Flint and steel

“ Steel-mills are small machines, which give light by turning a cylinder of steel against a piece of flint. Sir James Lowther had observed early in the last century, that the fire-damp in its usual form was not inflammable by sparks from flint and steel ”

“ In the olden times some people had flint lock pistols without barrels, which were used only to ignite punk for the purpose of fire-building. But when one starts a fire by means of flint and steel one's hands must act the part of the hammer, the back of one's knife may be the steel, then a piece of flint or a gritty rock and a piece of punk will produce the spark necessary to generate the flames. ”

“ These flints are wrought into shape in precisely the same manner as gun-flints, and it seems possible that the trade of chipping flint into forms adapted to be used with steel for striking a light may be of considerable antiquity, and that the manufacture of gun-flints ought consequently to be regarded as only a modification and extension of a pre-existing art, closely allied with the facing and squaring of flints for architectural purposes, which reached great perfection at an early period. ”

“ I take the steel and the flint, and striking them together I get sparks. I want you to ask yourselves, Where do the sparks come from? Each spark is due to a minute piece of iron being knocked off the steel by the blow of flint with steel. Note the precise character of the spark. Let me sprinkle some iron filings into this large gas flame. You will notice that the sparks of burning iron filings are very similar in appearance to the spark I produce by the collision of my flint and steel. ”

“ The spark made by a flint and steel, consists of a thin shaving of steel, scraped off by the flint and heated by the arrested motion. When well struck, the spark is white-hot and at that temperature it burns with bright scintillations in the air, just as iron that is merely red-hot burns in pure oxygen. ”

“ The only fire producer that it is worth while supplementing the sulphur match with is the even older-fashioned flint and steel, which to a man who smokes is a convenience in a wind. All the modern alcohol and gasoline pocket devices are extinguished by the lightest puff of wind, but the tinder, once ignited, burns the fiercer for the blast. With dry, shredded birch-bark I have made a fire upon occasion from the flint and steel. One resource may here be mentioned, since we are on the subject, which is always carried in the hind-sack of my sled against difficulty in fire making. ”

“ Flints.--If we may rely on a well-known passage in Virgil, concerning Æneas and his comrades, fire was sometimes made in ancient days by striking together two flints, but I confess myself wholly unable to light tinder with flints alone, and I am equally at a loss to understand what were the "dry leaves" that they are said in the same passage to have used for tinder. Neither can I obtain fire except with a flint and steel, or, at least, hardened iron; a flint and ordinary iron will not give an available spark. ”

“ The stone called flint was found to be the best for one of the two substances, and steel is usually preferred for the other. When steel and flint strike each other, if a spark falls upon some vegetable matter a fire is soon kindled. ”

“ In Scandinavian and Scottish folk-lore, there is a marked affinity between iron and flint. The elf-bolt or flint arrowhead was formerly in great repute as a charm against divers evil influences, whether carried around as an amulet, used as a magical purifier of drinking-water for cattle, or to avert fairy spite. It seems possible that iron and steel in superseding flint, which was so useful a material in the rude arts of primitive peoples, inherited its ancient magical qualities. ”

“ During the early part of his stay in Vairkingi he had always gone to some one of the constantly burning lamps which were the primitive fire source of the furry Vairkings. Later he had found several pieces of flint, when investigating a small chalk deposit as a possible alternative for limestone in his smelting operations. After the manufacture of steel had begun he had practiced striking a light in this more modern method, and thereafter had always carried flint and steel and tinder with him in one of the pouch pockets of his leather tunic. ”

“ Flint gravels are widely employed for dressing walks and roads, and for rough-cast work in architecture. For road-mending flint, though very hard, is not regarded with favour, as it is brittle and pulverizes readily; binds badly, yielding a surface which breaks up with heavy traffic and in bad weather; and its fine sharp-edged chips do much damage to tires of motors and cycles. Seasoned flints from the land, having been long exposed to the atmosphere, are preferred to flints freshly dug from the chalk pits. Formerly flint and steel were everywhere employed for striking a light ”

“ Everyone will, I think, readily concede that, putting for the moment pyrites out of the question, the inhabitants of this country must have been acquainted with the method of producing fire by means of flint and steel or iron, at all events so long ago as when their intercourse with the Romans commenced, if not at an even earlier period. ”

“ In the good old pioneer days, when we all wore buckskin clothes and did not bother about the price of wool, when we wore coonskin caps and cared little for the price of felt hats, everybody, from Miles Standish and George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, used flint and steel. Fig. 27 shows ten different forms of steel used by our grandsires and granddames. ”

“ The improvement of causing the steel to cover the priming, and to fly open by the striking of the cock against it, was soon made; and at the beginning of the eighteenth century the flint-lock was in general use in the English army, and differed but little from that with which our troops were armed up to 1840: it was a little heavier, and a little clumsier, perhaps, but that was all the difference, considered only as a fire-arm. ”

“ Canon Greenwell found a steel, in form much like those of modern date, in a Saxon grave at Uncleby in the East Riding of Yorkshire. As has been pointed out by Mr. Akerman, Scheffer [103] informs us that so late as the seventeenth century, the Lapps were buried with their axe, bow, and arrows, and a flint and steel, to be used both in a life to come and in finding their way to the scene of their future existence.
Flakes and rudely chipped pieces of flint are also of very common occurrence on the sites of Roman occupation, as, for instance, at Hardham, [104] Sussex, where Prof. ”

“ In Italy they are by no means uncommon, sometimes of great length. One, 7 inches long, is figured by Nicolucci. [124]
Among the Swiss Lake-dwellers considerable use was made of flint flakes, not only as the material for arrow-heads, but for cutting tools. So great was the abundance of flint left on the site of some of their habitations, as at Nussdorf, [125] that in after ages the spot was resorted to for generations, in order to procure flints for use with steel. It was by their being thus known as flint-producing spots that some of the Lake-dwellings were discovered. ”

“ Cartridges! The word strikes out a thought, as flint brings sparks from steel. The very thing needed to carry on the fight. A supply here; a store in the barrels in the ditch; our men short of ammunition, retreating, beaten! Now to afford them help.
“Quick, Müller!” cried Johanna. “Fill my apron with cartridges. I’ve plenty more in front. Our men are coming that way. Oh! victory shall be ours yet!”
Fired by her enthusiasm, the old man tremulously filled Johanna’s apron with the precious load. ”

“ With the above-mentioned articles were numerous fragments of calcined flint, and amongst the soil of the barrow two rude instruments of flint.
At eastern (p. 73) , in one part of the mound, an instrument was found, with a fine spear-head of flint, and a small arrow-head of the same. In other parts, but in apparently undisturbed earth, a circular instrument, and various chippings of flint, and the handle of a knife of stag's horn, riveted in the usual way on to the steel. ”

“ Heat can also be produced by the impact of imperfectly elastic bodies as well as by friction. This is the case, for instance, when we produce fire by striking flint against steel, or when an iron bar is worked for some time by powerful blows of the hammer. ”

“ These splinters are afterwards shaped, by placing them upon a sharp iron instrument, and then giving them repeatedly small blows with a mallet. During the whole operation the workman holds the stone in his hand, or merely supports it on his knee: and the operation is so simple, that a good workman has no difficulty in making 1500 flints in a day. The manufacture of gun-flints is chiefly confined to England, and two or three departments in France. In Prussia an attempt was once made to substitute a kind of earthenware or porcelain for flint ”

“ We are apt to think of the old flint and stone-workers as merely picking up the chance materials suited to their simple craft. But the use of flint in the manufacture of sling-stones, arrow-heads, and other missile weapons, as well as of all ordinary household implements, and those of war and the chase, involved a constant demand for fresh materials, frequently procurable only from distant localities. It is what might be assumed, therefore, apart from any direct evidence, that a regular system of quarrying for flint nodules best fitted for the tool-makers’ art was pursued ”

“ And so it was that a lone and dreadful man, stalking day and night through the New Damascus iron mill like a tormented apparition, goading his men to the point of frenzy, using them up and casting them off, yet holding them to it by force of contempt for fibre that snapped,—that one man in a spirit of madness frustrated the steel age and made it to limp on iron rails long after the true steel to shoe it with had been available. ”

“ If the axe thickened rapidly from the edge and was somewhat like a wedge, it was a good remedy against the brittleness of the flint, its great defect; and he put the more strength into the blow. The extreme hardness of flint made polishing very difficult. Most utensils of daily use were not polished at all. Many of the beautiful daggers, genuine works of art, were finished by a uniform, fine flaking down to the close of the period. Flint implements were not polished in Italy, Greece, Spain, and large parts of eastern Europe;97 they increase in abundance in Scandinavia and England. ”

“ Gunpowder, lead, and percussion caps, such as they are, can, when your own store is expended, destroyed, or lost, be readily procured even in very out of the way corners of the earth; whilst the cartridges calculated for breech-loaders could be only procured in towns or trading posts of importance, where the cost would, as a matter of necessity, be great, and their efficiency questionable. Strong flint muskets (old army regulation) will be found best calculated for the use of native servants. A bit of agate, common quartz, or iron pyrites, answers the purpose of a flint, should one be lost. ”

“ Man has reached the stage of culture when he could socket a stone into a wooden handle, and fix a flaked flint as a handled dagger or knife. The workmanship is superior to that shown in any of the stone utensils made by savage tribes of historic times. The manner of making flint implements appears to have been in all ages much the same. Flint from its mode of fracture is the only kind of stone which can be chipped or flaked into almost any shape, and thus forms the principal material of these earliest weapons. ”

“ The diversity of fracture in such materials must have taxed the skill of the expert workman, familiar chiefly with the regular cleavage of the obsidian, chert, or flint. But it is now known that the more delicate operations in the finishing of the flint implements were done by means of pressure with a horn or bone arrow-flaker; and not by a succession of blows with a chisel or hammer. The process has been repeatedly described [Pg 44] by eye-witnesses. Dr. Evans quotes more than one account of methods pursued among the Eskimo, the native Mexicans, and the Shasta Indians of California. ”

“ Men were tormenting the elements, parting iron from his natural affinities, giving him in new marriage without love or consent, audaciously creating what God had forgotten—steel! steel! steel! There in that smutted deep were tools walking about like fabled monsters, obedient and docile, handling flaming ingots of metal with the ponderous ease and precision of elephants moving logs. There amid clangor and confusion shrieking little bipeds were raising gigantic ominous shapes from shapelessness. ”

“ The flints are made red-hot, and in that state thrown into cold water, which makes them so brittle that they can be easily broken up by the “stampers,” which are perpendicular pieces of iron made to rise and fall with great force; the flints are then ground in a mill to a powder, which is treated in the same way that the clay was. When these two earths are mixed in proper proportions, and beaten together while moist, they form a substance of the consistence of putty, a lump of which is thrown into the centre of a piece of board turned by means of a wheel and treadle ”

“ The ancient workman had his knife, saw, adze, chisel, drill, and scraper,—or plane, as we may term it,—all made of flint. The worn and triturated edges of many of those flint-tools show abundant evidence of their use in fashioning some hard substance. ”

“ Strongarm sat up and looked hard at Flint. Then Flint had to strike the stones together again, to let Strongarm see the fire come out.
"Beaver Tail, an old ax maker, showed me how to do it," said Flint. "He has worked in stone all his life. For a long time he has known that fire lives in stone. He has seen sparks fly as he chipped his axes. One day in making a spear head, he struck a quartz pebble with his flint hammer stone. ”