Tinderbox

“ Gaping visitors are usually shown, by partial demonstration, with flint-and-steel, how our long-suffering and patient ancestors struck a light, but the process is not demonstrated in its entirety. To strike a spark off a flint with a piece of steel is an easy matter, but if the whole process of directing the sparks upon the tinder in the tinder-box and then blowing the tinder into a flame were gone through, visitors would be very much more astonished at the inconveniences endured by our forbears before the invention of matches. ”

“ Soon there was an improvement on this tinder-box, by which sparks were obtained by spinning a steel wheel with a piece of cord, somewhat like spinning a humming [50] top, and making the wheel strike a flint fixed in the side of a little trough full of tinder. This was an infinite advance in convenience on tinder-box No. 1. This box was called in the South a mill; one is here shown. Then some person invented strips of wood dipped in sulphur and called "spunks." These readily caught fire, and retained it, and were handy to carry light to a candle or pile of chips. ”

“ Did you choose me wisely for these experiments, Jane?
It takes a woman of nerve to go to housekeeping in a tinder-box, when she isn't sure she even knows what flint is when she sees it, and might strike out a spark without intending it at all. ”

“ I want a spark to fire my tinder. A spark is enough. Do you remember the motto of the Royal Humane Society? Some of my young friends can no doubt translate it, "Lateat scintilla forsan"—perchance a spark may lie hid. If a person rescued from drowning has but a spark of life remaining, try and get the spark to burst into activity. That is what the motto of that excellent society means. How am I to get this spark from the flint and steel to set fire to my tinder? ”

“ At one moment, during the searches, it is true, hopes were excited on the perception of a faint brimstone odour issuing from an antiquated iron box found among some rubbish; but instead of any vellum or parchment, there were only the unused remains of some bundles of veteran matches, with their tinder-box accomplice, which had been thrown aside and forgotten, ever since the time when the functions of those old hardened incendiaries, flint and steel, were extinguished by the lucifers. All further search, it is feared, will be in vain ”

“ Many persons remember the tinder-box that was taken from its warm nook beside the fire-place whenever a light was wanted; the matches tipped with sulphur used to start a blaze from the glowing tinder are also familiar to the older generation. ”

“ The household tinder-boxes of thirty years ago, before lucifers were invented, were for use in this way. Fig. 3 shows how sparks may be struck into a small tinder-box. It is the method most commonly adopted by travellers: for instance, it is universally used in South Africa and in North America. A hollow cylinder of wood or metal, about three inches long, and corked up at one end, is all that is essential. If it be barrel-shaped the flint lies against its sides, at the most convenient angle for striking sparks into the box, as is shown by the bottom drawing of fig. ”

“ Being now furnished with well-made arms, I soon brought down my birds, and might have fared sumptuously, could I have procured a fire. All my waking hours were, therefore, spent in bewailing this want, when one morning, as I was digging with my stick to come at a land tortoise that had crept into a hole, I raked out a piece of flint, and the tinder-box occurring to my mind, I struck it on the back of my knife, and instantly produced sparks, which actually made me leap for joy. My delight, however, was but of short duration. How were the sparks to be collected? I had no tinder—no matches. ”

“ The path to it is sacred to me. No one will disturb you; you are secure as a bird in its nest. There is a bed in a corner; rushlight and holder and tinder-box on a table by. Light, and take possession. I must go and reassure Portlock.”
I heard him move softly over the floor; a trap opened somewhere, letting in a momentary weak film of light, and he was gone.
For a time I stood motionless, hearing the murmur of voices somewhere below; then, suddenly panic-struck, groped for the table and tinder, and shakily struck fire. ”

“ We were engaged in our last lecture in considering the various methods that have been adopted from early times for obtaining fire, and we left off at the invention of the lucifer match. I ventured to hint at the conclusion of my last lecture, that the tinder-box had something to say to the lucifer match, by way of suggestion, that just as the lucifer match had ousted it, so it was not impossible that something some day might oust the lucifer match. Electricians have unlimited confidence (I can assure you) in the unlimited applications of electricity:—they believe in their science. ”

“ You know, says she, that a small Spark will set Fire to Tinder, and that Tinder [111] properly placed will fire a House; an angry Word is with you as that Spark, for you are both as touchy as Tinder, and very often make your own House too hot to hold you. To prevent this, therefore, and to live happily for the future, you must solemnly agree, that if one speaks an angry Word, the other will not answer, 'till he or she has distinctly called over all the Letters in the Alphabet, and the other not reply, 'till he has told twenty ”

“ By dawn bands of the restless had begun to drift about from village to village, eager to discuss the position, and by degrees gaining a certain coherence of intention. Even those who hung back from the idea of active interference joining the crowd out of curiosity and so increasing the quantity of human tinder ready for ignition by the smallest spark. Before noon Khân Mahomed Lateef Khân, looking out from his ruined tower, saw a cloud of dust beyond his bare brown fields and ere long was in parley with a recruiting band. ”

“ At first Parks, as most, had come to think that the man was innately a libertine, awaiting but the right one to strike the hidden flint and set the tinder aglow—the tinder that would burn, and consume, and destroy. He had known of men like that—of men who went the even pathway of their lives until there crossed it another who tore them from it; and that one they followed, leaving soul and morals and decency and cleanliness forever behind them. This, at first, he had thought to be John Schuyler. For the woman was beautiful—beautiful as an animal is beautiful.... ”

“ There's Ivus Niles!"
And at that moment Ivus Niles was marching into the village from the Jo Quacca hills, torch for the tinder that had been prepared. It is said that a cow kicked over a lantern that started the conflagration of its generation. In times when political tinder is dry there have been great men who have underestimated reform torches.
It was a bland June morning. The Hon. Thelismer Thornton was bland, too, in agreement with the weather. A good politician always agrees with what cannot be helped. ”

“ Although messages from women tend to draw more replies on the Net than those from males, the end results can dismay; one man reportedly welcomed a woman to a discussion group, launched a political dialogue, then shifted in a nanosecond to a request for a swap of nude pictures. Women tell of weirdoes stalking them via e-mail, flooding their Net accounts with unwanted messages. ”

“ And among educational institutions the percentage of females was as high as 41 percent. Borders between the Internet and commercial services are breaking down Berlin Wall fashion, so you can expect the Internet to show an increasing amount of female influence.
The old stereotype, however, that the Net is male dominated, would seem to hold up for the moment. Even the virtual dating services tend to have far, far more men than women despite, in some cases, better terms for female customers. ”

“ We writes, “amid accusations of censorship, were there comparable numbers of postings from women and men.”
Given the obstacles that women often face on the Internet, then, it is amazing at times that any romances happen there. When they do, yet another danger arises—the risk of missed cues. A friendship online may cause either sex to ignore mismatched words and gestures that might put them on guard. One Los Angeles women met her boyfriend on a BBS and suffered a disaster that could just as well have happened by way of the Net. ”

“ Today Laura Goodin and Houston Dunleavy are married and living together in the Washington, D.C., area, with a baby on the way. They exchanged more than 1,500 messages during their courtship, not to mention countless sessions of typing together in Teletype fashion, just as Greg and Sue have done. It is not the same as talking the old-fashioned way but can save enough in phone bills to pay for an engagement ring or maybe a more powerful computer. “A long-distance relationship is hellish,” Laura says, “but the pain is eased somewhat by the Internet.” ”

“ There were at that time at least ten firms in New England and York State who manufactured tinware, for which they loaned carts and gave credit to lively chaps who had teams. The peddler would go on the road and trade the tinware for barter, old iron, copper, brass, lead, zinc and all kinds of paper stock, besides cow hides and sheep pelts or anything of which he knew the value, and ship it in to pay his account. It was a lucrative business for a clever boy, often clearing $100.00 per week besides his expenses. ”

“ Even electronic hookers (“We go all the way”) were on the Internet—in fact, operating under the name “Brandy’s Babes.” They plied their trade from Arizona, the same wild and quirky state from which Canter and Siegel enraged the Net. And yet, if you cast the usual moral questions aside, the Babes seemed to be exemplary citizens of cyberspace. Not just hypesters, they posted specifics like prices, bust, hip, and waist measurements, and preferences in men. “No beards,” a Babe warned customers. “Employed men only.” ”

“ You help us with this network—all we want from you is permission to stick up a box over your sign and patch it into your power, you won’t even know it’s there—and those customers won’t be antisocial, they’ll be socializing, over the network. ”

“ If you want to find a fellow Peace Corps alumnus, you can choose from among several newsgroups and lists. If you’re a Libertarian stalwart and insist that your girlfriend be nothing but—well, the search may take longer.
Some philosophies just don’t hold out as much appeal to women as do others. But that has not daunted a smart young Libertarian in California, Eric Klien, who started what may have been the Internet’s first matchmaking service, an operation later taken over by Electric Classifieds. ”

“ In other words, you could have the same conversation over IM as you do over SMTP. With the right tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take place inside of a chat. Or a web-session. Or anything else.
This is called "tunneling." You put the SMTP inside a chat "tunnel." You could then put the chat back into an SMTP tunnel if you wanted to be really weird, tunneling the tunnel in another tunnel.
In fact, every Internet protocol is susceptible to this process. It's cool, because it means that if you're on a network with only Web access, you can tunnel your mail over it. ”

“ If you go by one network veteran, fewer than one in twenty of the early Netfolks were female. By popular belief, maybe a tenth of the people on the Net are female, a far smaller percentage than on other services such as Prodigy and America Online. The truth, however, is a bit more complicated. John Quarterman and Smoot Carl-Mitchell of Texas Internet Consulting, which regularly tracks the demographics of the Net, reported in the May 1995 issue of their publication Matrix News that according to a survey in October 1994, 64 percent of Netfolks were male and 36 percent female. ”

“ The traditional ways that people meet now do not allow much access to each other’s minds, and that has not led to enduring relationships.” What’s the best place to find out about your potential spouse? By sitting silently through movies or boozing it up in noisy, smoky nightspots, or by sharing intimacies over the modem? “I find people are more open on e-mail,” she says. And I agree.
The Internet, to be sure, is hardly a romantic nirvana, and although this chapter will be positive about net romance for the most part, I’ll mix the praise with some lengthy warnings. ”

“ Slowly but surely, we begin to mediate almost all of our communication over networks. Why walk down the hallway to ask a coworker a question, when you can just send email? You don't need to interrupt them, and you can keep going on your own projects, and if you forget the answer, you can just open the message again and look at the response. There're all kinds of ways to interact with our friends over the network: we can play hallucinogenic games, chat, send pictures, code, music, funny articles, metric fuckloads of porn... ”

“ H. No qualified organization shall sell network bingo cards on the Internet or other online service or allow the play of network bingo on the Internet or other online service. However, the location where network bingo games are conducted shall be equipped with a video monitor, television, or video screen, or any other similar means of visually displaying a broadcast or signal, that relays live, real-time video of the numbers as they are called by a live caller. The Internet or other online service may be used to relay information about winning players. ”