Matches · 1826 to 1922

Nobody Could Switch Alone

For about seventy years after the first case was described, match workers lost their jawbones to the phosphorus in the match head. For most of those years a match without it already existed. It cost about five per cent more, and the makers said, in writing and before Congress, that none of them could be the only one to pay it.

The disease had a trade name, phossy jaw: an aching tooth, swollen gums, then the jawbone itself dying and coming away, in the words of the British factory doctor Thomas Oliver as quoted in 1910.src A Vienna doctor, Lorinser, is credited with recognising it in 1838.src It came from one ingredient: white phosphorus, which a match maker used because it catches fire so easily.

Three match heads

Warm a head and see which one has reached the ignition temperature the safety references list for its phosphorus. The numbers are the references' own; where they disagree the range is shown, and each figure opens its source.

That is the whole of the chemistry the rest of this page needs. White phosphorus made the cheap match that lights on a boot sole, and it poisoned the people who dipped, dried and boxed it. The safety match moved the phosphorus out of the head and swapped it for red phosphorus, a different form of the same element; Anton Schrötter reported it to the Vienna Academy in December 1847.src The Lundström brothers' safety match was patented in several countries in 1855 and 1856src and took a medal at the Paris exhibition of 1855.src In 1898 two French chemists, Sévène and Cahen, patented a head made with phosphorus sesquisulphidesrc, which gave the public back the match that strikes anywhere, without the white phosphorus.

Two honest limits. The heads above only compare listed ignition temperatures; a real head lights from friction, and its other ingredients matter. And no source I found says a safety head can never be lit off the box; they say it was designed to strike only there.

Why nobody switched

Some of this record argues the danger could be managed, as you will see. Most of it argues about who goes first. In January 1910 the US Bureau of Labor printed John B. Andrews's survey of the American match factories. A company president told him the extra cost of the harmless match was

“less than 5 per cent.”src

and Andrews put the difficulty in two sentences:

“it costs just a little more to make the nonpoisonous matches. Compe­tition is so keen that a single manufacturer can not place himself at a natural disadvantage with his rivals in business.”src

The company that held the American patent on the substitute offered, in writing, to let every other maker use it on equal terms,

“if the use of white phosphorus is prohibited by law.”src

Two years later, manufacturers making ninety-five per cent of American matches

“testified before Congress that they could not substitute a harmless compound for the slightly cheaper poison without a uniform law”src

In Britain every manufacturer told the Home Office the same thing, conditionally: they would accept a ban if imported white phosphorus matches were banned too.src The problem the record describes is not a missing invention. It is a switch that each maker would take only if all of them had to.

Sweden, where the safety match came from

The clearest case is in a Swedish government bill of 1919, which recites its own history. In 1896 a committee of the Riksdag's Second Chamber turned down a ban on making white phosphorus matches. It said the workers' danger did not call for onesrc, and it said why the question mattered:

“ning vore en för Sverige viktig exportindustri; endast en ringa del därav såldes inom landet.”src

[the manufacture] was an important export industry for Sweden; only a small part of it was sold within the country. (translation ours)

On 30 March 1900 Sweden banned selling them at home.src The bill states the consequence in one line:

“Tillverkning av sådana tändstickor kan efter förordningens tillkomst alltså endast ske för export.”src

After the order, manufacture of such matches can therefore take place only for export. (translation ours)

In August 1919 the Swedish match company wrote that it no longer used white phosphorus and no longer exported matches containing it.src Only then did the minister propose banning manufacture, in words worth having in full:

“det dock vara stötande och ingalunda vårt land värdigt, att möjlighet skall föreligga att i Sverige tillverka och därifrån till andra länder exportera en vara, som på grand av sin hälsofarliga beskaffenhet icke får inom vårt eget land försäljas.”src

it would be offensive, and in no way worthy of our country, that it should be possible to manufacture in Sweden and export to other countries a product which, because of its danger to health, may not be sold within our own country. (translation ours; “grand” is the scan's misreading of “grund”, left as it is)

The ban on making them followed by Royal Order of 27 February 1920.src Sweden joined the Berne treaty on 10 April 1920.src

The wait

Each bar runs from a starting line you choose to the day a ban took force. Pick the line. If you think the safety match was always an answer, count from 1855. If you think the public would only give up a match that strikes anywhere, count from the harmless one of 1898. Or count from the day the first treaty was signed.

Two things the bars show that the usual story leaves out. First, measured from 1898, four of the rows are negative. France's switch falls within a year or two of the patent whichever source you take, but Finland, Denmark and Switzerland banned the poison years before it, when the only substitute was the safety match that needs its box, and Denmark's law forbade every match except one made to strike on a prepared surface.src So a harmless strike-anywhere was not a precondition. Second, it was not free either: Switzerland's first ban went into force in January 1881 and was repealed in 1882 because of

“the poor quality of matches that could then be made without the ordinary phosphorus”src

and Switzerland did not try again until a law of November 1898.src

The treaty, in the depositary's own list

On 26 September 1906, at Berne, seven states signed a convention to prohibit white phosphorus in matches: Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland.src Each party promised to prohibit the manufacture, the import and the sale of matches containing white phosphorussrc: the import ban included, which is the condition makers kept asking for. Britain declined to sign that Octobersrc and acceded two years later.src Switzerland keeps the treaty and publishes the date each party joined. Here is that list, as the Swiss federal register prints it. It was still gaining parties a century after Berne: the last lines are new states declaring themselves bound as successors.

The United States never joined. It used a tax instead: the Esch Act, approved 9 April 1912, charged two cents per hundred matchessrc, barred imports from 1 January 1913src and exports after 1 January 1914src, and took effect on 1 July 1913.src Early in 1911, at President Taft's suggestion, the Diamond Match Company had given the nation the free use of its patented substitute.src The patent was cancelled on 28 January 1911.src

What the American survey counted

Andrews's 1910 report covered 15 of the 16 match factories then working in the United States.src They employed 3,591 people, 314 of them children under sixteensrc, and 65 per cent worked where they were exposed to the fumes.src Government agents found sixteen definite cases in the factoriessrc; Andrews himself found records of more than a hundred within a very short time.src At one factory alone, 40 cases, 15 of them ending in the loss of one or both jaws, and a death in June 1908.src He wrote the cases up one by one under invented names, not as a table, so these are his counts, not a census.

The matchgirls, and what the record says they struck over

The best-known episode is London's. On 23 June 1888 Annie Besant published “White Slavery in London” in her paper The Link, about the women at Bryant and May's factory in Bow.src Twelve days later they walked out.src Retellings often say the article exposed phossy jaw, and that the strike was about it. Search the article yourself.

The article is about wages, fines, hours and a 23 per cent dividend. Fire comes into it twice: the fine for “burnts”, and the frames of matches that catch light and cost a girl her work. The strike ended on 17 July 1888, through the London Trades Council, on these terms, as the East London Observer printed them four days later:

“(1) Abolition of all fines; (2) abolition of all deductions for paint, brushes, stamps, &c.;”src

then the boys' racking money, the packers' threepence, grievances to go straight to the directors, all strikers taken back, and a promise of a breakfast room so the girls need not eat where they worked.src Nothing about phosphorus.src The National Archives says it plainly: the docking stopped, and the white phosphorus continued.src

The phosphorus fight came after. In 1898 the Home Secretary found “systematic neglect” by the firm in reporting casessrc, and the government's inquiry of 1899 counted 36 cases of necrosis in British match factories over 1894 to 1898src, three of them fatal.src It did not recommend a ban. It concluded that the dangers

“hitherto attending the use of yellow phosphorus can be overcome.”src

by regulation and dental supervision. Bryant and May bought the rights to the Sévène and Cahen match around 1899 (the secondary sources give 1899, 1900 and 1901)src, and by 1907 a peer could tell the Lords that the firm made every kind of match without white phosphorus.src Britain's Act received assent on 21 December 1908src and took force on 1 January 1910.src

None of this takes anything from the strike, which won what it asked for. It only puts the phosphorus where the documents put it: two decades later, and settled by law, not by the women of Bow.

The jaw, now

The disease has a modern relative. In 2003 the surgeon Robert Marx reported jawbone death in patients given the bisphosphonate drugs pamidronate and zoledronatesrc; a 2005 paper named it “bis-phossy jaw” and treated the old disease as an analoguesrc, and it is now called medication-related osteonecrosis of the jaw.src In 2008 Marx proposed that phossy jaw was the same disease, the body turning phosphorus into bisphosphonate-like compounds.src A 2023 review disagrees: it says the cause of phossy jaw is unknownsrc and that the X-ray picture differs from the modern one.src That is where it stands.

The whole record

Every claim the research gathered, 302 rows, each with the exact words of its source and a link. The page above uses about seventy of them. Filter it, and check any of them against the source yourself.