Book of Daze: Three on a Match Day℠

It’s a 1970s game show, a 1932 movie, and a late 1920s marketing ploy designed to bait people into using more matches. It’s three on a match, that’s what it is, Skippy, and today is its national celebration day.

The three-on-a-match superstition—if three soldiers lit their cigarettes from the same match, the third soldier on the match would be shot—is thought by some to have been invented in the late 1920s by the Swedish match tycoon Ivar Kreuger, who was called a genius and a swindler by one biographer and who once admitted, “I’ve built my enterprise on the firmest ground that can be found … the foolishness of people.”

Although Kreuger didn’t create the three-on-a-match superstition—it was mentioned in a newspaper editorial in the United States in 1919 and may date back to the first Boer War (1880-81)—he monetized the notion out the wazoo . . . ultimately controlling between two thirds and three quarters of worldwide match production. Such is the power of superstition.

Called the “Leanardo of larcenists,” Kreuger “either built a match monopoly that overreached or orchestrated one of the biggest pyramid schemes in history.” He shot himself in his Paris         

Later that year First National Pictures released The Match King, a film loosely based on Kreuger’s life.

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