Match Making

Factlet (13)

   This is not about what you think, it is about matches. Back when many people smoked, matches were needed and the line uttered by Lauren Bacall to Humphrey in To Have and Have Not, "Anybody got a match?," was often heard.  One of my sisters had huge glass containers and vases full of colourful matchbook covers. Now you rarely seen them and only infrequently get asked, "Buddy, got a light?"

   I thought of those match-filled days of long ago when I ran across this paragraph which provides the Factlet(s):

"For this tree [Western White Pine], almost exclusively now [c1949], yields us our wooden matches. Formerly they were made from the Eastern White Pine, but as the first growth of that species approached exhaustion, the western species, its closest relative and similar to it in the physical and chemical properties of its wood, began (from about 1914 on) to bear the whole burden of matchwood production. This may not seem a great drain - a match so slight a thing - but remember that twelve thousand wooden matches are struck, by the American people, every second. That makes more than 103 million in twenty-four hours. To produce a year's supply of matches, three hundred thousand mature pines must yield up their lives. If grown to a pure strand, they would cover an area 2 miles wide and 10 miles long."

   I suppose that one could view all of this as "progress" since fewer trees are being cut down to provide matches.  On the other hand, less trees are being used to produce newsprint and that is not good. Trees grow back, but newspapers are unlikely to return, even in digital form.

Source:

   That paragraph will be found on p.38 of A Natural History of North American Trees, by Donald Culross Peattie. It's a much more interesting book than the title indicates. See my post about Peattie. 

   If you are interested in the disappearance of the ordinary objects we grew up with see: Going Going Gone: Vanishing Americana by Susan Jones & Marilyn Nissenson. Among the things that have gone: Bank Checks; Carbon Paper; DDT; Girdles; Men's Garters; Nuns; Slide Rules; Tonsillectomies and Typewriters and Wedding Night Virgins.

All of those topics are covered in the book and I have a copy if you want to borrow it.

Post Script: 

   If you are more interested in the subject of "Match Making," see my post - "Lonely in London."
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