On October 24, 1836, Alonzo D. Phillips received the first American patent for a phosphorus friction match – strike anywhere.  Phillips was not the first to come up with matches.  They’d been around at least since 1827.  And like those early matches, Phillips’ matches used white phosphorus, which is far more interesting than matches.  For white phosphorus we need to go all the way back to 1669 and a German alchemist named Hennig Brand. 

An alchemist is a person who studies alchemy, as if that tells you anything.  Alchemy is an ancient blend of science, mysticism, philosophy, and hucksterism.  Alchemists were searching for the process that would turn cheap metal into gold, as well as the cure for everything, and an elixir that would give them eternal life.  If they conjured up the Philosopher’s Stone in the process, then they got all three.  Now there’s a trade your high school guidance counselor never told you about. 

What Brand did, back when being an alchemist was a career, was to take a whole lot of human urine and boil it down until it was just a pissy residue.  We’re talking thousands of gallons.  That’s a whole lot of piss jugs.  And mind you, this was before you could buy urine online.  Seriously.  You really can.  Brand, along with other alchemists, believed that human urine held the key to creating the Philosopher’s Stone because it was golden coloured, and it came from the human body.  All that aside, can you imagine how bad that would smell?  Like, the entire neighborhood?  Did it need to be stirred?  And would you ever use that pot for anything else?  So, yeah, he boiled it all down until there just wasn’t a whole lot left and then he mixed in sand and charcoal.  He didn’t create the Philosopher’s Stone, as if that needed to be stated.  What he did come up with was a white, waxy substance that had a greenish glow to it and would ignite on its own if left sitting out.  White phosphorus.

For the next 170 years or so nobody really knew what to do with white phosphorus.  First of all, it wasn’t easy to make, which pretty much goes without saying.  So there never was a whole lot of it.  Mostly it was used to impress people as part of magic tricks.  Some folks tried to make a night light out of it, but it wasn’t very bright... and it smelled.  Some doctors tried to use it as a medicine, which often ended up poisoning the patients.  But mostly they just stood around looking at it while scratching their heads.  You know, science. 

Come to find out, using real science, urine contains phosphates.  So do lots of things, including bonemeal.  It was around 1769 that a couple of Swedish chemists, Johan Gottlieb Gahn and Wilhelm Scheele were able to synthesize white phosphorus from bonemeal.  It still wasn’t that easy to make white phosphorus that way, but anything that didn’t involve human urine was a step in the right direction. 

And that’s about it for white phosphorus until 1831, when a French chemistry student named Charles Sauria put white phosphorus on a matchstick.  Mind you, there already were matches.  A British chemist named John Walker (no relation to the liquor) came up with the first practical chemical match in 1827.  Among other things, it used potassium chlorate.  Unlike white phosphorus, it wasn’t toxic or pyrophoric – it wouldn’t spontaneously combust, but it was a lot harder to light.  It came with its own sandpaper.  Sauria’s matches, what with the white phosphorus and all, would truly light anywhere.  Sometimes you didn’t even need to strike them.  And that made them a financial success.

In the 1840s folks started taking the phosphates from rocks, which was better than bonemeal but required a lot of heat, and a lot of labour, and that made it expensive.  But then in 1888 James Burgess Readman and Thomas Parker came up with carbothermal reduction, a process that used an electric arc furnace.  For the first time white phosphorus could be made cheaply and on large scale.  And that meant matches were now cheaper than ever.  Never mind how awful the electric arc furnace was for the environment, and never mind how nasty white phosphorus was for people working around it, especially those folks making the matches.

Match factories at the time hired mostly women – matchstick girls – to dip matchsticks in white phosphorus.  The toxic vapours caused what came to be known as “phossy jaw.”  Phosphorus necrosis.  The first symptoms were swollen gums and toothaches.  That was followed by chronic inflammation, a whole lot of painful abscesses, and the death (necrosis) of the jawbone, which often glowed in the dark in later stages.  At best it was horribly disfiguring.  At worst you died.  Using white phosphorus in matches was finally outlawed everywhere by international law in 1906.

White phosphorus, though, found a home with the military.  It’s still being used in such things as smoke grenades, tracer bullets, flares, and incendiary explosives.  In other words, it’s still just as nasty, only now no one is surprised when it kills people.

Going back to matches, there was this Austrian chemist, a guy named Anton von Schrötter, who in 1847 heated white phosphorus up to 572 degrees Fahrenheit, and it turned into red phosphorus, which is an allotrope of white phosphorus.  And, of course, an allotrope is a different physical form in which a chemical element can exist.  Basically it’s something with the same atoms arranged in a different way.  The biggest difference between the two phosphoruses (or phosphori, if you prefer) is that red phosphorus is a whole lot less nasty.  It won’t catch on fire by looking at it, and it won’t kill people working in the match factories.  And that gives us safety matches, which were first invented around 1850 by a Swedish guy named Gustav Erik Pasch.  Red phosphorus is still used in safety matches, only it’s not on the matchhead anymore.  It’s on the side of the box where you strike the matches. ​