Then the acid was put into a tiny hollow glass bead on the tip of the chemical soaked match. To light that match the glass was broken with a pair of nippers. Many of your grandfathers can remember the first friction sulphur matches. They were lighted with dreadful fumes that made one sneeze, by drawing the heads between folded sandpaper. Now you will want to know about how our safety matches of today are made, in big factories and by steam machinery.
The most interesting and difficult thing about match making, the one that takes the most and the biggest machines, is the making of the little wooden sticks. Some match sticks are round, others square. The two kinds are made in quite different ways. The round ones are made by—well, did you ever see your mama make "riced" potatoes for dinner? She boils the peeled potatoes. Then she forces them through the little round holes of a fruit press or "ricer." They come through mashed into fluffy strings that fall into grains like rice. A block of very soft wood, like pine or poplar, is forced endways through a steel plate punched full of round, sharp-edged holes. In that way the block is pressed through into round match sticks. Of course any wood is a great deal harder than boiled potatoes, so it takes a powerful machine to force a perforated steel plate, buzz-zip through a block of wood two and a half or three inches thick.
To make the square match sticks, a round block of wood quite twelve or fifteen inches long is turned against a strong knife blade of the same length. The block is peeled away in a continuous ribbon of wood, just as thick as a match, until it is all peeled away, and no core is left. The ribbon is cut lengthways into five strips. Then the wood ribbons are fed to a machine that chops them into matches. One machine can chop off 10,000,000 match sticks in one day.
After chopping, the sticks are dried with hot air in a huge whirling oven. If your kitchen stove should turn on its side and begin to roll over and over, that would be something like the revolving drum in which both round and square match sticks are dried. The oven is made to whirl for the same reason that you shake your popper when popping corn. It is to make the sticks dry evenly. In tumbling about together, too, splinters and rough edges are knocked off. Big drums are used a good deal in factories. In creameries the churns are big, whirling drums. In iron foundries, iron castings are put into a "tumbling barrel" to knock the rough edges from each other.
