INVENTIONS: No Three on a Match?

As an “ignition source”—to use the pompous term of match makers—nothing can approach the paper book match for ubiquity. Some 25 billion books, representing 500 billion lights, are distributed each year, almost always without charge to the user (through the stores, hotels and vending machine operators that buy them in bulk). Match manufacturers also make money selling advertising on the book covers. This industry has been built with no essential change in the product itself since 1911, when safer chemicals replaced the poisonous white phosphorus that had been used in the book matches patented in 1892 by Joshua Pusey. But this fall the Diamond Match division of Diamond International Corp. (1975 sales: $780 million) will begin national marketing of something new: a match that goes out by itself.

Diamond’s new StopLite is coated below the tip with a fire-resistant chemical. It burns for twelve or 15. seconds —about long enough to light a cigarette on the second fumbling try—then just fizzles out, with no shaking. Officials believe it will cut down on the 10,000 match-related accidents that now occur every year, mainly among children, and also reduce the large number of fires started in hotels and motels by careless smokers. No one can count the possible saving of charred clothing and blistered fingers among the clumsy or absentminded.

Officials of Diamond, the nation’s oldest (founded in 1881) and largest match producer, were not motivated by altruism. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has long pressed for safer book matches. Diamond’s solution may not light everyone’s metaphoric fire: the new match may prove to be inadequate for lighting birthday cakes, campfires or even pipes. But StopLite may reduce to irrelevance the old superstition about three on a match, which got started during the Boer War (a prolonged flame gave the enemy time to take aim). Lighting three cigarettes from the same StopLite would be not just unlucky but almost impossible.