Candles are greatly useful and helpful objects, maybe not as much anymore, however at one point in time they were used for more important things than just to make a room smell nice. Candles do not burn all by themselves. It takes energy to kickstart the chemical combustion that makes the wax initially burn. It can be provided by many different things, such as a match, or a lighter. When a candle is ignited, the wax turns into a liquid and gets genuinely hot. It dries strikingly quick and turns back into a solid. The wicks of candles are made up of numerous different individual fibers that are all wound up together. When you light a candle, the heat of the flame melts the wax the surrounds the wick and kickstarts capillary action. When the wax gets hot it melts and the gas of the wax travels through the fibers of the wick. This is called capillary action. Although, capillary action does not work for everything. When someone covers a toothpick in wax and light it on fire, it burns, but it does not burn for a long time. This is from the reason that the “fibers” inside of the wood are super close together and there is no room for the gas molecules from the wax to travel up through the fibers. …show more content…
All of the light that a candles makes comes from a chemical reaction called combustion. The equation for combustion is C₂₅H₅₂+O₂￫CO₂+H₂O. C₂₅H₅₂ is the fuel. O₂ is the oxygen. These together make CO₂, which is carbon dioxide/black carbon and H₂O which is water. The wax reacts with the oxygen in the air to make a gas, that is colorless, called carbon dioxide. Water is also produced in the form of steam (water vapor). This is what often causes black to be left on nearby objects such as the beaker in the experiment that we did in class. Wax may seem like it does not burn, and that is because the heat of the candle is not enough to make it burst into flame. Sure enough, at a higher temperature of heat, wax does in fact