Fire

1. T’áá Diné Bo’óhoo’aah Bindii’a Navajo Philosophy of Learning Fire Dr. Roy E. Howard, Developer, August, 2000 Elvira Largie, Tech Share Project Director, The Education Technology Improvement Project Navajo Education Technology Consortium Elvira Largie, Tech Share Project Director, The Education Technology Improvement Project Navajo Education Technology Consortium 1

2. FIRE K–’ One of the four main elements of life T’áá Diné Bo’óhoo’aah Bindii’a Navajo Philosophy of Learning Elvira Largie, Tech Share Project Director, The Education Technology Improvement Project Navajo Education Technology Consortium 2

3. Physical and chemical aspects of combustion • The chemical reactions • Combustion, with rare exceptions, is a complex chemical process involving many steps that depend on the properties of the combustible substance. It is initiated by external factors such as heat, light, and sparks. The reaction sets in as the mixture of combustibles attains the ignition temperature, and several aspects of this step can be defined. Elvira Largie, Tech Share Project Director, The Education Technology Improvement Project Navajo Education Technology Consortium 3

4. History of fire theory • History • Combustion, fire, and flame have been observed and speculated about from earliest times. Every civilization had its own explanation for them. The Greeks interpreted combustion in terms of philosophical doctrines, one of which was that a certain "inflammable principle" was contained in all combustible bodies and this principle escaped when the body was burned to react with air. Elvira Largie, Tech Share Project Director, The Education Technology Improvement Project Navajo Education Technology Consortium 4

5. Manufacture of fire • Manufacture of fire • The step from the control of fire to its manufacture is great and required hundreds of thousands of years. The number and variety of inventions of such manufacture are difficult to imagine. Not until Neolithic times is there evidence that human beings actually knew how to produce fire. Whether a chance spark from striking flint against pyrites or a spark made by friction while drilling a hole in wood gave human beings the idea for producing fire is not known; but flint and pyrites, as well as fire drills, have been recovered from Neolithic sites in Europe. Elvira Largie, Tech Share Project Director, The Education Technology Improvement Project Navajo Education Technology Consortium 5

6. Original uses of fire • Original uses of fire • The first human beings to control fire gradually learned its many uses. Not only did they use fire to keep warm and cook their food; they also learned to use it in fire drives in hunting or warfare, to kill insects, to obtain berries, and to clear forests of underbrush so that game could be better seen and hunted. Eventually they learned that the burning of brush produced better grasslands and therefore more game. Elvira Largie, Tech Share Project Director, The Education Technology Improvement Project Navajo Education Technology Consortium 6

7. Fire in Religion and Philosophy • Fire in religion and philosophy • The sacred fires and fire drills of religious rituals and the numerous fire-gods of world mythology must be interpreted as additional evidence of both the antiquity and the importance of fire in human history. Elvira Largie, Tech Share Project Director, The Education Technology Improvement Project Navajo Education Technology Consortium 7

8. Smoke • Smoke • When you put the fresh piece of wood or paper on a hot fire, the smoke you see is those volatile hydrocarbons evaporating from the wood. They start vaporizing at a temperature of 300 degrees or so. If the temperature gets high enough, these compounds burst into flame. Once they start burning, there is no smoke because the hydrocarbons are turned into carbon dioxide and water (both invisible) when they burn. Elvira Largie, Tech Share Project Director, The Education Technology Improvement Project Navajo Education Technology Consortium 8