thing. Also, a lot of folks will refer to this stuff as

flint in modern lighters, but that is misleading. Flint is something very different, and this merits a quick explanation so that you guys can understand and appreciate the difference between flint and pharaoh cirium. Alright, so let's start off with quartz. This stuff is the most abundant mineral found at Earth's surface, so we humans have tons of experience with quartz. If you take one part silicon to two parts oxygen, that's quartz. And it's a durable mineral, and it has some really

super interesting properties. It's heat resistant, so it's a good component to use in materials where you want to have something that can stand up to great amounts of heat. It also has a really interesting quirky phenomena that's associated with it and some other materials. If you exert a mechanical stress on quartz, in other words, if you hit it, it then accumulates an electrical charge, or if you expose quarts to an electrical charge, it will exert an internal

mechanical strain. It will vibrate. So you can make quartz pulse at a consistent frequency by applying an electrical charge to it, which is why quartz crystals are used in analog watches and clocks. The predictable, repeatable vibration that frequency is always going to be the same is a great way to keep track of the passing of time, and so you use that as sort of the uh, the foundation for all the other time keeping elements. But this

is not an episode about clockwork. So we'll get back to piece of electric because it will play a part later on in our episode, but let's leave that off for now. Now. More than that, quartz comes in many different varieties and one of those varieties is flint. Flint contains a lot of impurities, so it doesn't look like pure quartz at all. It doesn't look like what we

think of when we think of the word quartz. Flint tends to be dark gray in color, but it can have other colors in it as well, like brown or red, sometimes even whi er yellow, and typically is much closer to opaque than what we think of when we think of quarts. We tend to think of something that's at least translucent with quartz, but flint tends to be almost opaque. And like courts in general, flint has no flat surfaces of internal weakness, no Planer weakness inside court flint or cowards.

That means that you do not observe cleavage with quartz or flint, which is, you know, actual geological kind of term here. So in other words, if you were to strike this material hard enough to break it, you would see what's called a conchoidal fracture, that's a smoothly curving fracture. Surface Glass is a type of material that has conchoidal fractures as opposed to Planer fractures or cleavage. By breaking

quartz or flint in very precise ways. You can fashion tough, sharp objects, stuff that can stand up to somewear and tear, and it can have a very sharp edge to it, which is why flint was a valuable material in early human history. It could be chipped to shape into stuff like arrowheads spear points, as well as into cutting tools like access is now getting back to making fires. The property we're interested in with flint is that if you were to strike flint against iron, you can create sparks.

But why is that, Well, it's not because of the flint necessarily, it's actually more because of the irons. The iron is pyrophoric, which means it's a material that will ignite under room temperature. And that probably sounds really weird, right. I Mean, we've all come into contact with iron, We've all seen iron objects, and most of the time I think we could agree that's not you know, currently on fire. So what actually gives here? What's happening and why do

I say that iron is pyrophoric. We'll see when iron encounters air, it begins to oxidize, and with iron, that means it develops a thin layer of iron oxide on the outside surface of the iron itself. Iron oxide is known by another name rust. So the rusting process is a chemical reaction, and it's an exothermic chemical reaction, if you remember from our last episode. An exothermic reaction is one that in the process of this chemical reaction going on,

releases heat. But if you're talking about any appreciable amount of iron, as in more than just a tiny speck of the stuff, that heat dissipates pretty quickly. The relative mass of the iron is great enough that the heat becomes a non factor. And this is really important. We have to consider the ratio of a any given amount of irons mass relative to the surface area that is exposed to the air. If the iron has more than a little mass, that heat can dissipate through the rest

of the hunk of iron. You know, all the iron atoms that are not exposed to air will just sort of absorb that heat and nothing else happens apart from the external surfaces rusting. And once they rust, they've got this sort of protective layer, and thus the rest of the iron atoms aren't exposed to oxygen anymore. Rusting really is just a similar process to burning. That burning is also a chemical reaction. In which material oxidizes. It is just that burning happens a lot faster and with you know,

flames and stuff. When you strike iron with a flint, the flint is actually hard enough and typically sharp enough to cause very tiny shards of iron to shear off of whatever it is you're striking. While any part of those tiny pieces that were previously exposed to oxygen still have an iron oxide coating, the rest of those small pieces haven't been touched by oxygen at all, So these are pure iron with no iron oxide arm and as soon as that surface makes contact with oxygen, the oxidizing

process begins immediately. So now we're talking about iron in which the ratio of surface area of exposed iron compared to the mass of that iron has been flipped. It's very little mass, and much of it is exposed to oxygen. The mass of the shards is so low that it cannot dissipate that heat, So the exposed surface oxidizes at a rate faster than heat can dissipate. So since the

heat can't dissipate, it builds up. It builds up super super fast, and those tiny shards of iron get hot, hot enough to glow and to reach the ignition temperature of some other fuel source, like the tinder of a camp fire. That all happens in the blink of an eye, and that is a spark. The spark you see are these tiny pieces of iron that are oxidizing and they're generating so much heat that they cannot dissipate that the

metal itself begins to glow from that heat. So when you strike iron against flint, you're creating tiny flying shards of white hot iron particles, and that's why you're able to use those to light a camp fire. For example.

Flint was also used in early firearms. Flint would be in the striking arm of a gun like a flint lock rifle or a flint lock pistol, and so you would have this little hammer that would have flint attached to it, and you would have a little cup, essentially a little receptacle cup, and the when you pull the trigger, the hammer would come down and strike inside the cup. It would hit another surface that would be made out of pyrite, which is a mix of iron and silicon.

The collision would create sparks, which ignites a small amount of gunpowder. It leads into the chamber of the firearm ignites a larger amount of gunpowder, which causes an explosion and then propels a projectile out of the weapon. So that's where you get your flintlock pistols and your flintlock rifles. Now, technically you don't absolutely have to use flint. If you want to use iron to generate sparks. You really just need something that's hard enough and sharp enough to shear

off those tiny particles of iron. That's the secret. It's not the flint, it's really the iron. Flint happens to have that kind of hardness to it naturally, and there's a whole lot of flint that's available readily out in the world. It's close to the surface of the planet, so it's easy to find, so it's a very common

pairing with iron or steel. Also, remember steel itself is an alloy of iron and carbon and sometimes some other stuff too, and carbon steel is mostly iron like iron, and tends to be fairly brittle as far as steel goes, so it's frequently used in flint and steel kits. In fact, steel is typically better than playin old iron is because as iron has a tendency to bend rather than break when it's struck by a harder surface, So you want something that's a little more brittle that will shear off

a bit. Because bending doesn't produce sparks, It just you know, dentse it. Adding carbon makes iron less bindy. So in general, the harder the steel and the sharper the flint, the better sparks you're gonna get when you strike the two of them together. Also, if you've ever seen anyone use a machine like a grinder to shape iron or steel, you've likely seen showers of sparks that come down as a result. Those sparks come from the same process I

just described. Tiny fragments of pure iron are glowing white hot as they oxidize upon exposure to the air. All right, but what about pharaoh cyrium. I mentioned that earlier. Well for starters, pharaoh Cyrium is not a mineral like flint is. And to be fair, some people don't refer to flint as a mineral, they just call it a rock. But pharaoh cirium isn't a mineral or a rock. It's an alloy. It's made up of two metals, and the combination of

iron and syrium turned out to be really useful. You've got iron, which will oxidize rapidly when exposed to air, and you've got cirium, which has a low ignition temperature, so that oxidizing process will ignite the serrium and make the sparks more practical, makes it more likely that you're able to use them to do something like light of fire.

And after he first developed pharaoh cirium, Welsbach would tweak this alloy to try and fine tune it to make it more effective as sort of a spark making fire starting material. He discovered that adding another soft metal called lanthanum in very small amounts meant that Pharao cirium would create brighter sparks and thus be even more effective as a way of starting fires. Now, in most lighters, the quote unquote flint in the lighter is actually a piece

of pharaoh cirium. It's not flint, it's pharaoh cirium. And then most lighters use some sort of wheel made out of a harder material like steel that's a striker. So turning the steel wheel causes the wheel to rub or strike against the pharaoh cyrium quote unquote flint quickly, and that throws off sparks. There's usually some other piece of the lighter that holds the pharaoh cirium to a positive pressure against the wheel so that it remains in contact with the wheel even as you start to wear down

the pharaoh cirium. So there's usually some sort of spring or something that exerts pressure on that pharaoh cirium to make sure it remains in contact with the wheel, because if the pharaoh cirium loses contact with the wheel, the wheel will just spend freely. You won't get any sparks at all because the material that gives off the sparks isn't in contact with the striking surface anymore. Bells box discovery created an alternative to relying on chemistry to generate

a flame. The arc would do it if only you have a supply of fuel. So one of the early inventions to use pharaoh sirium as a way to start fires was called the Pisto lighter. I actually have an outtake where I said pistoleter because it's spelled like leader, but lighter. It's a lighter. Uh is from a company called Ronson, and it was called the Pisto lighter because it had sort of a pistol grip. In fact, it looked kind of like a little handgun, a little pistol,

but instead of shooting bullets, this thing shoots sparks. Ronson would actually play an important part in the early history of lighters, so it makes sense to talk about them for just a minute. The company was founded just before the turn of the twentieth century by Louis Vincent Ironson or Ronson, h Leopold Hertzig and Max Hecked, though at the time the company they called they formed was called the Art Metal Works, and the company mainly made stuff

out of iron, ranging from lamps to decorative items. But Aaronson was a bit of a chemist and an engineer, and he kept liking to, you know, to to to fiddle and and mess with stuff and try and figure out different ways of accomplishing things. He worked on creating better matches before he started making you know, lighters, and UH we talked about some of those attempts in the last episode, not about his work in particular, but the attempt to move away from things like white phosphorus as

your active component in a match. While n the company, UH introduced the pistol lighter, and inside this lighter was a length of pharaoh syrium um like a surface of pharao syrium inside what would be the barrel of this pistol, and then also inside of it was a spring loaded file of harder material, and so you could pull back on this and it would have the spring compress and a little catch would be put in place to hold the spring there, and the file would be in its

h back position. You'd pull a trigger that would release the spring, and the spring would thus expand and would push the file against the pharaoh serrium inside the barrel of this pistol lighter, and sparks would fly out the end. As a result. The pistol lighter didn't create a sustained flame like a modern lighter. It was more of a spark stick type of thing. So the idea was you would aim this at, say the tinder for a camp fire,

or maybe a motor engine. At the time, there were cars that and and motors that required you to have uh an actual external ignition source to to make them work. Scary times, but if all went well, when you pull the trigger, the sparks from the pistol lighter would ignite

whatever it was you were aiming. At and you would have your camp fire started, or your motor would begin if it didn't work on the first past, and you could pull the file back to the starting position, compressing the spring, activating the catch, and you'd be ready for a second go of it. To create a sustained flame, a lighter would need an additional component, one of the three components that make up the fire triangle, and that would be fuel. I'll explain more in just a moment,

but first let's take a quick break. All right, we're back now. There are three main components that I want to focus on with the early lighters that could create a sustained flame. One is the piece of faro syrium, which, as I just mentioned, frequently gets referred to as the flint, even though flint and pharao sirium are very different things, and technically it's again not flint. In flint and steel that gives off the sparks when you're striking them together,

it's really the steel, not the flint. If you slam two pieces of flint together, you can sometimes get sparks because sometimes you have trace other elements in there that will create them. But the second component is the striker, which in many lighters is a wheel that has a ribbed outer edge and that is pressed against the pharao serium, or rather I should say the pharaoh cerium is pressed

against the wheel. And so typically you would put like your thumb on the wheel, for example, and and you would spin it the wheel pretty quickly by bringing your thumb down, and that would end up striking against the

pharao serrium and then you get a spark. The third component is a wick, as in a wick like like what you would find in a candle, and the purpose of the wick is to transfer small amounts of some sort of fuel such as uh nuff the from a fuel container section of the lighter to the area where the wheel and the pharaoh cerium are generating sparks. And clearly you want that to be a separate area from

the main source of fuel. Otherwise you're being igniting all the fuel in one go, and that would be wasteful and probably pretty darned dangerous. So the wick is sort of like a fuel highway. It's very similar to the way wick works with a candle. So let's talk about the physics involved in that for a second, because candles are something I never really thought about in the sense of how do those work? I mean, why would you even bother encasing a wick in wax? Why not just

burn the wick material? What the heck is going on here? All right? So, when you light a candle, you light the end of the exposed wick, and that part is easy to understand, right. It starts to burn, So the wick itself is starting to burn, and the heat from that burning wick melts wax at that end of the candle. At the top of the candle, the wick starts to absorb that liquid wax, so it wicks away the wax

into the wick itself. The lick it wax. If you were to try and light it on fire, it would only burn if you were using really high temperatures, far hotter than what a burning wick would be able to create. The liquid wax in the wick continues to heat up and it starts to vaporize. And while liquid wax only burns its super high temperatures, wax vapor is different. It's

flammable at the right temperature of of a candle. So the vaporizing wax is what you're actually seeing burn when a candle is burning, and the vaporizing wax also has the effect of cooling the wick underneath. As it vaporizes, it's carrying heat away, so the wick doesn't just burn away. That's why the wick can remain serviceable even as the candle continues to burn. It doesn't just burn up and become useless. So the wick remains a conduit for the

liquid wax. So if you just set fire to a wick, if it didn't have any candle around it, it would just burn up pretty quickly and then you'd be in the dark again. But a candle isn't burning up the wick as its primary fuel. It's burning up the wax, right, So a lighter wick serves the same purpose as a candle wick, which is again to convey fuel through absorption or wicking from the fuel container to the combustion area. The fuel for early lighters was, as I said, neftha

or nf thea uh. That's a term that originates from the Middle East, particularly around Azerbaijan and Iran, and it was used to describe a particularly volatile type of petroleum found in those regions, But then it would get applied to all sorts of different stuff after that, Like it was described as early as the first century by smarty pants eggheads like Pliny the Elder, but later folks would use that term to refer to all sorts of different stuff,

and it confused the matter, like alchemists and scholars in the Middle Ages would use it to describe pretty much any liquid with a low boiling point. For our purposes, we're talking about a hydrocarbon fuel. In nineteen twelve, the Ronson Company introduced the Wonder light, and unlike the pistol light, this lighter actually contained fuel and used a wick so that the sparks would ignite the fuel that was in the wig and create a sort of permanent match. That's

what they called it. Now, it was much easier to light stuff like lamps and candles that way. You weren't just shooting sparks. You had a sustained flame and you could use that to light other stuff. And there may well have been other lighters in a similar vein of this type uh that might have even been invented before

the wonder Light. But as it turns out, this is one of those topics where it's really hard to find a definitive history on the subject, and it's also difficult to trace back who created the very first version of whatever particular incarnation you're looking at. But in ninety six Ronson introduced a super cool lighter, a pocket lighter called the Banjo. This lighter had a button essentially a lever.

So imagine a little lighter where you've got a lever and you push down on the lever, and when you do that, it has sort of a double action result. One is that this pushing down would also turn a striking wheel that would rub up against some pharaoh cyrium and thus create a spark. So pushing down on the lever you get a spark out of it. But the other effect was that it lifted a cap off of the wick for this lighter. So when the lever is in the up position, you know, unpressed, the cap is down.

Pushing down on the lever creates the spark and reveals the wick, and the same go so the spark can hit the wick that's got fuel on it, and then the wick can light. Letting go of the button, as long as you hold the button, the light is the light still remains, the flame is still lit. But leting go to the button means the cap comes down and it extinguishes the fire because it cuts off the supply of oxygen, which is again one of the three things

we need in order to sustain a fire. You need the fuel, you need the heat, and you need an oxidizer. So you remove the oxidizer, the flame goes out. This made the Banjo the first automatic pocket lighter in the world. In the company would release a tabletop version of the banjo, so this was one that you would not carry around with you in your pocket. Uh. It would be a piece on a desk or a table that you would

use to light various things, typically cigarettes. I don't like talking about that because I don't like cigarettes, but that was the typical application of the time. As for fuel, well, I found a manual on how to care and refuel a Banjo lighter, and boy howdy did it raise my eyebrows because according to the manual, you could use quote high grade gasoline benzene or energen as fuel. Gasoline. That

lighter must have smelled terrible, so to refuel. Uh. It had two screw caps on this lighter, a big one and a small one, so you would want to unscrew the larger of the two screw caps and that would open up a access to the fuel chamber, and presumably you would then use a funnel and you would very carefully refuel the lighter or else risks spilling something like gasoline all over it and turning it into a very

dangerous one use item. The other screw cap, the smaller one, was for the chamber that held the piece of pharaoh syrium in place, so that the strike wheel would maintain contact with the pharaoh cyrium. And so imagine that you've got this little piece of this material that when it's struck, it gives us sparks, and it's being held against this wheel through the use of a spring that's slightly compressed. Uh So the screw cap opened up the chamber where

the spring was. So if your Pharao syrium ran out, you know, you're spinning the wheel and no sparks are coming out, probably means that there's no more far as syrium, or that it's been worn down so far that's no longer making contact with the wheel. You would unscrew the screw cap, you take the spring out, you would take out whatever little remnants of the Pharao serrium you had in there. You put a new piece into that chamber.

The new piece of Pharao syrium. You would put the spring back into the chamber and you would have to compress it down a little bit as you screwed the screw cap back in place, and it would again hold the new piece of Farris serrium against that striking wheel, so that you would have the sparking material right there ready to go for the next time you need to use the lighter. So you can actually use these things

indefinitely as long as the other components held out. The banjo sold for five dollars according to most sources I came across. Now, you know me, I had to find out how much would be if we were to purchase it today, right, because this was five dollars back in nineteen twenty six. So according to inflation calculators, five dollars back in nineteen twenty six would be about the same amount as seventy two dollars today if we we factor in inflation, So this would be a lighter that would

cost seventy two bucks. That's a pretty expensive lighter. But I guess if you're thinking that this could potentially replace the need for matches for like ever, maybe that could be a deal. If you're going through matches like crazy. These days, the original Ronson banjo lighters, if you can find them in good condition, can sell for a couple of hundred to several hundred dollars. They are sought after

by collectors uh. Since nineteen twenty eight or so, the only Ronson banjo lighters that have been made have been replicas out of Japan, so those obviously are not as valuable. It's only the ones between nineteen six and nineteen twenty eight that were originally made by Ronson that will fetch those higher prices. Lighters like the banjo have lids so

that the fuel doesn't just gradually evaporate away. If you kept that wick exposed to air, then fuel would start to evaporate over time, and you would continue to see it wick away from the fuel chamber and then and evaporate into the atmosphere. So you would end up running out a fuel much faster, So you want to have some sort of cap that keeps that from happening. Another brand would make this style of lighter incredibly famous, particularly

in America. That brand was Zippo, and Zippo's founder was a guy named George G. Blaisdell, and the story goes that in the early nineteen thirties, Blaisdell saw a guy at the Bradford Country Club where Blaisdell was hanging out uh in Pennsylvania struggled to light a cigarette from an Austrian built lighter. But the lighter was kind of unwieldy and it looked like it required two hands to operate.

It was made out of very thin metal, so that thin metal was actually soft enough where if you were gripping it too tightly, you could dent the lighter just through trying to use it. So Blaisdel saw the opportunity to improve upon that design and create a pocket lighter for the United States because he also saw that people really like cigarettes and they were going through matches like crazy, So if you could market something like that, you could

really make some money. So Blaisdell then goes and purchases the United States production and distribution rights for that Austrian lighter manufacturer, so now Blasdel has the rights to make and sell those style lighters in the US. However, it didn't go over so well. He gave them a chrome plating to kind of make them more attractive and a

little more durable. And he tried to sell them, but the lighters just didn't work very well, so he ultimately decided to scrap that approach entirely and to make his own lighters. So he rented out a small work space and he hired three people and they collectively tried to build a prototype for a new type of lighter. Blaizel sunk nearly three bucks Princely some in nineteen two to purchase used equipment machining equipment in order to design and

build this lighter. Together, they built a lighter that had a hinged top. If you open the top, it would expose the striking wheel and the wick to the to the air uh and the wick itself was housed inside a chimney like chamber to protect it from the wind, so you could use the lighter even if you were out in on a windy day. You can also open the lighter with one hand. You could flick it open.

All it took was the spin of the wheel to strike against the ferres sinium flint to cause a spark that would ignite the fuel on the wick in the chimney, and you get a nice bright flame. So if you practiced,

you can flip open the lighter with one hand. You can roll the wheel with your thumb, or if you're trying to be you know, like serious cool person, you flipped open and then you strike that wheel against your hip or your thigh or something, and you light it and then you do your cool you know, I meant to do that kind of face. I can't. I can't do that face because I if I meant to do it, it didn't happen, And if it happened, I'm just as

surprised as you are. Anyway, the flame would stay active with the Zippo lighters until either all the fuel was gone or you flipped close the lid in order to cut off oxygen to the flame, so you didn't have to do anything to keep it lit. You know, you you roll the striking wheel as soon as those sparks ignite the fuel on the wick, it was gonna stay lit until you either closed it or you ran out of fuel or something else happened, like maybe I don't know,

you dunked it in water or something. Blaze don't liked the sound of the word zipper. He felt that just had a really good zing to it, so he decided to take a kind of a variant on that. Then he named the lighter the Zippo. The original price for a windproof zippo was a dollar n two, which means

that today it would cost you about thirty six dollars. Now, if you wanted to go out and buy a brand new zippo today, prices start somewhere around twenty bucks and they go up from there, reaching more than a hundred dollars. For certain limited edition zippos, they're known not only for their iconic hinged top and the fact that they'll stay lit once you light them, but also for the types

of artwork that are featured on them. I think my own personal favorite is one that is the brass Necronomicon lighter. But then I'm also the guy who wrote how Cathulu works as well as how the Necronomicon works for how stuff works dot Com. By the way, I don't own a zip bow, but if I did, that's probably the

one I would go for. Now. If you were to open up a modern Zippo lighter with the traditional fuel, so for example, let's say that you need to replace the wick or you need to refuel the zippo, here's how that that would go you would open up the case, and the Zippo case is just that, it's a case. It's it's not the lighter itself. The lighter is inside the case, and you can actually pull the lighter out

lifting it out of the case. You turn the lighter upside down and on the underside you're gonna see a felt pad being held in place by a screw that's actually in an inside of a tube. That tube holds the pharaoh cirium uh or or flint screw. It's a piece that has the pharaoh cyrium at the very end of it. UH. If you're just refueling, you don't even need to touch that screw cap. You just move the felt pad out of the way like you bend it out the way, and then you would see some packing

material inside the lighter. It kind of looks like cotton wadding, but it's this very specific type of packing material. So you would then take some lighter fluid Zippo as its own specific brand it would prefer you to use, and you would saturate that packing material. You would squirt the

lighter fluid into the packing material itself. Once it was saturated, you would move the felt pad back into place to cover it up, and you would probably want to give the lighter a pass or two with a clean cloth to remove any excess fuel that might have spilled on the outside of it. Then you would replace the lighter

inside the case. You want to also give the case a pass or two with a clean cloth, then wait a little bit to allow the lighter fluid to heat up to room temperature, and then you could use the lighter again and it would be totally refueled. While the purpose of a wick is to hold fuel and the wick itself isn't really meant to burn up, over time, carbon deposits on the wick will make the wick less effective.

It won't absorb fuel, and then you'll get sparks when you're trying to use your lighter, but it won't actually light. So if you're using a Zippo like lighter, what you would do is you use some tweezers or a pair of needle nose players to grab hold of the end of the wick, and you would pull it out a little bit so that you get a clean section of wick inside the chimney of that lighter. Wicks are several inches long, so you can do this a couple of

times with each wick. And when you do that, you would then snip off the end of the burnt wick, the carbon infused wick UH to remove that part so that you get a nice clean section inside the chimney, and then you're good to go for a good while longer. Now, if you've done that a couple of times, there might not be enough wick left inside the lighter to do it again, and you need to replace the wick. The replacement process is similar to what you would do if

you were refueling, but as some extra steps. So you take the lighter out of the case, and rather than just moving the felt pad on the bottom aside, you would actually remove that screw at the end. It's called the flint screw again sparrow cerium, not flint, but whatever. You take out the felt pad because now it's no longer held there by the screw. UH. You would also take out the packing material, and the packing material typically

comes out in three or four wads of the stuff. UH. You would need to feed a new wick into the lighter. You could either do it from inside through the fuel chamber, or you could put it down through the chimney and you get that so enough of it's poking out the top so that you've got the the clean wick at the top of the chimney, and then you would need

to replace the packing material. You'd kind of have to do it in a way so that the packing material is all around the wick, so it has good exposure to that packing material, because remember it's the packing material the whole the fuel. The fuel then wicks into the wick, so you want to make sure it has really good um exposure to all of that. So you're packing the

material all around the wick until it's all replaced. Then you would put the felt pad back in place, and you would re insert the flint screw, and then you could put it back inside the case and it would be good to go. Now, the reason I went through all that process wasn't to talk about Zippo the brand

or anything. I'm not here to sell Zippo lighters, but rather to explain how lighters like the Zippo differ from other types of lighters, specifically those that use buttane, because not all lighters are created equal, and betane lighters work on slightly different principles from these style lighters, the wick based lighters. I'll explain more in just a moment. But

first let's take another quick break. Before the break, I mentioned butane lighters, and they use butane as the fuel, and the basic type still uses a piece of ferrocerium to generate sparks to ignite that fuel. So in some ways they're very similar to the other types of lighters I just mentioned, but there are some key differences between butane lighters and the NUFA or lighter fluid based ones I had just been talking about. At room temperature and

under normal atmospheric pressure, butane is a gas. It's naturally colorless and odorless. It's a hydrocarbon that's found in natural gas. It's also a byproduct during the process of refining petroleum to produce gasoline, and it is ignitable. But if you were to compress butane just a little bit, it liquefies. And it doesn't take too much pressure to convert mutane from a gas to liquid at room temperature about three

and a half atmospheres of pressure. So if you sell bututane in a container that can hold that pressure, you apply that much pressure to it, at least the gas condenses into a liquid. Now I wish I could tell you when someone thought to use butane as a fuel for lighters. But honestly, there doesn't seem to be any record of when someone thought of that idea first. There are a lot of very general, vague descriptions. Some sources go really vague. They say something like sometime in the

nineteen fifties people started using butchane for lighters. Others say it dates back a little earlier than that, with the invention of the butuane lighter coming somewhere in the nineteen thirties or nineteen forties, whenever they were first manufactured, and whomever it was that figured it out. They work on a pretty ingenious principle. So inside a butane lighter, the fuel chamber is sealed, so it acts as a low pressure container that keeps mutane in liquid form because it's

under that three and a half atmospheres of pressure. A tube from the fuel chamber to the chim me, you know, the part where the flame comes up, acts as a conduit for this fuel. And the tube has a valve and a nozzle, so there's a valve and then right after the valves nozzle, so when the lighter is not used, the valve is shut. So the bututane remains in liquid form,

there's nowhere for it to go. On a classic butane lighter, you've got the striking wheel, just like in the other lighters I've described, and rather than a wick, you have the end of a nozzle. And then there's this little button that you're supposed to hold down like you spin the wheel, and when your thumb comes down at the end of the spin, it presses this button and you're supposed to hold it down. That button is the release for the valve that closes off the tube from the

fuel chamber. When that valve opens, there's a lower pressure pathway for the but tane to move through, and we know that fluids will move from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure. So when this valve opens, the but tane moves up the tube and it hits the nozzle. The mutane then boils off into butane gas. The spark from the striking wheel uh and the flint or pharaoh's cirium ignites this escaping butane gas.

So as long as you hold down the button, you keep the valve open, and the buttane gas continues to come out and feeds the flame. It provides the fuel, so the fuel is constantly being replenished as long as you hold down the button. When you let go of the button, it closes the valve, thus cutting off the fuel to the flame, and the flame goes out. Buttane lighters don't require a wick, so there's no need to

replace wicks over time. There's no wick to replace. Many buttane lighters have a means of adjusting how wide that valve will open when you press down on a button. That affects how much butane gas can escape at any given amount of time, so it affects how big the flame will be. More fuel means bigger flame. Less fuel means smaller flame, so if you restrict the valve you get a very low flame. You open the valve as much as you can, the flame would be much larger.

Another advantage was that butane didn't give off an unpleasant odor the way earlier fuels were. They were smelly, but butuane didn't smell. It burned without making any sort of smell at all. Really, one disadvantage is that it's trickier to refuel a bututane lighter. Some beautane lighters are marketed as disposable, which really just means there's no way to refuel them at all once they're out, so you're meant

to throw them away and buy a new one. And when I say there's no way, people have figured out ways. But typically you're meant to just use it and then toss it, which is pretty wasteful. Perhaps the best known of these is the Big Lighter, which was first produced in the early nineteen seventies. The bit lighter was seen as an inexpensive alternative to the more fashionable lighters like Zippo. Other bututane lighters are meant to be reusable, and they

include a second valve. This is typically on the base of the lighter, the underside of the lighter, and this valve allows buttane gas to get injected into the fuel chamber, but prevents it from coming back out. Now, typically if you were refueling a butane lighter, you would hold the lighter upside down. You'd use something pointy to kind of open up the valve and bleed it of any old butane gas, and then you would get a butane refill

can which has a nozzle on the end. The nozzle goes into the valve of the lighter and you would just insert the bututane can into the lighter, and after just a couple of seconds, like five seconds, it would refill the fuel chamber on the butane lighter, and you'd want to wait a little bit for the fuel inside the lighter to reach room temperature and then you can start using it again. Over time, a new variant on the butuane lighter showed up. This is the piece of

electric lighter. I told you we kind of come back to it. So remember how I said. Quartz is an interesting material. If you apply mechanical stress to it, the quarts generates an internal electric charge. Well that's a manifestation of the piece of electric effect. So a piece of electric lighter uses this particular phenomenon in order to generate a spark. So there's no ferro serrium in a uh in a in this kind of lighter, or or flint

if you prefer, there's none of that instead. A piece of electric lighter typically has a button on the lighter. If you push down on that button, you would probably feel a click, kind of like a click pen. But what's happening is that the button is typically doing two things.

It's transferring the force you've just exerted on the button onto some piece of electric material, and maybe not directly, it might pull back and then release a spring loaded hammer which then strikes this piece of electric material that makes the material generate an electric charge, and that creates a difference of voltage between two little electrodes and causes

a small spark to fly between them. And at the same time, pushing down on the button also releases a valve that opens up the pathway to the fuel chamber, so beutane gas escapes at that same moment, so the beautane gas starts to come out of the chamber through a nozzle at the same time as a spark is flying across the nozzle and that ignites the escaping gas

and you get a flame. So you see this in a lot of different types of lighters, including like pocket lighters, but also the utility lighters that I think about, like the ones that have the very long stems and use them to light candles or fireplaces, that kind of thing. Uh, they typically have the piezo electric approach as opposed to a faroh cirium kind of lighting system. So you can find lighters like this that actually fit into lighter cases,

like the ones made famous by Zippo. So if you preferred that mechanism to the faro syrium traditional type of lighter, you could swap them out, and you can take out one lighter and you put another one in the same case. And a neat thing about this particular type of lighter is that although it uses an electric spark to ignite a flame, there's no need for a battery or anything like that. There's no source of electricity apart from the

piece of electric material. So as long as that material is inside the lighter, and as long as the mechanism that exerts mechanical stress onto the material is still working, you should still be able to generate sparks. One other type of lighter I should mention before I close out this episode works on yet another principle, and this would be the old fashioned car cigarette lighters. And you don't typically see these in cars anymore, at least not as a standard option, but it used to be a really

common feature. So they look like little knobs that are typically somewhere in the dashboard and you would push it in and it would remain pushed in for a short while before it would hop back out, kind of like

a toaster. You would then pull the knob out of the dashboard and the other end from the handle would be glowing red hot, and you would apply that into whatever it was he wanted to light, which more often than not was a cigarette, and the heat was greater than the ignition temperature of the material and it starts to burn. Now, I have a distinct memory of being a kid and my dad patiently explaining to me that the cigarette lighter on the dashboard of our old Dodge

Dart would in fact get super super hot. He was trying to teach me to be careful and not to play with it, right, because this was in the nineteen seventies when such things were common, And I remember I was a particularly dumb kid, No big surprise there. You guys all know who I am. And I immediately didn't believe him. So I touched it and I burnt myself because I was dumb. But I learned a valuable lesson, one that my dad was telling the truth, and to

that the facts. Car cigarette lighters get really really hot. But how do they get hot. Well, in the end of the car cigarette lighter, the business end, the end that lights stuff. There's a coil of wire, and it's typically made from something like nichrome, which is nickel chrome, and it's a generic term for a group of alloys that are made up of surprise, surprise, nickel and chrome and sometimes other stuff like iron. This material has a

pretty high resistivity. That means it's resistant to electrical current flowing through that material and quick refresh. You can think of all materials everywhere as being on a spectrum of conductivity. At one end extreme end of that spectrum, you have stuff that allows electricity to pass without any resistance at all. The electrons just flow through it, there's no problem there.

These would be super conductors, and typically we don't see superconductors unless we have some very special circumstances involved, such is cooling stuff down to near absolute zero. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have material that pretty much prevents any electrical current from passing through that material at all. It just stops. These would be insulators. Nichrome

resists the flow of electricity. It allows it to move through, but it resists the flow, and in the process the metal heats up as some of that energy from the electricity gets converted over into heat. So if you had a coil of this stuff, and you passed an electric current through it, the stuff heats up. And that's the basic principle behind inventions like the electric stove and electric space heaters. They use wires or uh components like this

with high resistivity to convert electrical current into heat. Now, well, when it's not in use, the car cigarette lighter isn't in contact with the electrodes that would otherwise push electric current through the lighter. But when you pressed the lighter in, it would engage with those electrodes and the current would

come from the car's overall electrical circuit. Inside the lighter is a spring, so it compresses as you push it in, and there's a little retaining clip that would engage when it was pushed all the way in and would hold the cigarette lighter in that compressed state, so it's in contact with those electrodes. But the clip, the retaining clip

was made from a bimetallic material. Now, as the name implies, bimetallic stuff is made up of two metals, and in this case, it's a strip that's made up of two different materials that expand at different rates when they get hot. So you press the lighter in the current goes through the nichrome wire, the wire heats up and the biometallic restraining clips starts to get hot until one side of the clip begins to expand faster than the other and

it starts to curl away. Eventually that bends the clip enough so that the spring is released and the cigarette lighter pops back out from the dashboard. It disc engages from the electrodes and you're able to pull it out

the dashboard and that end is super hot. These days, you typically seen car manufacturers offer this as an electrical outlet rather than a cigarette lighter, and you could plug something again, like a converter so that you can plug in your your cell phone chargers, that kind of stuff. But occasionally you can find car manufacturers that offer it as an option or you can get as an aftermarket

thing for your vehicle. But really we've seen a massive decline in car cigarette lighters over the years, as we've also seen a decline in cigarette smoking in general, which I considered to be a good thing. So there you have it. That's how lighters work, and I think it's a good idea to have a few lighters just in

case of emergencies. Such as loss of power. A good piezo electric lighter, particularly one of those utility lighters I was talking about that half a long stem that could be really handy if you need to light stuff like candles or lamps in the case of a power power failure. It's also good to know how to use pharaoh sirium

like pharaoh sirium sticks or fire starter sticks. I think it's a must have component if you ever plan on doing stuff like camping, or you want to have like a survivalist gear package, you gotta have fire starter sticks. It's a reliable way to generate the sparks you need to start campfires. You don't have to worry about water ruining your matches, or you don't have to carry combustible fuel, which in itself could be a danger. The good old fire sticks will really serve you well in those cases.

But that wraps up this episode. If you guys have suggestions for future topics for tech stuff, let me know. You can get in touch with me on social media Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is text stuff h s. W LL look forward to hearing from you, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen to your favorite shows.