After drying, the match sticks are shaken in sieves that sift out splinters and broken pieces. The good match sticks fall down into little places that are partitioned off, and lie side by side, as straight as in a box. Then a machine that seems almost to have brains in its little steel fingers, picks up a bundle of sticks, fastens them like pegs in little holes, each one separated from every other one, and gently lowers fifty or a hundred at a time, into melted paraffine wax, then into phosphorus mixed with other chemicals.
As soon as a dripping frame full of matches is lifted from the phosphorus vat, it passes along a belt into a blast of cold air. This dries the heads quickly. A little farther on the dipping frame lets go of the matches. They fall, heads all one way, into another machine that puts them in neat rows into boxes.
The pasteboard or strawboard boxes are made in the same factories. An endless roll of brown strawboard is fed in a broad sheet to a machine that cuts it into strips wide enough to make the four sides of a sliding box cover, or the bottom and sides of the box.
Through one machine after another these strips go. The box cover is given four folds and pasted into a square-sided endless tube. The tube goes through a special printing press that prints the top and bottom and one side, and pastes a strip of sandpaper on the fourth side. Then the printed tube is cut up into box—length. Five hundred to a thousand boxes can be made every minute in a big match factory. A thousand boxes must be made every minute for ten hours every day to supply enough boxes for 100,000,000 matches. About one hundred and sixty matches are put in the ordinary box, and one dozen boxes in a package. Such a package is often sold for as little as eighteen or twenty cents. That is about a penny a hundred. Very old people can remember when matches were sold by the dozen, and people rolled paper lamp-lighters to save matches.
A match lighted in the dark is a sort of little star. The phosphorus on the head that flashes so instantly into flame, was named for a star, too. The Greek people called the morning star Phosphorus, or light—bearer. When a substance was found in the earth that, united with the oxygen of the air, glowed or even burst into flame readily, it was named for the star. Now, of course, it would never do for Nature to leave so dangerous a thing lying about in lumps by itself. Phosphorus is always mixed with other things. For example, it is mixed with lime in your bones, and with tissue in the nerves and the brain. In match heads we want something that
