Playing with Fire E-Book

Paul Heiney

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 271

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

**How to get sparks back in your life and keep them burning. ** The blaze of a log fire on a cold night speaks to the heart in a way no other flame can. It has character and ever-changing form; it has vibrant colour and a balletic movement. Indeed, it was the flame that transformed the way life was lived on earth, but now that primary driver of evolution finds itself being extinguished in a modern world of microwaves, induction hobs and central heating. Gradually the flames are going out, as houses are now built without fireplaces, bonfires are banned, and schoolchildren are forbidden to use the Bunsen burner. But the sight of a flame remains as evocative as ever. Playing with Fire wants to inspire, and teach, looking at the history of fire and showing the wonders that the burning flame can conjure.

Leseprobe

First published 2017 as Playing with Fire: The Art of Chopping and Burning Wood

This paperback edition first published 2025

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Paul Heiney, 2017, 2025

The right of Paul Heiney to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 83705 063 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

The History Press proudly supports

www.treesforlife.org.uk

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe

Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia

[email protected]

Contents

Introduction

1 How Things Burn

2 The First Flames

3 Lighting Fires: The Basics

4 A Wood of Your Own

5 Wood to Burn

6 The Axe

7 The Chainsaw

8 Cutting, Chopping and Stacking

9 The Wood-burning Stove

10 Smoking

11 The Modern Way to Burn Wood

The glory of the roaring wood fire.

Introduction

AUTUMN, WITH ITS promise of wood fires to come, is the finest season of the year for me. It is when I try to take an informed glance at the woodpile and reckon if it is up to the job of seeing me through the winter. Is there kindling in the box, and is it dry? I will take random logs and sniff them, and feel their weight in my hand, guessing how much flame-retarding moisture is still hidden within. It is the first of the winter games I play with nature. If she wins I stay cold, if I win then I have all the comforts a wood fire can give.

Then, like a child longing for Christmas, I start looking at the calendar and see the winter months getting closer. I begin to wonder when the temperature will drop to that magic, undefined figure when I can declare it time to light the first fire of the season. Like the artist who has arranged his colours on his palette, I have prepared my wood as best as I know how and I am once again ready for the artful business of playing with fire.

All summer I will have missed the effort that wood burning demands: the fetching of logs, the striking of the match, the careful building of the logs on the grate, the saying of a silent prayer until the kindling has taken hold and the first log begins to smoulder. I hate it when the place has been devoid of the smell of wood and woodsmoke all summer. It is as if an old friend has been banished from the household. Once the first fire is lit, I will go outside to taste the first whiff of woodsmoke that creeps gently at first from the chimney, and then gathers momentum before disappearing completely as the fire gains heat. That is how I like to reconnect and, while I know that sniffing this grey fog for too long is probably bad for my health, that small downside is nothing compared to the soaring of my mood. The church should be jealous of the spiritual uplift a bit of burning applewood, or pine, can provide.

Every creature in the house loves the warmth of burning wood.

If this speaks nothing to you, then I doubt you are going to find much here. But let me try and persuade you. Those of us who consider ourselves wood-burners, and those who aspire to be, know that burning wood is one of the most fundamental joys of life, as sustaining as the very breath we take. How lucky I am to be able to choose not to heat myself by stabbing my finger at a dreary thermostat, and how sorry I feel for those whose circumstances mean they can never gaze thoughtfully into the embers of a dying fire nor know the warm uplift that only a dancing flame can give.

I have had a hard education in the ways of burning wood. When I first moved out of town to the country and took command of my first wood-burning stove, I might as well have been presented with a vintage steam engine for all I understood of its flues, dampers and doors. I guessed there was some science to this, but in those pre-internet days information was not so readily to hand, and so much of my learning was done on the job.

In the matter of wood I was even more ignorant. In fact, I can remember buying one of my early loads of logs from a cheeky lad who dropped them on the drive and then quickly disappeared, suspiciously. Had I known anything about firewood at all, alarm bells would have rung when I saw that green leaves were still sprouting from it and that, far from it being seasoned, sap still flowed from it like water from a running tap. It is difficult to learn the subtle ways of a stove when the only thing your smouldering wood will give you is a depressing sizzle, while you are craving heat. There is no snub greater than that given by a heartless fire; it is telling you that you have no idea what you are doing, you should go away and get some understanding of burning wood, and only then come back and bother me with your match when you have learned a thing or two.

Having been brought up in a home not far from the coal mining areas of South Yorkshire, from an early age I was no stranger to the joys of the dancing flame. There was hardly a day when there wasn’t an open fire blazing in our house, usually with coal nicked from the power station where my father worked. I learned that flame was not only warm it was soothing too, and it made a child feel good, and the dog and cat calm.

My grandmother was a demon for an open fire and had a pensioner’s flat which housed a coal fireplace with a built-in oven beside it – a kind of kitchen range with a large warming area above. It was without doubt the largest item in the flat and commanded everyone’s attention and respect, which was willingly given for like all fires it was the heart of the home. These ranges were common in the 1950s. A lot of council houses had them, and they required frequent applications of Zeebrite to keep them shining black. My granny could play this fireplace like a musical instrument, making a song and a dance of it by pulling mysterious levers to direct the flames from the chimney to the underside of the oven, bending the heat and flame to her will. Never was a bit of heat wasted. When the fire was red hot she would rake the embers and present roasted shoulder of pork to it, creating the crispest bubbling crackling. Then, not wanting to waste so much as a therm of heat, a bowl of bread dough would hit the warming shelf till it fluffed and rose, by which time a shift of the dampers had the oven hot enough to bake it into fresh rolls. It was always lit with newspaper and sticks, and if it was a still day or the draught was somehow poor and the fire wouldn’t ‘draw’ then a shovel would be placed vertically in front of the fire and a newspaper stretched across it, which forced air to enter only through the grate. It always worked, and to my surprise the newspaper never caught fire.

The ever welcoming, ever soothing log fire.

We survived the bitter winter of 1963 in front of that fire, a winter when the sea froze over, and which broke records in terms of cold and longevity. Grandfather, I remember, shuttled between fire and ‘coal hole’, shovel in hand, dew drop on the end of his nose, hauling jet black coal with the urgency of a man who knew that his flannel shirt was not enough protection from a winter like that.

I remember there was always a kettle sitting somewhere near the fire, warming itself, singing gently, so as to use less gas when it came time to boil it on the kitchen stove. The shelves in the oven were made of heavy cast iron and on cold nights they would be removed just before bed, wrapped in a blanket and slid into the bed as a warmer. The ranges were eventually replaced with gas fires, known as ‘gas misers’, and never was there a more apt description. There was never any toast made in front of a fire after that.

My own first wood fire was a different affair; an inglenook in an old Suffolk farmhouse which had not been improved for decades and certainly had no centralised heating system – the nearest thing to a thermostat was opening or closing the kitchen door. Here I learned that romance is one thing and keeping warm is another. There was nothing finer than seeing blazing logs strung across the huge grate, but nothing colder than the cruel, cold draught that comes whistling under the doors, kissing the flames, taking the heat straight up the chimney. I soon learnt that confining your heat in a wood-burning stove was a good idea.

But for all the pleasure I got from burning wood, I was shamefully ignorant of all the things that go to make a roaring fire. I little understood that choice of wood mattered hugely, and that its dryness was a crucial factor. I gave no thought to how chimneys work, and how some would be good while others would always be bad ’uns. I thought stoves were just iron boxes and no more than that. I happily threw logs on the fire, not realising that like any fine structure a fire needed to be carefully and precisely built. Outside, in the garden, fires were more problematic. Bonfires would never go for me, and I invariably ended up with a stinking, smouldering heap which my neighbours – all real countrymen – looked at with pity. When I took to farming and needed to cut hedges, I was completely unaware that if you place the trimmings one way the fire will never burn, but place them properly and they will be consumed until there is hardly a trace of ash remaining. It took an old farmhand who had trimmed farm hedges by hand every year for forty years to teach me that little trick.

But my ignorance went even wider than that. I never gave a thought to the woods or the forest, which is the only source of all the raw materials the fire-maker requires. I knew nothing of how the forester tended his woods to keep me warm while at the same time keeping his wood alive. In fact, I never gave woods or forest a second thought and certainly didn’t appreciate their complexity. Like many innocents, I thought that people who went into woods and cut down trees were somehow ‘bad people’, completely failing to realise that they were performing the greatest act of kindness for their trees, giving them new life. The axe, which I did not know how to properly swing, remained an item of mystery, and I assumed that my inability to split a piece of wood was a fault on the axe’s part, and not on mine. I would never have given a second thought to the axe handle, and how its subtle shape makes it safer and easier to use. I knew that it was best to keep your logs under cover to keep the rain off – that much is obvious even to the complete novice – but I had no appreciation of the fact that properly stacked in a precise geometrical way can turn indifferent wood into good fuel. Did I know there was a way to place logs on a fire that ensures they catch light, and ways of doing it that almost guarantee they never will? I certainly did not.

Many years passed before any of these things crossed my mind. And that is the reason I have written this book. It is not written for you, it is written for me. I have sought out the people who know and understand how fires are made: the forester who grows the wood, the engineers who build our stoves, the blacksmith who hammers out the axe head, and many more. I have been to see them all so they can tell their stories in their own words.

It is my ambition to try and fill a huge gap in my understanding of something so precious but largely unconsidered. For a log fire stands for much more than a few hunks of wood and a waft of flames. It brings together a wider range of skills than could be imagined, and involves a myriad of chemical and biological processes that together make the mind boggle. The story of burning wood is a rich drama of science, biology, mechanics and survival.

Burning wood is not a push-button business. You can start a fire but you have no idea what kind of blaze you will end up with. It carries with it a burden of uncertainty, which in itself is one of its attractions. All you can hope is that all your efforts, and those of countless others who have brought the flame to your hearth, will result in those magical, fleeting, dancing flames, in front of which you can sit and reflect on the sheer magic that is the burning fire.

Dancing flames when hot gas meets cooler air.

1   How Things Burn

London in 1848. The street lighting, if there is any, is by gas. The incandescent light bulb driven by electricity is being developed in Britain by Joseph Swann, and in America by Thomas Edison, but inside the Royal Institution, where the greatest scientists come to share their discoveries with a wider audience, the rooms are lit either by candles grouped together in chandeliers, or by oil lamps. Into the famous lecture theatre – still widely seen in the modern televised Christmas lectures – steps the great Michael Faraday.

He had, by this time, embraced the recently discovered principles of electromagnetism and constructed the first ever transformer, thereby laying the foundations of many fundamental understandings which remain the cornerstone of physics to this day.

This was an era of rapid scientific and technological advance. Photographs were first produced in 1834, and the typewriter invented in the same year. The pneumatic tyre, anaesthetic, the sewing machine and the science of thermodynamics soon followed. Every passing year brought an advance, many of which survive to this day.

Yet Michael Faraday, one of the most highly regarded scientists of that inventive era, chose not to address the latest advances. Instead, he started his lecture enigmatically:

I have taken this subject on a former occasion, and, were it left to my own will, I should prefer to repeat it almost every year, so abundant is the interest that attaches itself to the subject, so wonderful are the varieties of outlet which it offers into the various departments of philosophy. There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena.

The white heat of the exploding match.

The ancient candle meets the ‘modern’ match.

His subject was ‘The Chemical History of a Candle’. It was such an innocent title, but with such profound implications, if Faraday is to be believed. But is he overstating his case? Can there really be sufficient evidence in the gentle, wallowing flame of a candle to suppose that all parts of the universe are governed by the same laws, or at least the laws as they were understood at the time? It is not for me to disagree with Faraday, but for others more qualified to make a judgement.

However, I know that to understand the workings of a flame, and how it produces heat, and where the smoke comes from, and why it shimmers, adds greatly to the already deep pleasures of burning wood. Not only that, but a scientific understanding of combustion explains why wet wood won’t burn, and why kindling has to be chopped into small pieces, and why the old saying ‘there’s no smoke without fire’ might not be true in all circumstances – for the perfect fire, as we shall discover, would give off no smoke at all. Understand the flame, and therein lies everything you need to know about lighting a fire.

Take a lingering look at your fire and reflect that the chemical process that is taking place on your hearth is nothing less than the unlocking of the energy the sun bestowed upon the timber as it grew. In fact, it is possible that the energy in your fire was captured by the tree in the years when Faraday was giving his lecture. That is a powerful thought. It is a reminder that the moment of combustion is just the grand finale of one of the most remarkable biological processes on our planet, and it is not for us to screw it up. So let us follow in the great scientist’s footsteps and examine the purity of the single candle flame and thereby understand better how our fires work.

But first, the match. Unless we are resorting to bushcraft techniques (see later) most of us will start our fires with a match. This, in itself, is yet another example of pure burning, of using a small amount of energy to release a much larger burst of it. It is such a tiny thing, the flame of a match, and hundreds of matches can be packed into each and every pocket of our clothes, yet a single match can bring down an entire cathedral roof.

The modern match is a comparative newcomer to the business of making fire, having been invented as recently as 1805 by Jean Chancel, a Parisian. The Chinese were employing sticks of wood impregnated with sulphur as far back as the fourteenth century to light lamps, but their development never progressed and each sulphur stick needed an existing flame to light it.

In 1680, the physicist Robert Boyle put his mind to refining the match using the sulphur technique of the Chinese. His idea was to bring about ignition by drawing his match across paper, but it didn’t work and he gave up. Instead, he diverted his attention to defining the fundamental relationship between the pressure and volume of gasses, which famously became known as Boyle’s Law, and which remains a fundamental principle in the understanding of physics. His time was probably better spent.

Chancel’s sticks, it has to be said, seem to have offered very little improvement on the Chinese ones, and his matches were hardly as handy as the small packet you can carry in your pocket. His method was to coat a stick with potassium chlorate, sulphur and sugar. In an asbestos bottle was held some sulphuric acid, and when the stick was dipped in the acid an almighty exothermic chemical reaction took place generating great heat setting the stick on fire. It was as dangerous, toxic and inconvenient a way of producing a flame as could be imagined. Needless to say, it didn’t catch on.

The miraculous chemical processes that are burning wood.

The first friction match was the work of an English chemist, John Walker of County Durham, whose breakthrough moment was the realisation that the necessary chemical reaction to initiate combustion could be ignited by a spark, and that spark could be simply created by friction between the match and an abrasive surface. Walker’s matches contained potassium chlorate, antimony trisulphide and sugar, all held together in gum. They were lit by rubbing them across sandpaper. The main problem with his match was that the fire tended to detach itself from the head of the match, and after several carpets were destroyed many domestic fires were blamed on this new invention and matches were consequently banned in France and Germany.

There were many subsequent experiments leading to significant developments, the most important being the discovery that the use of white phosphorus made for a much safer match – phosphorous needs little energy to light it – but concerns about its effect on public health eventually led to white phosphorous being banned. It was a Swede, Johan Lundström who showed that by using red phosphorous all objections were overcome, and by 1858 he was producing 12 million boxes of matches a year. The match has never looked back.

The modern match has a rich cocktail of ingredients, all of which are necessary because phosphorous alone will not produce a flame for long enough to be useful. A modern match works like this: the initial burst of energy from the combustion of the phosphorous breaks down potassium chlorate which releases oxygen, necessary if the flame is to flourish. This oxygen gives support to the igniting sulphur, which keeps the flame going, otherwise it would quickly go out. The head of the match also contains powdered glass to ensure sufficient spark-producing friction when the match is struck, this energy being used to convert the red phosphorous into white phosphorus, which is highly volatile and reacts with the oxygen in turn, leading to ignition. To keep the match burning, the stick can also be impregnated with candle wax.

There is pleasure to be had in just watching the striking of a match, seeing it burst into life, its transition into flame followed not long after by its death. The Danish storyteller Hans Christian Anderson wrote the story of a girl’s hopes and dreams after she lit match after match to warm her as she tried in vain to sell her matches on the cold winter streets of Denmark. It was called ‘The Little Match Girl’. Once the last match has been lit, and its flame dies, so she dies too. This was one writer’s take on the poignancy and inspiration to be found in the writhing of a dying flame. Candle flames were a preoccupation of Anderson from an early age. One of his earliest works, written when he was a schoolboy and only recently discovered, was a short 700-word story called ‘The Tallow Candle’, about a candle which suffered from lack of self-esteem. The candle was ignored and neglected before its natural beauty was recognised, enhanced once it was lit. Michael Faraday must surely have been bewitched by flame too, or why would he elevate the burning of the candle to philosophical status?

Mystical elements of flame apart, the science itself is worth understanding so that each time you light your fire you can remind yourself of the magic you are performing. Fire works as follows: without three fundamental ingredients, fuel, heat and oxygen, you will never make fire. In the case of the candle, the fuel is wax. The heat that starts the chemical reaction is the flame of the match with which you light it. Oxygen we take for granted but in the case of wood a plentiful supply of oxygen, which might be provided by a draught, is required. You could not light a candle in the vacuum of space, nor could you create a conventional-looking flame because it is gravity that causes hotter air to rise and cooler to fall, and in a zero gravity environment neither of these things will occur. The result is that all the products of combustion would hang around the flame, smothering it, and it would go out.

Back on earth, on applying a match to the wick of the candle, a small quantity of the wax melts. By capillary action the molten wax climbs up the wick. Because the quantity of wax in the wick is small, it does not require much heat to start breaking the wax, which is a hydrocarbon, into hydrogen and carbon. If there were no wick, the quantity of heat required to produce the same effect in a lump of wax would be greater than a single match could provide, so the wick teaches us that small burns more easily than large, which is why we shall eventually cut our fire-starting kindling into slithers and not chunks.

The vaporised hydrocarbon wax has now become hydrogen and carbon and both are drawn upwards, because hot air rises. They then combine with the oxygen in the air, which in turn produces four by-products: water vapour, carbon dioxide and, most usefully, heat and light.

‘LOOK AT HOW A SINGLE CANDLE CAN BOTH DEFY AND DEFINE THE DARKNESS.’

ANNE FRANK

But why does the candle keep burning when you take the match away? Simply because that initial burst of heat is enough to melt a little more wax, which again rises the length of the wick, going through a vaporisation process, producing more heat, melting more wax, and so on. Without a wick a candle would not work.

It doesn’t always go smoothly. A candle flame can hesitate, and if it is insufficiently hot to melt the wax then the flame will go out. Or too much wax might be produced, or there may be insufficient air. What happens then is that the flame starts to smoke, or gives off unburnt carbon particles, producing soot. This is because the combustion has not been complete.

Once your candle is burning with a steady flame, look at it more closely. There are three distinct bands of colour. At the top is the large, yellow portion, which we tend to think of as the flame. Below that is a brown, or orange, section and this sits on an area at the bottom of the flame, which is bright blue. It is in this bright blue section that the hydrocarbons (molten wax) start to break down into hydrogen and carbon, and because there is plenty of oxygen here the hydrogen reacts with the oxygen to produce water vapour. A little of the hot carbon will also react with the oxygen to produce carbon dioxide, but the carbon has more important business to conduct as it moves up the flame. In the brown zone, where the temperature can reach 1,000ºC, the carbon particles start to burn and they continue to get hotter as they enter the yellow zone where, at 1,200ºC, they start to ignite and give off light, producing the observable flame.

Firewood follows the candle’s example and needs heat to start the reaction. Instead of wax providing the hydrocarbons, in the case of wood it is cellulose that is contained within its structure. Cellulose is the most abundant organic compound in the world and makes up 50 per cent of every piece of wood. It has no taste, is odourless, you find it in paper and cardboard, and it is what cellophane is made from. It is also used as an additive by the food industry as it adds fibre and effectively bulks up the product, making it cheaper to produce, and weight for weight reduces fat. If you buy grated cheese in a bag, the reason the flakes don’t stick together is because cellulose has been added. You might think this is cheating; you thought you were buying cheese, not wood.

From the wood-burner’s point of view, the crucial fact is that wood has to reach 150ºC before organic cellulose can break down. But before you can do anything you must get rid of the water content; we all know the effect that water has on fire. This will not occur until the wood reaches 100ºC, the boiling point of water, when it starts to evaporate. Once that process has started, the next stage is to get the cellulose to decompose.

There are three products of wood combustion. Under the effect of heat, wood gives off volatile gases consisting of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Taken together we call them smoke. The carbon element, apart from the small amount of it in the smoke, is known as char – it gives its name to charcoal and the word ‘charred’. It’s the black, dirty bit left in the grate. Charcoal is, incidentally, wood from which all the volatile elements have been removed, which is why charcoal burns with no flame. That leaves the ash, which is all the other grey, dusty bits, calcium carbonate forming a large proportion but also potash and trace elements such as iron, zinc and copper. This is why wood is often added to compost heaps to provide added nutrients.

The next stage in the wood-burning process is for the volatile gases to start to break apart and this happens around 260ºC. Once the molecules have broken apart, the atoms of hydrogen and carbon recombine with the oxygen to produce water and carbon dioxide and this is the process we called burning. Most importantly, it is this reaction which gives off heat, which, in turn, keeps the fire going, in exactly the same way that the molten wax keeps the candle flame alive. As the carbon atoms get hotter they, and other atoms, start to emit light, and this is the flame that you see.

A flame varies in its colours, of course, being bright yellow in some parts and a dull orange in others. This is a representation of the varying temperatures within the flame itself.

To keep a fire blazing the reaction has to kept going, and so once the initial piece of wood is burning others have to be brought up to temperature in turn. This is why a fire made with one piece of wood will never burn, for no single match can provide enough energy to create the combustive reaction in a single chunk of wood. It also explains why we use small pieces of wood to start a fire for we are multiplying the energy as we go. It works like this: a little energy from a match can provide enough energy to get the kindling going, then with that initial energy from the kindling we can ignite the first piece of wood, which in turn passes on sufficient energy to ignite the next. The crucial point in making a fire is the temperature at which the cellulose starts to break down into the highly flammable carbon and hydrogen. Until you get to that point, you will not have a fire. It is obvious that the larger the piece of wood, the more energy is required to get it to that point. You could start a fire with a whole tree trunk, but imagine the number of matches it would require. How much more quickly you can make fire with a thin sliver of dry wood and only a small flame to start the process.

It is worth watching intently the beginnings of a fire, for all this science is laid out before you within a few minutes. First, set light to a piece of paper, a rich source of cellulose. On first application of a match, the edge of the paper will start to smoulder; there will be no flame but there will be lots of smoke – the product of incomplete combustion. Then, suddenly a flame will appear, seemingly out of nowhere. You have now reached that crucial combustion temperature and proper and efficient burning is taking place. That process complete, you are soon left with a few lumps of almost weightless black carbon.

Some like to talk of the ‘fire triangle’, which is merely a way of reminding yourself of the three vital ingredients to produce fire: oxygen, heat and fuel. Get them together in the right proportions in the right place and you are playing with fire.

WHY DO FLAMES FLICKER?

A flame would be a dull, diminished thing if it did not flicker, no more than a feeble yellow light. The motion of the flame gives it life, which offers something for our minds to play with. Sometimes flames suggest anger, especially the aggressive flames of a recently lit fire accompanied by spitting and urgent crackle. But a simmering fire which has given up most of its energy and is now on the long, downward slope to its death carries a less athletic but more balletic flame, which dances gently across the hearth, to and fro, as if trying to rock us to sleep.