There’s a new, relatively easy way to make fire entirely with “primitive” (or found) materials, and it’s much, much easier than any other method I’ve seen over the decades.
Anyone who knows something about the subject of primitive fire-making will probably consider that incredibly unlikely, and possibly an outrageous statement. After hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years of making fire with primitive materials new techniques simply don’t appear out of nowhere. Indeed, it’s very possible that this is a very, very old technique… even, just possibly, the first and oldest technique used by our ancestors to make fire at will, that it was very nearly lost in recent times, and is just now becoming known again.
It’s called the “Rüdiger roll” (or “Rudiger roll”), or “fire roll”, or, perhaps historically, “wool skating”.
Let’s just establish a few basics: Starting fire with a ferrocerium rod (often wrongly called a “firesteel”) is not primitive, ferrocerium rods don’t grow on trees, they come out of factories. Creating a fire with a real firesteel, one actually made of steel, is not really primitive, it’s just old technology. Such firesteels may have been around for thousands of years, but they are not low-tech, a good one is not trivial to make even with tool steel as a starting point, and making one from bog iron or ore is a huge undertaking requiring specialized knowledge and experience. The fire-piston is an interesting device, but making one from scratch could take at least the better part of a day, and the primitive version of the gasket needed is cordage, the creation of which is an art in itself. Starting a fire on a nice sunny day with a lens is pretty easy, but creating a lens in the woods is something else again. It’s possible to strike sparks with stones if one of the stones is iron pyrites, but iron pyrite stones are pretty rare, and the sparks are of such low temperature that the preferred tinder, prepared chaga or amadou or tinder fungus, doesn’t occur at all in most of the world.
In short, techniques for creating fire given only primitive or “found” material are few and labor-intensive, mostly friction methods that take practice and are difficult to do under bad conditions. Probably the easiest is the fire-bow, which not only requires some fabrication but requires cord. Television “survival experts” can show how easy that is all they like by using a bootlace, but if you have nothing of the kind it’s not something you can readily make on the spot.
Put another way, when you need fire the most, when you’re caught outdoors in cold and high wind and rain or freezing rain or snow, that is exactly when it is the most difficult to make fire. As the author Jack London so artfully and memorably tried to teach us, that’s when you die.
“Primitive” fire-making is heavily dependent on preparation.. on collecting suitable materials for tinder and kindling when they are available and carrying them in such a way that they stay as dry as possible, on making the tools and means and having them ready when needed, and often on using what’s produced by one fire to make creating the next easier. As I’ve said elsewhere, the figure in Greek myth who is said to have stolen fire from the gods and given it to man is named Prometheus- which literally means “foresight”. I don’t think that’s anything like a coincidence.
Because of all this, the discovery of a different way to make fire entirely with primitive materials that is easier and faster than the others is, and should be, huge news to anyone with any interest in survival subjects at all.
Curiously, though there is a slowly-widening group that’s aware of the technique and appreciates its significance, the knowledge seems to be spreading very slowly, and a whole lot of survival “authorities” of various types still seem to be completely unaware of it.
Like most “new” things, it’s all over Youtube, and that’s where I first encountered it, where it’s being referred to as the “Rudiger roll” or just “fire roll”. Quite frankly, when I first saw video of it being done, I thought that there was a good chance that it was a hoax of some sort. Having some experience creating friction fire, this just looked way too easy to be true. I was in pursuit of other information when I ran across it, so I mentally filed it away to investigate later.
When I got back to the subject I quickly found that there were dozens or perhaps even hundreds of videos depicting variations on the theme. The most basic, at least in this rediscovery, has been using cotton (unrolled cotton balls) and wood ashes, but there have been many successful variations, notably using rust, baking soda and manganese dioxide as substitute powders (we’ll get back to that last), and using jute and milkweed, paper towels or thin cotton fabric as substitute fibrous material. Once learned, the technique seems to work, more or less easily, with a very wide variety of materials.
As near as I’ve been able to gather the current batch of folks making Youtube videos about it were mostly tipped off to it by each other, and one or the other of them (I’m not taking sides here) saw it demonstrated by the well-regarded German survival expert Rüdiger Nehberg, sometimes known as “Sir Vival” (I don’t make this stuff up, folks). Apparently he managed to reconstruct the technique based on a sketchy text description of it being used in a concentration camp during WWII to light cigarettes. As far as I know, none of these persons going back to that concentration camp claimed to have invented the technique, so we don’t know with certainty as of this writing whether it’s ancient or not.
I’m not going to try to describe the technique here. When so many have already demonstrated it very well on video it seems superfluous to add a text description.
Wanting to establish a baseline I started out myself with cotton and wood ashes. My first attempt very nearly succeeded, to my surprise the cotton roll quickly got hot enough in the center to hurt to touch, but somehow I failed to get it to form an ember and the roll disintegrated. The second attempt was less successful, the roll falling apart quickly, but the third, when I focused on getting the roll as tight as possible, succeeded quickly in forming two healthy smoking embers. It does indeed work.
The Rudiger roll or fire roll seems fundamentally different from other friction fire-starting techniques. All that seems to be required is any of a variety of fine powders, some organic and flammable fibrous material and two flat surfaces. Here we have a relatively quick and easy technique that can utilize materials scrounged on the spot, and since wood ashes make an excellent powder component can leverage one successful attempt to “bootstrap” itself into a position of making subsequent fires even more easily. It seems to be a candidate for making fire, at least under decent conditions, quickly and with materials at-hand and no tools- not even a knife or bootlace.
Sometime after my first experiment, I ran across this article. Turns out there are several on the subject, but apparently they’ve figured out that Neandertals in Europe collected and abraded rocks made out of manganese dioxide to create manganese dioxide powder. Initially, with that unfailing instinct that academics have to explain and dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their theories, they decided that they were collecting these rocks and powdering them for use as pigment in paint. That doesn’t hold up in a lot of ways, the chemical is just black, and there are plenty of easier ways to get black.. plus the Neandertals, with no apparent respect for later academic theory, only collected manganese dioxide rocks, ignoring other similar manganese oxide rocks nearby. So, now they have a new theory, it turns out that manganese dioxide has the property of lowering the ignition/kindling temperature of typical fire-fuel materials by up to 180 degrees F. That would make it much easier to start friction fires.
Searching the fire roll videos, the one guy most prominent in producing them has tried manganese dioxide. He did a couple of things “wrong”… he salvaged the manganese dioxide from alkaline batteries (it’s the nasty damp black stuff that takes up most of the space inside them) which is okay, but that form is impure, it needs to be washed by diluting it in water, letting it precipitate out and pouring the water off the top, then drying it. He did none of that, in fact he used it while it was still damp… and it still worked well.
Circumstantial evidence, but really, the Rudiger/fire roll works well enough that I’d be amazed of millions of years of friction-fire-using humans never discovered it… it seems likely that the Neandertals were way ahead of us on this one. Maybe they were using them with flints and iron pyrites, maybe they were using them with friction fire starters, but it’s a powder that lowers kindling temperature… maybe they were rolling it in leaves. Maybe whoever was using the technique in a concentration camp in WWII learned it from his grandfather, and maybe there were villages somewhere, perhaps in Eastern Europe, where the knowledge never disappeared at all.
What does seem more certain is this- given what we’ve learned lately about the importance of fire and cooking to humans, learning and becoming adept at this ancient/new technique seems a must for anyone trying to become as resourceful as possible. I’m going to keep practicing it and trying more and more “natural” and abundant materials.
– Robert the Wombat