What makes sparks

A rite of passage that ties you to wilderness travelers through the millennia, the ability to use flint and steal is one of the basic survival skills everyone should master. But how does flint and steel work? More specifically, what causes the sparks when you strike a piece of flint with steel? The answer may surprise you!

The following information will help you understand what it takes to make fire using flint and steel or flint and FireSteel. It will change the way you look at flint and steel as a fire making tool and perhaps even make you a better flint and steel fire maker. Survival Topics believes that if you know the fundamental reasons why survival gear and survival techniques work then you are in a far better position to use them to best advantage.

Outwardly the answer seems obvious; striking flint with steel produces hot sparks. However, dig a little deeper and you will find there is a lot more to it. It all revolves around a little known fact about iron and some other metals that revolutionized the way people started fires thousands of years ago; pyrophorics.

Flint and Steel — Simply by carrying a piece of iron steel and a hard, sharp object such as a piece of flint rock, you can start a fire whenever you want. By spontaneous we mean these substances will simply catch on fire of their own accord without you having to do anything such as light it with a flame. This is also known as autoignition.

What many people do not realize is that iron is a pyrophoric material; in the presence of oxygen, iron catches on fire automatically! It just starts burning. The answer lays in the fact that the portion of the iron object in contact with the air and your skin is not pure iron. Rather it has developed a thin coating of iron oxide, or rust, immediately upon contact with the oxygen in the air. This serves to seal off the iron inside from exposure to the air and reduces the rate of further rusting.

Nice answer here about this here physics. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Johnathan Gross Johnathan Gross 1, 9 9 silver badges 18 18 bronze badges. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google.

Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked 9. Related 8. You can adjust the knobs with your mouse to change the look of these static electricity sparks or mini-lightning bolts. These items are somewhat related to real world parameters but are more for demonstration than scientific simulation.

For more information, see Generating Static Electricity. A lightning bolt can be over 1. The amount of voltage released in a lightning bolt is typically about ,, volts. The sound of thunder is caused by a shock wave created in the air, similar to the sonic boom of a supersonic jet plane.

The lightning occurs first and the thunder occurs a fraction of a second later. For more information, see Static Electricity and Lightning. A static electricity spark is a sudden flow of electric current across an air gap, heating the air to very high temperatures, cause it to glow.

Humans and Sparks - Preventing painful static sparks. Top-rated books on Electrostatics. Do you have any questions, comments, or opinions on this subject?

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