Top 45 Amazing Facts About Fire | Amazing Facts 4U
- Fire is a chemical reaction that releases light and heat.
- The ancient Greeks amazingly started a fire with concentrated sunlight. A parabolic mirror that focuses solar rays is still used to ignite the Olympic torch.
- The amazing fact is earth is the only known planet where fire can burn. Everywhere else you don’t find enough oxygen for fire to occur.
- Fire triangle represents the three components that fires need to exist: heat, oxygen and fuel. Fire is extinguished when one of these components is missing.
- Fact is oxygen supply influences the color of the flame. A low oxygen fire gives off a yellow glow. A high oxygen fire burns blue.
- Candle flames are blue at the bottom because that’s where they take up fresh air, and yellow at the top because the rising fumes from below partly suffocate the upper part of the flame.
- Amazing fact is fire can make water. Place a cold spoon over a candle and you will observe the water vapor condense on the metal. Wax contains hydrogen which combines with oxygen to make water.
- Assuming stable fuel, heat and oxygen levels, a typical house fire will amazingly double in size every minute.
- Fire is faster than generally thought as it takes less than thirty seconds for a fire to become very difficult to control.
- A candle flame typically burns at around 1000 degrees Celsius (1800 Fahrenheit).
- The amazing fact is that more people die from smoke inhalation than flames. Fire can suck all of the oxygen from a room and fill it with poisonous smoke and gases before flames even reach a room.
- During wildfires, it’s amazing that trees can explode if water deep inside the tree quickly turns to steam.
- The heat from a fire alone is enough to kill. It can get as hot as 315 degrees Celsius at eye level , hot enough to scorch your lungs if you breathe it in and to melt the clothes you’re wearing into your skin.
- If you’re in a burning house, you might not be able to see. It can be pitch black because of the dark smoke.
- Amazingly you might not be able to find the exit in fire even if you’ve lived there for years since smoke can be extremely disorienting. Memorize your escape plan beforehand and practice it blindfolded.
- Air is 21 percent oxygen which combines with acetylene and you get an oxyacetylene welding torch that burns at over 5500 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest fire you encounter.
- A gallon of gasoline has the explosive potential of 30 sticks of dynamite.
- Amazingly you can start a fire with ice.
- At 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, unprotected steel may collapse under its own weight during a fire.
- The amazing fact is that forest fires move faster uphill than downhill! The steeper the slope, the faster the fire travels.
- Once a forest fire begins, it can spread at an amazing rate of up to 15 miles per hour, consuming everything in its path.
- On 13 August 2012 scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland, announced that they had achieved the Highest Manmade Temperature of over 5 trillion K and perhaps as high as 5.5 trillion K , more than 300,000 times hotter than the center of the sun.
- When John Walker used a stick to stir a pot containing antimony sulfide, potassium chlorate & sulfur, some of the mixture stuck to the end of the stick. When the lump was scraped , it caught fire which led to the birth of match sticks.
- Fire extinguishers control fires by discharging water, foams, carbon dioxide, dry chemicals or other substances.
- No one knows who invented the fire hydrant, because its patent was destroyed in a fire.
- A single fire hydrant in San Francisco survived a massive earthquake in 1906 and aided fire fighters in saving the Mission district. The hydrant was painted gold in memory of the event.
- Walt Disney World is the largest consumer of fireworks in the United States launching the fireworks with compressed air instead of gunpowder to reduce fumes and gain better height and timing.
- There’s a bush called dictamnus albus which secretes a flammable, oily substance which can be lit on fire, without burning the bush itself.
- Amazingly cotton will catch on fire if super glue is applied to it.
- More than 80 percent of all wildfires are started by humans.
- The most common cause of fire deaths is cooking fires , the risk emanating from kitchen. Two of every five home fires started in the kitchen.
- In the great fire of London in 1666, 80 % of London was burnt down but only 6 people were injured. It burned out of control for 5 days and destroyed 13,000 homes and 87 churches.
- The great fire of London also ended bubonic plague epidemic that had killed 65000 people as rats and fleas were fried.
- A natural gas vent in Iraq known as The Eternal Fire has been burning continuously for over 4,000 years, and it has been mentioned in the Old Testament’s Book of Daniel.
- A coal seam about 140 miles north of Sydney, Australia, has been amazingly burning for thousands of years.
- America’s deadliest fire took place in 1865, aboard the steamship Sultana when the boilers exploded. The ship was six times over capacity mostly carrying prisoners released recently. The death toll was amazing 1,547.
- During WWII, Japan actually sent 9000 “fire balloons” towards North America to cause damage . About thousand of them actually hit land and killed 6 people.
- The Cairo opera house was destroyed by fire in 1970. Amazing thing was it also housed Cairo fire station.
- Fire houses have spiral staircases because the horses that used to pull the fire wagons learned to walk up straight ones.
- Ashtrays are compulsorily required on every commercial airplane because 123 people died on a flight in 1973 when a lit cigarette caught fire in a lavatory waste bin.
- On August 19, 1980, a Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight carrying 301 people caught fire shortly after takeoff. The plane landed safely but when the ground crew opened the doors, everyone was already dead due to poisonous gases..
- In 1985, Philadelphia police used a helicopter to drop two bombs on a house during an armed standoff which resulted in a fire that killed 11 and destroyed 60 homes.
- The Black Dragon Fire of 1987, the largest wildfire in modern times, burned some 20 million acres across China and the Soviet Union, an area about the size of South Carolina.
- A fire in Mecca, Saudi Arabia in 2002 killed 15 school girls . They were not allowed to leave the burning building by the state’s religious police because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress.
- In 2004, over 300 people died in a supermarket fire in Asunción, Paraguay because the owners shut the doors so that people wouldn’t leave without paying.
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