by Clay Lane

A Match Made in Stockton

The modern match is ignited by friction, a simple idea but one which had not occurred to anyone until 1826, when a Stockton pharmacist dropped a stick.

1826

King George IV 1820-1830

Introduction

Until 1826, lighting a fire, a candle or a pipe was not an easy business. Matches as we know them were in their infancy, a toilsome affair requiring a man to juggle little bottles of noxious chemicals and perhaps a pair of pliers. But that year, a merry pharmacist from Stockton-on-Tees called John Walker (1781-1859) liberated us from all this, and quite by accident.

by Clay Lane

IN 1819, thirty-eight-year-old John Walker opened a pharmacy at 59, the High Street, in his hometown of Stockton-on-Tees. He had at one time studied surgery under Watson Alcock, physician to local landowner the Marquis of Londonderry, but after a brief spell in London he had retrained as a pharmacist in Durham and York.

He was little like the spare and haggard apothecary in Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The work of a pharmacist could be laborious but Walker was always ready with a joke, and his sunny smile was one of his most trusty remedies. He had an inquiring turn of mind, and like many of his fellow chemists made experiments with the combustible properties of various compounds, perhaps with an eye to the gun trade. One day in 1826, when working with a mixture of sulphide of antimony, chlorate of potash and gum, Walker accidentally dropped his mixing stick onto the hearth. The stick glanced aside and burst into flame, and at the same instant an idea kindled in Walker’s imagination.

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Précis

In 1826, John Walker, a former surgeon’s apprentice who now kept a chemist’s shop in Stockton-on-Tees, dropped his mixing stick while experimenting with a combustible paste. Like many others, he was sure chemicals could make tinderboxes a thing of the past, and when his stick struck the hearth and ignited, Walker saw the possibilities at once.

Jigsaws

Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.

Walker was apprenticed to a surgeon. He decided to become a pharmacist. He opened a chemist’s shop in 1819.

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