Have you ever seen how they allegedly pour gasoline into the palm of your hand, light it, it burns, but the person does not receive any harm from the fire? Why don't burns appear on the skin? After all, fire is a high-temperature plasma! What's the matter?

Spectacular focus

The example with fire in the palm is, of course, impressive. People who have nervous nerves should not watch this trick. Or immediately tune in to the fact that this is just spectacular focus. Even if it’s not entirely clear, it smacks of fantasy. Let's break the focus down into its component parts. First, the visual part. What do we usually see?

The magician rolls up his shirt sleeve to his elbow and shows us his palm from all sides. By this he convinces the audience that he has nothing in his palm. Then he takes a glass half filled with a clear liquid, shaking it from side to side, convinces us that this is really some kind of flammable liquid, since it was said about the flame that he will light in the palm of his hand. Of course, we associate liquid with gasoline or some other transparent liquid flammable substance.

Next, the magician squeezes his palm a little and pours liquid from the glass into it, puts the empty glass back on the table, takes a lighter, spins the wheel on it and sets fire to the liquid in his palm. It flares up with a voluminous smokiness orange flame. For greater effect, turn off the light. We see how a magician in the dark makes beautiful passes with his palm with a flame, then instantly clenches his palm into a fist and the flame goes out. The lights flash and the magician bows to the applause of the audience.

Now let's look at the second part of the trick - the chemical one. The magician poured ordinary water from a glass into his palm! But it won't catch fire! However, we did not notice that a small cotton ball soaked in a mixture of carbon tetrachloride and cyclohexane in equal proportions, grabbed from the table along with a lighter, fell into our palm. Having poured water into his palm, the magician quietly drained it, and the cotton ball began to evaporate a certain substance, releasing a flammable gas. The magician sets it on fire. The gas burns for several seconds without causing any harm to the palm. Clenching his palm into a fist, the magician sharply limits the access of air to the flame - the fire goes out. He only moistened the skin with water on his palm. Otherwise, a mixture of carbon tetrachloride and cyclohexane would penetrate into it and it would be quite severe burn. The peculiarity is that the combustion did not occur on the skin of the palm itself, but at some distance from it. And since, according to the laws of physics, heat tends upward, a layer of cold air appeared between the palm and the flame.

Another way to repeat this trick

It should be noted that the mixture of carbon tetrachloride and cyclohexane is toxic. For this reason, the focus is placed in a very large, well-ventilated room. For example, in the circus arena, in pauses between performances, when forced ventilation using powerful mechanisms.

Less dangerous trick using ethyl ether boric acid. But its vapors burn not with a yellow, but with a greenish flame, which is not so impressive. To prepare ethyl ester of boric acid in a strictly defined proportion, dry boric acid itself is used, ethanol, concentrated hydrochloric or sulfuric acid. The mixture releases ether vapors that are not visible. The resulting aerosol burns. This fire does not burn the skin at all. But if after some time (a matter of seconds!) the access of air to the mixture is not blocked, the ethyl alcohol itself will begin to burn, which will result in a guaranteed skin burn.

As you can see, tricks with cold fire are very effective in the dark, but require excellent reaction. When demonstrating them, there is always an assistant with a wet towel next to the magician - in case the magician does not have time to quickly put out the flame and gets burned.

Spring has arrived, which means it's time to go outdoors. What to have fun in nature, besides field kitchen and setting up the camp? We invite you to try several ways to start a fire without matches or lighters. It's exciting, and most importantly, if the result is positive, you will get invaluable experience, which may be useful to you someday in life.

Every experienced hunter, fisherman, and just an avid traveler should know how to make fire without matches. This is the basis for survival in any unforeseen situation. Fire is life, and you can do without it in harsh conditions. hiking conditions extremely difficult. Matches can simply become damp and then traditional and not so traditional matches come to the rescue. traditional methods and methods of making fire. Some of the methods described below have been familiar to people since ancient times, and some are the know-how of modern times, they were invented recently and in some respects are not inferior traditional ways making fire. Lighting a fire without matches is a painstaking and time-consuming task. You can find yourself in the wilderness under absolutely any conditions, and only a fire can save a person.

1. Making fire using friction

This is perhaps the most famous and affordable way receiving fire. It is long and painstaking, so you need to prepare for the fact that it will take a lot of time to get the first spark.

There are certain criteria for the success of such an event, one of which is the correctly selected wood as a rod and plank. The wood should be dry, not damp. A rod is a wooden stick that must be rotated on a piece of wood around its axis to create fire, creating the effect of strong friction.

The best types of wood suitable for making fire by friction are Walnut, cypress, cedar, willow, aspen, pine.

It is necessary to collect the tinder into a compact pile. Don't put too much tinder on the wood base. The tinder itself is made from dry leaves or grass, it is lightweight material, which should flare up from a spark. IN wooden base a V-shaped hole is cut and some tinder is placed in the recess of the hole. After this, the wooden rod is placed in the recess and the rod begins to rotate. To make it more convenient to rotate the rod with your hands, you need to take a wooden stick to create a rod at least sixty centimeters long. You need to press the rod onto the wooden backing very carefully, while quickly rotating it between your palms.

After a spark is obtained, dry moss, juniper, and aspen bark should be placed on the board.

Another interesting way making fire without matches is Fire plow. To make fire similar method A wooden backing made of dry wood is useful, in the middle of which a recess is cut for the rod. You have to forcefully move it up and down. As soon as the tree begins to smolder, it is necessary to add tinder.

A bow drill is another versatile way to make fire without using matches. Unlike manual friction, producing a spark from a bow occurs more quickly. Since the bow maintains ideal pressure and maximum rotation speed of the wooden shaft. As a result, strong friction occurs, which helps to get fire in a short time. What will you need for this method? This is, first of all:

• Wooden rod;
• Wooden backing;
• Bow and weight;

When friction occurs, the weight is pressed onto the end of the rod, and the rod rotates with the help of the bow. In order not to break the rod, you need to use a less dense and hard weighting material.

You can use water or oil as a lubricant, this will make the process go faster. Let's talk about the onion itself. You can do it yourself. The length of the bow should correspond to the length of the arm ordinary person. It is better to choose a flexible and pliable vine; the bowstring is made from rope or shoelace. The bowstring can be made from absolutely anything, but it must be strong and not break during the making of fire. It is simply pulled over the ends of the vine branches and the bow is ready to use. A hole is cut in the wooden backing and a wooden rod is placed in the loop of the bowstring. One end of the rod should be placed in the hole in the backing, and the other in the bow string. The bow is moving forward movements, and through this process fire can be quickly produced. Tinder is added to the smoldering coals, and the fire slowly but surely flares up.

2. Making fire using lenses

We all know the standard physics course at school, from which we remember that a beam passing through glass solar energy concentrated at one point. The temperature is so high at this point that just holding a paper napkin to it will cause it to light up. This method of making fire is good for everyone, but there is also a significant disadvantage. You can get fire using a lens only in dry and sunny weather. What will you need?

• Lens of any type;
• Tinder collected from dry leaves or grass;

If there is no lens, then ordinary glasses, a piece of glass, the bottom will do aluminum can, and even ice. By the way, you can dwell in more detail on making fire using ice. It would seem that these are two mutually exclusive concepts: ice and fire. But thanks to ice, you can light a fire, this is especially useful in winter period, when it is difficult to find dry leaves or grass. The principle of operation of this interesting method was also described by Jules Verne. You need to create a lens from regular ice, but the ice should be as clean and transparent as possible.

Thanks to coordination sun rays You can even set fire to paper. It is not always possible to find pure ice in nature, but you can freeze simple drinking water. The resulting piece of ice is carefully processed and polished using improvised means. Ice can also be frozen in a spherical container, such as a shallow saucer. But you need to remove the ice as carefully as possible so as not to damage it. Ice melts quickly and such a lens should be used as quickly as possible.

As for simple lenses, it’s enough to just take some dry twigs, leaves, grass and build something similar to a nest. After the lens is pointed at the tinder, you must carefully monitor the appearance of smoldering and smoke, and try to fan the fire.

3. Making fire using chemicals

Simple knowledge of elementary chemistry will help you make fire. Some chemical compositions ignite when rubbed or mixed. But when using this method, you must exercise individual caution so as not to harm yourself. It is important to avoid physical contact chemical substance with the metal surface. The following compounds promote ignition:

• Potassium permanganate (potassium permanganate) and regular sugar in a ratio of nine (sugar) to one (potassium permanganate);
• Potassium chlorate and sugar (proportions three to one);
• Potassium permanganate and glycerin;
• Sodium chlorate and sugar (proportion three to one);
• Potassium permanganate and any antifreeze;

Now the question is: where to get these chemical elements? Potassium chloride is included in some drugs against throat diseases (Furacillin). And potassium permanganate and glycerin can be found in the first aid kit. The most basic example: take a small piece of cotton wool, add potassium permanganate, then sugar and begin to rub this kind of tinder with a stick.

After a couple of minutes, the cotton wool will ignite. Common mistake inexperienced people is that they do not follow the correct dosage of ingredients.

4. Making fire using flint, steel or flint

Another method, rooted in centuries-old history: making fire using flint. Flint was especially popular in the eighteenth century before the invention of ordinary matches. To strike a spark and make a fire, it is enough to have a silicon stone. A couple of blows are enough and you can bring tinder from leaves or dry grass to ignite the fire. Flint was often used in camping conditions or in war. And also, many people wear it in theirs. The chair must be metal.

If you're lucky, you can make sparks for a future fire using silicon. Flint, consisting of hard rock minerals, can be easily found among stones. By the way, flint steel was used in ancient firearms.

5. Condom

After we have examined the traditional and quite familiar methods of making fire without matches, we can turn our attention to alternative methods of making a flame. Let's talk about the most interesting of them. A condom is not only a means of protection, but also an excellent means of starting a fire without matches. It needs to be filled with water, the main thing is not to overdo it.

The result is something like a lens. The light from the sun passing through the condom is focused on the pre-prepared tinder on a wooden backing. As a result, the tinder begins to slowly smolder, all that remains is to fan the flames of the fire. This is such an interesting and creative way.

6. Flashlight

You can make fire using a regular flashlight, if you don't feel sorry for it, of course. The flashlight will have to be broken. The electrical part of the light bulb on the lantern is carefully broken (we need to expose the electric arc itself).

We quickly place a little tinder, bring the bare arc and set the tinder on fire.

7. Skating

If we don't wash, we'll ride! IN in this case you will need regular cotton wool. This old prison know-how consists of forming a kind of roller from a simple piece of cotton wool.

The roller begins to roll out over the wooden surface. After some time, the cotton wool begins to smolder, the cotton wool increases in size, becoming saturated with oxygen. Oxygen itself is a catalyst for the combustion reaction.

8. A can of Coca-Cola and a bar of chocolate.

How can these delicacies help in making fire, you ask? Everything is very simple. The ingredients for success are a sunny day, chocolate and a soda can (tin). Open the chocolate and start rubbing it on the bottom tin can. Of course, it’s a pity for chocolate, but you don’t have to sacrifice anything to make fire!

This clever polishing will make the tin bottom shiny and shiny. After polishing, the Coca-Cola can turned into a kind of parabolic mirror. We turn the polished bottom towards the sun and try to set fire to the previously prepared tinder.

8. Wool and batteries

Wool and regular batteries can also come in handy when performing the difficult task of starting a fire without matches.

Just stretching wool fabric(it is desirable that the wool be natural) and begin to quickly rub a piece of wool with a battery. The optimal battery power suitable for such actions is approximately 9 W. After much effort, the wool slowly begins to ignite, all you have to do is blow lightly on it and add tinder to make the fire start faster.

10. Firearms

You can get a saving fire if you have it firearms. The shot is simply removed from the cartridge itself, the cartridge case can be filled with tinder in the form of dry moss, leaves, rolled dry bark, and a blank shot can be fired at the place where the fire is planned. The rest is just a matter of technique, you need to fan the fire and throw dry branches into it.

A rather exotic method at first glance, but still very effective in emergency situations.

As you can see, there are many ways to start a fire if you don’t have matches. It's important to know some basic rules, folk tricks and tips that can keep you warm in the forest or even save your life if you suddenly get lost. Experience accumulated over centuries allows us to obtain life-saving fire from almost any available materials. This does not require special skill, it is important to apply maximum amount efforts to make fire. Fire is life. And a cheerful, crackling fire will warm you in any situation and in any weather.

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Cold fire is called special type low temperature flame. Such fire is “tame”: you can touch it, hold it in your hands, play with it. Probably, each of you has seen films or animated films in which the characters released fireballs from their hands. Of course, all this is the result of the work of computer graphics industry professionals, but today, thanks to the science of chemistry, we will tell you how to make a cold fire at home.

You will need:

Preparing the base on which we will apply ready mixture. The fact is that cold fire can cause significant harm to the skin if it is applied directly to the hand. So for these purposes we will build a small ball.

To do this, we wrap a fairly tight ball into a ball. wool thread. A ball of 2-3 centimeters in size is enough for 3-4 minutes of burning.

If you don’t want to risk touching the fire with your hands, you can build something similar to a torch by placing a ball on a knitting needle or a thin long stick.

We proceed directly to preparing the mixture for cold fire.

To do this, pour a tablespoon of ethyl alcohol into a small container. We add the same amount of boric acid, and only after that – a drop of hydrochloric or sulfuric acid. It is very important to maintain proportions and thoroughly mix all ingredients, since we are dealing with very unstable and strong chemicals.

Next, we need to heat the resulting mixture. To do this, it is best to use a water bath (2-3 minutes will be enough). To check the temperature, dip your fingertip into the mixture: if you can stand it for a few seconds (it doesn’t burn too much), remove it.

We blot the ball with the solution. Before setting it on fire, keep in mind that it will start to burn first hydrochloric acid(or boric, depending on which one you used), the flame from which is almost insensitive. But after this, the alcohol will ignite, which, when burned, can seriously burn the skin. So as soon as you begin to feel a slight burning sensation, extinguish the ball, or put it in a specially prepared empty container.

Few children, and adults too, have not dreamed of holding a flaming fireball in their palms and feeling like they were in the shoes of their favorite fantasy heroes! Unfortunately, the flame can seriously burn your hands, so for a colorful trick you need cold fire rather than regular fire.

It would seem difficult to find a more paradoxical phrase. However, it really exists, moreover, it can be easily made at home. A few minutes of work and you can, to the envy of your guests, demonstrate a flaming ball lying in your hands.

For this trick you need to prepare:

• A piece of cotton fabric;
• needle and thread;
• shallow saucer or tin lid;
• a flammable substance with which you are going to impregnate the future fireball.

There are several ways to make a burning hand ball, and they vary in difficulty.

Important! Therefore, before you make a cold fire, it is worth considering whether you have the skills of a chemist and necessary equipment, or is it better to prefer a simpler, but equally effective way.

Cold fire: quick and easy

First, you need to make the base for the fireball. Take a cotton cloth and fold it into a compact ball and wrap it with thread. It would be a good idea to stitch the resulting ball for reliability.

The best flammable material is isopropanol or products containing it, such as hand sanitizers - for example, Lizanol. However, high-octane gasoline will demonstrate no less, or even greater, effect. The temperature of these substances is relatively low, and the flame they create will not burn your hands.

Surely every person has seen how in the movies or the circus people hold flames on their hands, or even juggle or throw them. And if they can be created using computer graphics, then in the circus it looks like a real miracle. In fact, this phenomenon has a completely scientific explanation and is called “cold fire” by chemists. If you wish, you can surprise guests at the holiday with a spectacle by making it yourself.

Let's define it in terms

By non-burning flame, chemistry means a chain reaction of oxidation in which a glow is observed. So if you strictly follow the terminology, cold is not. It is used to create very spectacular special effects and some types of fireworks. A number of esters and acids, both organic and inorganic, are capable of producing a cold flame. The most commonly used is the ethyl derivative of boric acid.

Often, cold fire also means a visual “trick” in which the combustion process as such is absent. It is usually used not for tricks, but for design purposes.

The most effective way to make a cold fire at home

If we consider the most known variant creating a flame that does not burn, then you will need quite affordable ingredients. Take a spoonful of alcohol (medical or chemically pure, used for analysis). It is mixed with an equal volume of boric acid powder. It, like alcohol, can be bought at any pharmacy. A drop of concentrated strong acid - hydrochloric or sulfuric - is dropped into the solution. For the uninformed: this one is filled into batteries, so getting it out is also not a problem. The vessel with the workpiece heats up. The fastest and safest way to do this is in a primitive water bath. When the mixture becomes noticeably warm, but not yet hot, you can begin to perform the trick.

If you have never made cold fire before, you should not set it on fire directly on your palm - if you do not have the skill, you will get injured. It is better to roll it up, soak it in the composition and only then set it on fire. The match (lighter) should not touch the ball of thread.

Caution is paramount!

The fire remains cold only as long as the ether formed by the reagents burns. When it runs out, ethyl alcohol will take over directly - but its combustion temperature is quite high. In addition, do not forget that the acid involved in creating the flame is a dangerous substance. So you should take precautions:

1. Do not increase the dose of acid under any circumstances. Firstly, an explosive mixture may result. Secondly, you can get a chemical burn by placing the ball on your palm.
2. Make sure that there is no hair or edge of clothing near the ball being lit. An inexperienced magician may not catch the moment of ignition of alcohol, and the mentioned things are easily flammable.
3. Keep a small, non-flammable container nearby to cover and extinguish the cold fire when it gets hot. Or show focus over kitchen sink to quickly throw it into it.

After a certain amount of training, when you learn to control temperature changes to such an extent that you do not get burned, you can light a non-burning flame directly on the palm of your hand.

A safer option

You can make a cold fire in another way, although it will look less impressive, since the flame from it has a familiar color, not greenish. Take a small piece of cotton fabric, roll it into a ball and wrap it (or better yet, stitch it) with thread so that it does not unravel. Low-temperature fuel, for example, isopropanol, is poured into a shallow bowl. You can take the so-called one, but here you need to be careful: these liquids have different combustion temperatures, and you can run into quite noticeable ones. The fabric ball is dipped in fuel, wrung out and set on fire. The lump will warm your hand, but if you roll it over your palm and between your fingers, you will only feel a pleasant warmth. And if you lubricate the place where the ball is placed with cream, you can keep it in one place. The only safety measure is not to touch the top of the flame - this is a guaranteed burn.

Short flame

There are other methods for making cold fire with your own hands, mostly based on the dexterity of a magician and small tricks. The easiest two options are:

Simulated flame

It remains to consider the cold fireplace fire. At home, not having the opportunity to lay out a real fireplace, many romantics do just that. A fan is placed in a box (you can even use cardboard) so that the air flow from it is directed upward. LEDs and optical filters for red, blue and yellow color. There are mirrors on the sides inside. Triangles are cut from fabric and glued to the box. The system is plugged into sockets - and a cold flame creates comfort in the room.

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