Swedish Matches

We used to have KAV matches. They were acquired by the company Swedish Match in 2000. When I searched I found out that Sweden is an important supplier in match market.Their comparative advantage comes from their ease of access to raw Forests consists of %60 of Sweden's area. But the advantage is not coming from wood but from phosphorus.

Phosphorus is first produced in 1675 in Germany. But the production process was extremely hard. Henning Brand, a German inventor who was trying to produce gold from human urine. During process he accidentally produced a substance which is illuminating and burn spontaneously when exposed to air. Phosphorus's name comes from Latin, which means "the bearer of light". But the production cost of phosphorus with this method was extremely high. It was costing 500 USD to produce 30 grams of Phosphorus, which make commercial production impossible.

Then in 1750's a Swedish chemist, Karl Scheele, invented a method to produce phosphorus without human urine. But there were two other contributions were needed for commercial production. First came from Gustaf Erik Pasch, who formulate a way to change yellow phosphorus, which is dangerous to human health and extremely flammable, to red phosphorus. The later substance's flammability could be controlled. Another Swedish engineer, Alexander Lagerman invented a machine which allows mass production of matches.

So with the contribution of three science people, Sweden has an important role in World's match production.