My first thought was to go from fuel through fire to blacksmiths, but I’ve gone down that road already. Let’s flip it.

A cutlass is a sword, and swords have to be sharp. (It’s also a kind of car, which has to be sharp in a different way to cut through the air.) But we’ve been sharpening things far longer than we’ve had swords. Members of our genus have sharpened tools for millions of years. We’ve gotten good at it by this point. We’ve gotten so good at it that the Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus used a knife to reason his way to a fledgeling atomic theory.

Here’s what he said: When you cut into an apple, some of the apple ends up on either side of the knife. But the only way the knife can get between the two parts of the apple is if there was already space between them. So there must be bits of matter with empty space between them. QED—or whatever the Ancient Greek version of QED was. It’s not quite the argument we’d use today, but it’s neat, even when summarized as fleetingly as I just did.

Modern atomic theory came from the dual directions of physics—where atoms explained temperatures and sounds and a bunch else—and chemistry—where atoms explained reactions. Chemical reactions seemed to consume the input elements in certain ratios, and we now know it’s because a certain number of atoms of one element would always react with the same number of atoms of the other: Two oxygens and one carbon became carbon dioxide, say.

Fire, as we know from the other day, is a complex collection of chemical reactions involving oxygen. But fires need two other ingredients. They need heat and, of course, they need fuel.