The history of the match

 A British pharmacist named John Walker invented the match in 1826, but it was not without a catch-22, the people making the matches were exposed to white phosphorus, which is dangerous as it is explosive when in contact with oxygen, the long hours spent in the factories sometimes gave the medical issue named "phossy jaw", which it causes the bones to die and teeth to decay and sometimes causes the jaw to be lost.

Walker was meant to make paster that might be used in guns, but instead added white phosphorus to a small wooden stick and scraped it and it caught fire. 

He started selling it to locals in England in April of 1827 and it was very favored over standard fire-starting methods. He named it "Friction lights", but he was what people call now a chill dude, as he did not patent his product (which is a synonym for copyright). So that anyone can make it (if you patent a product no one else that doesn't has the rights can produce it). 

He was repeatedly told to patent his wonderful product, but he refrained from it, and another British man named Samuel Jones made a copy of Walker's product and started selling "Lucifers" in 1829.

After "Lucifers", hit the market, matches were a common trade in England, as hundreds of factories were spread around the country all around the match trade.

How it was made was workers dipped treated wood into the white phosphor and then dried and cut the sticks into the small pieces of wood that you see often.

Like many other poorly paid and tedious factory jobs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, matchmakers were mostly women and children, “Half the employees in this industry were kids who hadn’t even reached their teens. While working long hours indoors in a cramped, dark factory.

A person with name Mrs. Fleet a victim of phossy jaw said that was complaining of tooth and jaw ache, and had 4 teeth extracted after she was in pain and the smell of dying bone coming out from her cheek.

After she was let go from the match company, she was not hired by any other match company as they did not want the public to know about the phossy jaw, since that would tarnish their reputation and sales would drop since people would probably riot since the workers were treated harshly. 

Eventually, matchmaking with white phosphorus was banned in the United States in 1910. Now matches use potassium chlorate, mixed with sulfur which is much safer than phosphorus.

Even after 100 years matches are now still used in fire-starting around the globe and were a very important improvement to the quality of life from the 1800s.