I like to do the flint and steel fire making demonstration. It is fun and it is also a visitor participation program. Everybody gets a chance to make sparks with flint and steel at the end of it. One thing that we use for making an actual fire is char cloth. It is cloth that is made of charcoal. The reason it is used is that the sparks from the flint and steel are hot enough to get it burning. It glows just like the charcoal you use in the barbecue grill and blowing on it produces a lot of heat. Anyway, the way you make it is to place cotton patches in a sealed metal tin with a hole in the top. You put that in the fire and pretty soon smoke starts coming out the hole. This smoke is the volatile components in the cotton. It is also flammable. When you take the can out of the fire and open it up, you have black pieces of cloth that are now just about pure carbon.