Half of the 500 billion matches used in the United States each year are given away free. These 250 billion free lights, in the form of book matches, are an American institution that we have come to take for granted without realizing that only we enjoy such a privilege.

The far-sightedness of the men who first thought of the possibilities of using the match as an advertising device is directly responsible for this phenomenon, and to their dream we owe our privilege of paying only 31 cents per person each year for all types of matches.

The history of fire making is a long one...59 centuries long. But for 56 of these centuries, matches were unknown. In 1668, an alchemist made the first step with the discovery of phosphorus. One hundred and fifty-eight years later, an English pharmacist invented and sold the first match. Thus John Walker became the father of the match industry.

In 1830, a Frenchman, Dr. Charles Sauria, made a phosphorus match head, the first of its kind. He was followed by two Swedes who perfected the safety match. This development paved the way for the first book match that Joshua Pusey made in 1892. But Mr. Pusey, a Philadelphia lawyer, found inventing easier than selling, so he sold his patent to a match company.

At this point, the book match might have become just another sold commodity and the 63 million Americans who carry them in their pockets and purses might have had to pay for them. But that is when the great idea was born. A salesman named Henry C. Traute was given the job of selling the new match form. At the time, the company was capable of making only 3600 books per hour, but Mr. Traute's ideas were bigger than that.

First, he moved the striking surface from the inside, where Pusey had put it, to the outside of the book. In the interests of safety, he coined the familiar "close cover before striking." Then he began his masterstroke.

A traveling opera company gave him the idea. Preparing for a New York performance, their manager bought up hundreds of blank books. He set his cast to lettering the message on each one and pasting in pictures of the show's principals.

Traute seized on the scheme, got an Akron lithographer to print an ad on several covers, and set out to sell the service. In Wisconsin, he got an order for ten million books. From the Duke tobacco people he got another order for 30 million books. This at a time when the machinery for producing such mass orders was still on paper.

When the chewing gum king, William Wrigley, showed sales resistance, Traute offered to buy a million boxes of gum to give away in promoting book match sales. Wrigley groaned, "If I sell them to you, you'll own my chewing gum factory in about three years!" So he gave in a bought a billion books of matches to promote chewing gum. This advertising gave Wrigley a momentum that his business has never lost.

Still Traute was not satisfied. The books were still being sold to the user. He picked out an intersection in New York City, which had a tobacco store on each corner. He then convinced one of the storeowners that a match book gift with each purchase would beat competition. Soon, all four stores were giving away match books. The practice has become so widespread that OPA rules during the last war refused to allow stores to stop giving away matches, declaring that it constituted a raise in price to hold out on free lights.

A recent survey showed that 98 per cent of smokers carry book matches, and 73 per cent explain that they're the most convenient light. Three people out of eight can name off-hand the advertiser on the match book in their pockets.

While Traute was pushing his book matches, William A. Fairburn, a naval architect, worked on the worst problem in the industry...phosphorus necrosis, a poisoning derived from handling the phosphorus during the manufacture of matches.

While not a chemist, he tested formula after formula until he found a substance that was not poisonous to humans and also distasteful to rodents who had often started fires by gnawing phosphorus heads.

To protect the public and the match industry, Fairburn's company deeded the formula to the people of the United States for all to use without royalty. That ended man's age-old search for a convenient source of fire that could be carried on the person without danger.

Today, with all of its matches safe and its book matches free, America uses 57 million matches every hour. Yet some instinct inherited through the ages makes us thrifty in using matches. Of 9,000 discarded match books found in Chicago's streets, only seven contained unused lights out of the 180,000 matches originally in the books.