Obviously, I’m rapidly becoming a fan of Thomas Pavitte. Here is his tribute to the inventor of the matchstick, John Walker. Over a series of months, Pavitte created this typographical sculpture using 10,000 friction matches. I had no idea, but Walker invented the matchstick by accident–a fact that fascinated Pavitte.

While Walker was preparing a lighting mixture on one occasion, a match which had been dipped in it took fire by an accidental friction upon the hearth. He at once appreciated the practical value of the discovery, and started making friction matches. They consisted of wooden splints or sticks of cardboard coated with sulphur and tipped with a mixture of sulphide of antimony, chlorate of potash, and gum, the sulphur serving to communicate the flame to the wood.

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Some people make furnitures out of scraps of wood, but Roman Yerokhin’s family made theirs from really tiny scraps of wood, namely matchsticks:

… since matchsticks were one of the few abundant resources in the USSR, Roman Yerokhin’s family chose it as a medium to give their home a unique makeover. While other people threw away the matchsticks after lighting the stove, they saved them for the sake of art, and even lit up entire boxes of matches when they ran out of materials. Then his mother would glue the matchsticks on small pieces of cardboard to ensure the squares in the pattern were all the same size. Then the pieces were attached to the otherwise bland furniture and covered with a layer of varnish.

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Phillip Warren’s hobby for the past 62 years has been building models of warships out of matchsticks. So far, he’s used 650,000 matches to build 400 ship models:

The master modeller, from Brandford, Dorset, has created every ship built in the Royal Navy since 1945, as well as 60 other ships from the US navy and other impressive floating fortresses from 18 other nations. One of the largest ships in his collection is the famous USS Nimitz, the largest aircraft carrier in the world.

Throghout his career as a ship model builder, Phillip Waren created over 400 individual ships, as well as 1,200 airplane models that make his aircraft carriers look more real. The average ship in his collection is made using around 1,500 matchsticks and takes about a month to complete, but for his larger creations he used over 5,000 matchsticks and 200 wooden boxes. These took him about a year to complete. All in all, Phillip Waren used around 650,000 matchsticks, to create his entire fleet.

Article Link and Gallery Link via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: ModelWarships.com

Ukrainian artist Yurko Gutsulyak has created what is probably the perfect calendar for pyromaniacs: the "days" made of individual matches that you can tear off and set alight.

Link – via Typography Served