#6: Matches and Lighters
Which came first, the match or the lighter? Most of us would guess that matches were invented first because they are a simple, bare-bones method of starting a fire. However, the concept of the lighter was invented a few years earlier. The very first lighter was created in 1823 by German chemist Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner.
This early lighter was often called “Döbereiner’s lamp” and involved flammable hydrogen gas and large amounts of platinum. Although the lighter was technically invented first, matches took off with the general public after John Walker invented them in 1826. Matches were smaller, safer, and much cheaper to produce than Döbereiner’s lighter. The first lighter was pretty large and was mostly used to ignite large-scale fires at factories.