Discuss Star Trek: The Next Generation

I hadn't thought much of it before, but this time I looked it up. Fairly close to the end of part 1, they show "Mark Twain" lighting his cigar with what appears to be a strike-anywhere type of match. But from what I've found, strike-anywhere matches didn't exist until the early 1900s.

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Guinan gave them to him?

@Knixon said:

I hadn't thought much of it before, but this time I looked it up. Fairly close to the end of part 1, they show "Mark Twain" lighting his cigar with what appears to be a strike-anywhere type of match. But from what I've found, strike-anywhere matches didn't exist until the early 1900s.


In the episode "Time's Arrow Part 1," the crew travels back to 1893, where at a reception Mark Twain can be seen striking a match against a cup and then lighting his cigar with it.

The strike-anywhere match—aka friction match—was invented by the English chemist John Walker in 1826. He sold a box of 50 matches for one shilling. An improved version—antimony sulfide was replaced with white phosphorus—by French chemist Charles Sauria, was later patented in 1836 in the USA by A. D. Phillips, who sold the rights to Ezekiel Byam, founder of the first match-making company, Lucifer Match Factory, in Massachusetts, USA. A box of one hundred of these matches then cost 25 cents.

Another American company that made similar matches was that of Tatnal, which was taken over in 1861 by the Swift & Courtney Company. They got a boost in business during the American Civil War. In 1880, the company was sold to the Barber Match Company and renamed the Diamond Match Company, which became the largest match-making company in the USA with over 85 percent of the market in 1881.

Mark Twain probably used the Diamond matches.

More proof that not only will you get different search results depending on where you are, but you might even get different results each time you try it.

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