Safety match - Made in Sweden.

Today I want to guide you in the Match museum in Sweden, in the city of Jönköping. I went there from Göteborg on 2th of January. The way took about 2.20 hours. Well, buses are very comfortable and I have slept the whole way :P.

This is Jönköping's central station:

From the station till the Match museum it is about 10 minutes walking, but before going there I went to my host to leave all my luggage and have tasty food. After I went on my way to the museum. Maybe you do not know, but this museum and the place itself is unique because 1. there is only one match museum in the world and 2. before this museum was the very first safety match factory in Sweden and I think in the whole world. Of course before people were using matches, but they ware dangerous and caused different diseases.

Everything began in 1844-45 when Johan and Carl Lundström created and started producing matches, below you can see their working table and a match cover catalog.



Some pictures from the catalog:



The very first matches were made from Phosphorus and it was really dangerous for workers especially for kids who were working there 10 hours in day. Kids had thin fingers and could easily work with the thin matches. (Unfortunately they were getting only one third part of the salary what adults were taking for the same job)

Everything had changed in 1853, when chemist Gustav Erik Pasch found out a new formula for the match's head (instead of pure phosphorus). From this time on, the factory started producing safety matches. (I have to say, matches are done from tree Asp which has just perfect qualities for producing matches.)

Bellow you can see the factory's laboratory :


Everything was done by hand for a long time. Whole families were working at the factories and they could even get apartments and could work there, but if one of the family members was losing job, they were losing the apartment as well. Down you can see how a mother and her kid are gluing paper on the boxes:



The whole producing process you can see bellow. One asp log was enough for 370 000 matches.


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Really big changes happened in 1892, when Alexander Lagerman created a universal machine, which could do the whole producing process. Of course this was not really good for people who were working there.


A completely new history starts in the life of the factory with Ivan Kreuger (1917) but now I am not going to talk about this, I just want to show you several other pictures :)

First match boxes:

2. After paper match box was invented wooden box:


3.I tried to make a box myself :)


4.Different match boxes, which were producing all around the world under Swedish match fabric label.



5. different variation of boxes.


Now I want to finish our excursion. Thanks for being my guests. :)