Strike a light
Peter Borrows takes us on another excursion into local chemistry
Walking around any town you will encounter groups of people furtively gathered around the doorways of offices, pubs and shops. However, this trail is not about nicotine, but about how smokers light their tobacco.
These days most smokers use a cigarette lighter, for which the fuel is liquefied butane. The butane is ignited by a spark which can be produced by the piezoelectric effect or by rubbing a 'flint' against a rough surface.
The piezoelectric effect depends on the change in dipole density when a crystal is subject to mechanical stress and is exhibited only by crystals that have no centre of symmetry. Quartz and Rochelle salt are well known examples but lighters probably use synthetic ceramics such as lead zirconate titanate. When the crystal is deformed the charge distribution alters, giving rise to a potential difference which is often thousands of volts. Although the current is tiny, the spark has sufficient energy to ignite the gas.
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