Hey, Jason Toon here and in this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, mystery is afoot! Or, rather, mystery is a-hotfoot as I try to track down the enigmatic tale of the match that could light 500 cigarettes… or could it? A brilliant scientist. An extraordinary breakthrough. The promise of world-changing energy efficiency. The patent bought up and suppressed by the established industry before it could threaten their profits. I stumbled across a real story that follows this classic conspiracist's fable. There's even a suspicious death, massive financial fraud, and a decades-old trail of evidence suddenly going cold. Only this time, the wonder discovery wasn't a car that runs on water, or a household cold fusion reactor. It was a match that could light hundreds of cigarettes. And the rest of the story - what I could find of it - reads more like a parody of this trope than a confirmation of it. Meet Ferdinand Ringer and his so-called everlasting match.
"Three on a match? Pfft. Amateurs." Dazzling offers "THE MATCH WHICH WILL LIGHT 600 TIMES," proclaimed the June 5, 1931 edition of the Ripley's Believe It or Not syndicated newspaper feature. "Dr. Ferdinand Ringer's invention of the 'eternal match', which I saw during my stay in Vienna, will play havoc with the financial arrangements" of the match industry, the column continued. "I shall watch with interest the further developments in that field." "My 'everlasting' match is made of a special substance of my own discovery," he claimed in one typical example. "Hardly a day passes that I do not get dazzling offers for my invention. All I have done is let [potential investors] light their cigarettes as often as they like with my match - always the same match. My only desire is to guard my invention. Its appearance on the market is only a question of time."
Extra! Extra! Continental chemist conjures continual combustion! Foremost among those "dazzling offers" came from the "Swedish Match King", Ivar Krueger. By this time, Krueger dominated the global match market, including the US-based Diamond Match Company. But his house of matches was collapsing. In early 1932, a loan application revealed that Krueger owed Swedish banks an amount equal to half of the entire Swedish currency reserve, and his default would rock the Swedish banking system in the "Krueger Crash". As creditors and regulators closed in, the Match King shot himself in a Paris hotel room. Rumours that Krueger was actually murdered, promoted by his family, persist to this day. The aggressively vainglorious Ringer would later take "credit" for Krueger's suicide. "I showed the match to Krueger in Paris," he told the New Yorker. "News of it got around and caused Krueger shares to go down… Unfortunately, I am the reason he committed suicide." Whatever the story there, breathless press stories continued to appear through 1932, touting the miracle match and its imminent release. And then… nothing happened. It, and Ringer, faded from public view aside from a squalid episode where Ringer was named as "the other man" in a messy high-profile 1944 divorce case. His invention was still well-known enough for reporters to run wild with "match" puns. "A distinct danger" It would take more than a decade, and a lawsuit from the US Department of Justice, for the story to come out. Yes, Ringer had indeed sold the everlasting match to the Swedish Match Trust in 1934. And they had indeed kept it off the market to protect their match business. The May 8, 1944 edition of Time magazine reported that the DoJ filed an antitrust complaint against the five biggest US match producers, all controlled by Krueger's former empire. They found records of company decisions to suppress the everlasting match, with match executives calling it "a distinct danger to the American match industry" and "a fertile field for the rottenest kind of competition." When Justice won the antitrust suit in 1946, Ringer's patent for the "ignitible stick" became available to anyone who could pay the $15 usage fee. That included one Matty Fox, a hustling former Hollywood executive who had also been involved in early attempts at cable TV, and somehow once controlled all trade between Indonesia and the US (yeah, I don't get it either).
A boy and his vinyl resin-acetone compound This frivolous accident made both men rich, but fear not, match consumers: Ringer assured the New Yorker in 1947 his priority was still the serious business of perfecting a new everlasting match. Cagey as ever, Ringer "permitted us to inspect it at a distance of four feet," the magazine wrote. "It was three inches long and a little thicker than a wooden kitchen match, and was made of a grayish substance. He poked it into the flame of an ordinary match and nothing happened. He then struck it against a piece of brown stone, and it ignited." Once again came a wave of news stories anticipating the imminent arrival of the match that would change everything. And this time… …it fizzled out. Again. Ringer's name barely appears in the media after this. He died just a few years later, in 1950, and was buried in Paramus, New Jersey. I couldn't even find a published obituary. "Rather awkward" So who killed the everlasting match? Did Ringer lose focus in the mad whirl of Bub-O-Loon fame and fortune? Or was the whole thing just bullshit? There's almost no documentation or eyewitness accounts of how well it worked: the four-feet-away New Yorker report is about as detailed as it gets. But the descriptions of the matches themselves - variously compared to "a crayon", "a pencil", and "a wooden knitting needle" - suggest that maybe it wasn't a direct replacement for the matches Americans carried in books in their pockets. A 1986 paper by chemist Stig Johansson about the history of matches dismisses Ringer's everlasting match as "rather awkward to use and in no way competitive with normal matches." Put it all together, plus the fact that nobody has seriously tried to commercialize Ringer's patent, and the obvious conclusion is that the everlasting match was more a triumph of promotion than technology. There's also just not much money in matches anymore. In 1944 the match business turned over $95 million, which would be about $1.7 billion in today's dollars. The global match industry today does about $192 million in business annually, an 89% decrease in real terms. The decline of smoking played a part, but it was the appearance of another invention in the 1970s that first cratered the match business. The match monopolists should have worried less about the everlasting match and more about the disposable lighter.
Flick it, my Cricket (I couldn't find a good vintage Bic ad) I was about to gripe about yet another amazing thing we lost to corporate greed…but I can’t get much enthusiasm up for having better matches. So I’ll stick to bemoaning our lost streetcars, our simpler tax filing system, longer-lasting light bulbs, electric cars. What corporate conspiracy theories do you think actually may be true? Join us over at this week’s Shoddy Goods chat to talk about our amazing lost future. For smooth, rich, satisfying flavor, spark up one of these past Shoddy Goods stories:
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