Today, we steal fire from the gods. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
The recurrent theme in
stories of our origin is that we've stolen
knowledge from God, and we've usurped His power.
Adam ate the apple of knowledge and was thrown out
of Eden for it. Prometheus stole fire and was
severely punished for giving us the power to become
as gods. For Zoroastrians, fire was a gift of
truth, order, and righteousness. In that sense, the
possession of fire is the possession of knowledge.
So we wonder, how did Prometheus actually steal
fire? We've used fire for hundreds of thousands of
years. We find evidence deep in the ancient caves
of Peking Man. But using fire when it's available
is a world apart from creating it. Prometheus's
real theft was learning to create fire at will.
All early creation of fire involved doing
mechanical work to raise the temperature of
something to the combustion point. We created the
first fires by striking flint against iron pyrite
to make tiny, high-temperature chips break away.
Those heated chips are what we call sparks.
That was common in the late Paleolithic period. It
might go back 20,000 years. Steel, or at least
heat-treated iron, later replaced iron pyrite. But
we were still using the basic idea in 1827, when
friction matches were finally invented.
Friction took another form in firestarters that
used the friction of wood on wood. Learning to do
that was far less accidental. It took a huge
intervention of human ingenuity. And the variety of
means fairly sings of the metaphorical power of
fire to evoke thought.
Since wood is an insulator, friction can generate
intense heat in a small part of a wood block. This
can be done by plowing, drilling, or sawing one
piece against another. Drilling is done with all
kinds of drives -- hands, bowstrings, drawstrings,
and more. It's hard to date wood-on-wood
firestarters, since they were all small and
The most complex of the old firestarters is the
Southeast Asian fire-piston. A bone piston rides in
a precision-drilled cylinder. The piston has a
small tinder hole in its face. When it's driven
into the hole by a single hammer blow, the air
temperature rises hundreds of degrees, and -- with
luck -- it lights the tinder.
So the ancient legends seem to be correct. We did
indeed use the fire of the mind to steal the fire
of the hearth. Fire is the most elemental
technology and the most pervasive one. It is at
once booty from the gods and a gift of the mind.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds