h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: How To Start a Fire in an Emergency (Or Impress Your Friends While Camping) - A4063330
Author: Erik_Nelson - U1552428

Here's #3 in the bestselling list on Wilderness Survival. This one's on starting fires in the woods. Enjoi!

Hi again Erik,
Another well written and entertaining piece of literature. I wasn't a boy scout nor ever in the forces, so didn't learn these methods of making fires outdoors.
When I was about 12/13 years old I went with some mates along the banks of a local river. We started a fire with matches and, just as you have warned, it travelled along the dry grass literally like wildfire and set the deciduous trees alight; ( silver birch). We panicked and ran from the scene along the country road, dodging into the trees as we saw the fire engine (tender) speeding towards us. They put it out in seconds with plenty of water. There were no buildings near the fire, only a cottage on the other side of the river bank. We presumed they had phoned the brigade soon after seeing us panicking and running away.
I learned later that there were always natural fires starting there in the long, dry summer days.

scr

Hi Eric,

This is an area of interest for me also.

There are a number of existing entries on fire starting. Have you come across A784091 'The Bow Drill - Fire without Matches!' and/or A799383 'Making a Tepee Fire' plus others such as A505801 'Ten Essentials of Outdoor Survival' while you were researching this entry? Some cover pretty much the same ground as parts of this entry, so you might want to tune and prune your entry accordingly. You'll also find entries about shelter building A810172 and A810181.

It's usually good to look onsite to see what has already been done when you're considering an entry. I'm sure you'll find there are holes in what's here and with your interest and enthusiasm you'll make a great contribution to the guide.

I enjoyed reading this. Which is a good criteria for evaluating an entry? Five gallons of liquid oxygen makes very short quick work of starting a campfire or backyard barbeque. Good work!

Hehe....I ssaw an engineer at Purdue trying to find the fastest way to cook a burger. He poured perhaps a pound or two of LOx on an open flame. Afterwards, they guessed that the resulting 15' fireball hit somewhere around 10,000 degrees around the center. They never did find the bbq grill.

The enginneer's name was George Gobel, I think...he won the contest at the company for making the charcoal turn white in about .5 seconds.
They did locate a few small charred and melted piece of the grill, but he burned the burgers.

You can get into GuideML pretty quickly by switching to Brunel when you are working. That gives you some pretty obvious icons on the edit box for adding headers, footnotes, subheaders, bold, italics and so on.

Another trick is to learn GiudeMl by cribbing tricks from other researchers You can look at their Guide ML formatting in entries and personal spaces with the following tricks:

To view an entry, such as A395552, look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/Test395552 remembering to leave out the letter 'A'. If you want to look at the GuideML for someone's Personal Space, type in the URL http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/TestUserPage123456 where 123456 is the U number of the Researcher.

A nice format makes an entry more readable but good content comes first.

Your first paragraph uses the first person which is a no-no and someone will come along and complain about that shortly.

"Afterwards, they guessed that the resulting 15' fireball hit somewhere around 10,000 degrees around the center. They never did find the bbq grill" did they ever find the engineer?.

My favourite way to start a fire (and impress everybody) is to grind some sugar to a powder using a pestle and mortar (fuel). Use a separate P&M to grind up some potassium manganate (VII)(oxidising agent). Mix the two together and place it ina heap on some scrunched up paper. Then add a few drops of water, stand back and wait. After a few seconds one will observe a few wisps of smoke curling upwards and, shortly afterwards, it will ignite.

As a fully appreciate, one is unlikely to have a supply of KMnO4 to hand in an emergency, but one might well have a battery torch and some wire wool for pan cleaning. P0ull out and twist the wire wool into a longish moderately thick rope and connect it across the terminals of the battery. The wire will heat up sufficiently to ignite some paper and then 'Bob's yer uncle!

Complain? No! Point out - yes, Fred.

Erik,

You're going to do some really useful entries for the Guide, I can see and there's some really good stuff here. I don't know if you've read the <./>writing-guidelines</.> yet about entries? There's some really useful information here which will help you.

(This is on the email, but I forgot to post on it)

Author Elvised - Flea Market?

Any Scouts around to second?

Emmily

I'll second it Emmily.

Ok,

Emmily