Fire. What Is Fire?

The earliest use man made of fire was to keep him warm. As he became more civilized he learned to use fire in many other ways. Even in earliest times man had learned to use fire to cook food, to shape weapons and tools, to change clay into pottery, and to furnish light. Light was especially important because it drove away wild animals at night. But primitive peoples had very slow and unsatisfactory ways of kindling fires. Modern man has not only improved the methods of kindling fires, but also he uses fire in many more ways. Fire furnishes the energy to drive machines, and keeps vast industries running. It drives the large locomotives of our great railroad lines. It moves steamships across the ocean; it causes the airplane to fly; and it generates electricity. It has even changed the methods of fighting wars. Fire is used to remove and destroy waste materials, and to kill harmful bacteria.

Fire is also used in separating most metals from their ores, as well as in forging and shaping metals into useful things. Many chemical changes of materials are either made possible or speeded up by the use of fire. A few of these chemical changes are made in such places as sugar refineries and oil and rubber industries.

Controlled fire is useful to man, but uncontrolled fire is one of man's worst enemies. Thousands of lives and millions of dollars worth of property are lost each year through uncontrolled fires.

The first technical application of the fire may have been the extracting and treating of metals. There are numerous modern applications of fire. In its broadest sense, fire is used by nearly every human being on earth in a controlled setting every day. Users of internal combustionvehicles employ fire every time they drive. Thermalpower stations provide electricity for a large percentage of humanity.

The use of fire in warfare has a long history. Hunter-gatherer groups around the world have been noted as using grass and forest fires to injure their enemies and destroy their ability to find food, so it can be assumed that fire has been used in warfare for as long as humans have had the knowledge to control it. Fire was the basis of all early thermal weapons. Homer detailed the use of fire by Greek commandos who hid in a wooden horse to burn Troy during the Trojan war. Later theByzantine fleet used Greek fire to attack ships and men. In the First World War, the first modern flamethrowers were used by infantry, and were successfully mounted on armoured vehicles in the Second World War. In the latter war, incendiary bombs were used by AxisandAllies alike, notably on Rotterdam, London, Hamburg and, notoriously, at Dresden, in the latter two cases firestorms were deliberately caused in which a ring of fire surrounding each city was drawn inward by an updraft caused by a central cluster of fires. The United States Army Air Force also extensively used incendiaries against Japanese targets in the latter months of the war, devastating entire cities constructed primarily of wood and paper houses. In the Second World War, the use of napalm and molotov cocktails was popularized, though the former did not gain public attention until the Vietnam War. More recently many villages were burned during the Rwandan Genocide.

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