Question

Is it possible to light a candle without touching its wick?

Hypothesis
It is impossible to light a candle without touching its wick because fire can not float through air.

Materials
The materials needed to conduct this experiment are: A LIGHTER

A CANDLE

A CANDLE HOLDER

(Adult supervision is required for you to conduct this experiment because it involves a live flame)

Procedure
There are only a few steps to doing this experiment. First you have to make sure that you have adult supervision and a good source of water (I suggest a sink) near you just in case the fire gets out of hand. After you have made sure you have these two important things you can start to conduct this experiment. First you have to obtain a candle; it would have better effect if the wick of the candle was a bit longer. Now, you must secure the candle onto the candle holder. All you have to do is use your lighter and heat the bottom of the candle until it is almost a liquid, once it is heated, place the candle onto the candle holder in an upright position and press down. Now that you have the candle secured you can light the candle. Keep the candle lit until

the wick is charred. After the wick of the candle is charred you blow out the flame. Now, you put the lighter about an inch over the flame into the stream of rising smoke. Observe what happens! You should see the candle relight without you touching it. Now that you can relight the candle from an inch above it, see if you can go higher!

Observation
While conducting this experiment we noticed a few things. First of all, we noticed that this experiment would not work for 3 main reasons. The most likely reason for this experiment not to work is that the wick of the candle is no long enough to produce enough smoke. Also, another explanation might be that the wick of the candle wasnt charred enough so the production of smoke was very little and not enough to act as a fuse. The

last explanation would be that you waited too long after you had blown out the candle and the smoke had began to thin. We also noticed a few other facts. First, we noticed that if the smoke is thick enough you can see the fire traveling down the smoke into the candle. Also, we noticed that if you join the fire from the candle with the fire from the lighter, the fire becomes bigger and wilder. Lastly we noticed that there are two kinds of smoke. One of them is the smoke that appears after you blow out the candle, and the other is the smoke created from when you move the candle around. We noticed that the smoke created from moving the candle, are black and are not flammable.

Conclusion
This experiment proves that our hypothesis is wrong. In our hypothesis we only thought about fire traveling through oxygen and forgot about the other gasses. We found out that the smoke that appears after you blow out a candle is actually stream of paraffin wax vapour, which is extremely flammable. This vapour acted as a fuse for connecting the fire from the lighter to the wick of the candle. However, this experiment does not prove our hypothesis completely wrong because fire can not travel through air, like we said, but it can travel through wax paraffin. This is because with the wax paraffin the three things that are needed to sustain a fire are present; source of fuel (wax paraffin), source of oxygen,

and the kindling temperature of the fuel must be reached.

Problems
There was only one major problem in this experiment. That is the fact that if there is a small draft the smoke will be blown away and the experiment will not work.

Other Facts

Smoke is cloud of fine particles suspended in a gas. The smoke from candles is a cloud of wax paraffin which is extremely flammable. Wax paraffin is a fine powder of wax that is created from burnt candle wax. Wheat silos sometimes explode because of wheat paraffin which is created from has a very low kindling temperature. A small spark inside the silo can cause the whole silo to explode.