How Flint and Steel Really Works

Description

For years I've been teaching school kids what happens when stone and steel create sparks, without ever knowing if it was true! Recently, a microscope let me see what's really going on . . .

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,flint and steel,firemaking,campfires,microscope,camping

Video Transcription

hello it's April in Wisconsin and it's snowing again I've done something as a wilderness teacher that I'm a little bit ashamed of and I I take flint and steel and i go and i have a class of survival in flint to steal fire class for kids at some local schools and for years I have been telling them how this works the flint and steel where I've been saying is that when the rock contacts you steal the stone is actually harder than the steel and breaks off pieces of steel sparks are essentially molten steel and if we could look at them under a microscope I say we would see these tiny perfectly round balls where those sparks have flown off cooled in the air basically as little pieces of lava and then him falling down and become these small spheres well here's the thing i had heard that that was a truth but i never been able to check it out until i recently got my hands on a microscope so i would like to show you what I found I struck the flint and steel into a white ball and then took a close look at first all I saw were shards of Steel and some broken bits of chert but then there was the first small round orb the more I looked the more I found looks like I was not leading those children astray that when church strikes deal we get small sparks which are actually molten pieces of metal

and when they don't hit char cloth they cool in the air into small round orbs I'm hypothesizing that the shards of Steel are on the end of this stroke when the stone and steel scraped together at first you have enough power that sparks are thrown but then it's scraping along with less force enough to scrape pieces of metal off but not to make them molten I certainly found this interesting and I'm hoping that you did too if you ever teach somebody flint and steel feel free to tell them that indeed the sparks are pieces of steel molten steel that are flying through the air and if they cool in the air they turn into these little round balls which are too small for us to see with the naked eye thanks for watching