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July 5, 2011 07:41 pm PDT

Introduction to The Practical Pyromaniac, by William Gurstelle

My friend and MAKE contributing editor William Gurstelle has written a new book: The Practical Pyromaniac: Build Fire Tornadoes, One-Candlepower Engines, Great Balls of Fire, and More Incendiary Devices. It has instructions for 16 fiery projects. Bill and his publisher kindly gave us permission to run the introduction to the book here. THE PARADOX OF FIRE Fire is the most important agent of change on earth. It makes our cars and airplanes move, it purifies metals, it cooks our food. It also destroys forests and pollutes the atmosphere. Fire is also one of the most paradoxical forces in nature. Sometimes it's incredibly difficult to light a much-desired campfire and keep it going, while at other times unwanted fires start far too easily. To Greek philosophers of the Classical era, fire was a tangible, material thing. The legends they repeated held that noble Prometheus purloined fire from Mount Olympus and secretly gave it to human beings, much to the chagrin of an angry Zeus. As Greek civilization progressed, legends became insufficient; people sought to understand fire on a more scientific basis. The first major nonmythological theorist was the Greek scholar Empedocles, who devised the earliest well-known explanation of the nature of the world. Everything, he said, was made up of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. This was called the Four Element hypothesis. Aristotle refined that a bit, and for the next 2,000 years it was accepted with only minor modifications as the cosmological basis for the entire universe....


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/O8TlKPSRtCk/introduction-to-the.html

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