How fast do you have to strike a match to get it to light? Not the chemistry of the ignition, but the actual speed, in metres per second, that the little piece of wood and its bulbous head have to move to spark the chain reaction behind the flame.

It was a question born of insomnia. And there, in the dark, I did the thing you’re not supposed to do, if your goal is to fall back asleep: I opened my phone. Before I knew it, 3am had become 5am. I learned about the composition of the friction strip (red phosphorus, pulverized glass), and of the match head (potassium chlorate, antimony trisulphide, wax), and that a safety match struck against anything else will not light. I found slow-motion videos of a match strike captured at 3,500 frames per second. But nothing about the speed.

Still searching for an answer, I sent off my query to the tobacco multinational Swedish Match, and then I emailed two professors: one a chemist in Tasmania, the other a professor of thermodynamics at Imperial College London. At 5.30, I managed to fall back asleep, slightly frustrated and wondering if Claude would have provided the answer I wanted in seconds.

For the better part of two decades, Silicon Valley has been selling us seamlessness in place of friction, and we’ve become enthusiastic buyers. A few months ago, I felt a slight pulse of revulsion at a LinkedIn post whose author described how much she preferred Amazon’s recommendation algorithm to bookstores. The algorithm, she wrote, knew her and so it was efficient: with the implication that getting lost in a labyrinth of authors and covers one might or might not connect with was a waste of time – was friction.

Imagine being offered the Louvre, I thought when I read the post, without the desire to........

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