- Info(03)
(3D/CGI, AI prompht)
HJJ 2025
Designer : Han Jaejin
Date of completion : Feb. 2025
If you've never heard of a cold fire before, the title of this post probably seems like nonsense to you. At the very least it seems oxymoronic in a way that there's no way the fire is anywhere near the temperature of like... an ice cube. But hopefully that's not where your head was going and you're asking
"what is a cold fire?" with us. If not, maybe the fact that invisible fires are a thing will do something for you?
We discovered them by accident. The idea of a cool flame was discovered in 1810 by a guy named Humphry Davy. Davy didn't set out to create a cool flame, though. He was sticking a heated platinum wire into air and ether trying to make a slow combustion of ether. What he ended up observing was a weirdly pale light. As he recreated this weird new fire he found that some of the flames didn't burn him, and didn't need something to ignite them.
It wouldn't be until 1929 when the term "cool flame" got adopted though. The term was coined when the emission spectra of cool flames were first analyzed. By definition, cool flames are still pretty hot, their temperatures peak at 400 degrees Celsius, which is four times greater than the temperature water boils at. In Fahrenheit, that's 752 degrees. For comparison, a candle flame's average temperature is 1,000 degrees Celsius (1832 degrees Fahrenheit). While the lower barrier of what constitutes a "cool flame" doesn't have a concrete definition, the benchmark is "can be seen with the naked eye when it's dark." In daylight, a cool flame is functionally invisible. Here's an example of a methanol fire which, in the daylight, is invisible.