Don't Fall For It

CHAPTER 9The Seductive Power of FOMO

Everything in life is founded on confidence.

—Ivar Kreuger

Thomas Edison invented the first electric light bulb in 1879. This innovation changed the world in immense ways but it didn’t happen overnight. Not a single home was wired for electricity over the year following Edison’s breakthrough, but by 1940 nearly 100% of urban homes were wired.^[1] In the intervening years, people still had to do something for light and warmth. It’s hard to imagine now what with the ubiquity of electricity, but matches were a consumer staple in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. They didn’t fall too far behind food, clothing, and a roof over your head in the pecking order of household necessities. Matches were used in a variety of ways – to light kerosene lamps, gas heaters, candles, fires, stoves, and everyone’s favorite deadly habit back then – smoking. Cigarette production in the US doubled in the decade ending in 1929, so matches were used for both needs and vices.

The Swedes were the first to develop the safe phosphorous surface used to light a match by striking it against the side of a matchbox. They were called safety matches at the time and became an enormous hit. This innovation quickly turned Sweden into the biggest exporter of matches in the world. By the 1920s, one Swedish man controlled three-quarters of the production and sales of all matches used in the world, owning more than 200 match factories in 35 different countries all ...