>He then rubbed the wood across the paper and created a fire. However, there was no useable match created by Robert Boyle. I found this altogether too brief an

>He then rubbed the wood across the paper and created a fire. However, there was no useable match created by Robert Boyle. I found this altogether too brief and immediately ran off to Wikipedia, where I was informed that the Chinese had beaten Boyle to it by centuries: >Another text, Wu Lin Chiu Shih, dated from 1270 AD, lists sulfur matches as something that was sold in the markets of Hangzhou, around the time of Marco Polo's visit. But Wikipedia generally confirms that flint and steel remained the primary means of ignition until the nineteenth century. The medieval Chinese matches were just used as a particularly effective tinder.