"Light and Heavy Pipe" contains: "Emperor Yan made it, drilled it to make a fire, cooked it, and the people ate it. There is no stomach trouble, but it is all over the world. "
"Everything is done wrong in five dimensions": "People in ancient times ate sulfur clams, which smelled fishy and hurt their stomachs. People are sick. A sage made a drill to make a fire, so that the smell dissolved, the people were pleased with it, and the king of the world was named Suiren. "
"Taiping Yulan" Volume 76 quoted "Notes on the Collection of Relics": "Therefore, knowing the name of a state-owned tree is full of twists and turns. There are saints in the afterlife. As for their country, see it under this tree. A bird pecked at the tree and caught fire. The sage felt embarrassed, and because he used twigs to drill fire, he was named Suiren. "
Some scholars pointed out that the earliest myth was that Emperor Yan made a fire, and later it evolved into the legend of the man who drilled the fire. (1) this legend spread like wildfire, and most people only know that "Sui people drill wood to make fire", but they don't know the earlier "Yan Di drilled Sui". However, it is not difficult to see that people in later generations will always miss their ancestors' "great victory over nature for the first time".
Of course, this kind of fire-making technology, which was processed by later generations and attributed to the inspiration of a saint, was created collectively by people in primitive times, and it was an idea produced after the disintegration of primitive society.
From about 3500 BC to 2000 BC, the ancient culture of China entered the bronze age. By this time, our ancestors had been able to smelt copper and make simple bronzes. With the appearance of bronze mirror, a new method of taking fire was born. This method of making a fire is called "Yang Xiang" or "Yang Xiang", also called "Jin Xiang". It is recorded in ancient books of pre-Qin dynasty.
"Zhou Li Qiu Guan": "Think about raising your palm and your husband, and take an open flame from the sun." Han Zheng Xuan's Note: "Husband is satisfied, and Yang is also satisfied." Tang Gong Yanshu: "The essence of the sun takes the fire of the sun, so it is named Yangsui." It turns out that this ear of poplar is a kind of copper concave mirror. Facing the sun, the fire is obtained by using the principle of sunlight focusing.
Among the utensils that parents and aunts must wear are records of Zuo Pei Golden Elephant and Youpei Wooden Elephant. The "wood flint" here is a wooden pole for drilling fire. Why bring both "gold enamel" and "wood enamel"? In the Tang Dynasty, Kong Ying Da said, "Light the sun with golden flint on sunny days and drill the fire with wood flint on cloudy days." . It turns out that the "golden urn" is for sunny days and the "wooden urn" is for rainy days, so both of them should be reserved. It can also be seen that this lighting tool was as common as modern people carrying matches and lighters at that time.
Shen Kuo, a famous scientist in Song Dynasty, gave the most detailed and incisive account of Yang Xiang's making fire. He said in Meng Xi Talk: "Yang Xiang's face is hollow. Under the sunlight, all the light gathers inward, an inch or two away from the mirror, and the light gathers a little, as big as hemp, and he gets angry when he touches anything." Our ancestors invented the sun image to make fire, four or five hundred years earlier than the legend that Archimedes, an ancient Greek physicist, burned Roman warships with concave mirror.
1September, 1995, a sheep marrow of the Western Zhou Dynasty was unearthed at the Joo Won? site in Huangdui Village, Fufeng County, Shaanxi Province, which is the earliest artificial kindling tool in China so far. The male pulp is made of copper, shaped like a round concave mirror, with a diameter of 8.8 cm. When unearthed, it was covered with emerald copper spots. In view of the preciousness of cultural relics, it is not easy to remove rust and polish, and at the same time, it is necessary to prove that the yang pulp does have the function of taking fire. The Joo Won? Museum turned it upside down and made an identical copy. After polishing, it was placed in the sun, which really brought the fire of the sun, so this cultural relic named "Yang Nian" was confirmed.
In ancient times, in addition to the gold urn, there were convex lenses made of glass and other materials. This point is contained in Wang Chong's "On Heng Luan Long" in the Eastern Han Dynasty: "Yang Sui took fire from the sky, and at 3 o'clock in the afternoon of May, the five-color stone was refined into a weapon, so he could take fire." Obviously, "melting five-color stone as a device" means melting quartz sand and other raw materials at high temperature to make a convex lens that can focus. This is a step further than Jinsui and hundreds of years earlier than the glass technology handed down from Europe.
Zhang Hua's "Natural History" also recorded a strange way to make fire with ice: "Cut the ice into circles, lift it to the sun, and make fire with Ai Chengzhen's shadow." This shows that the ancients had a profound understanding and skillful application of the principle of convex lens.