Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

By Larry Cohen c. 2026

One afternoon when I returned from class, my college roommate (one of the several I had over 4 years) was reading a book about “spontaneous combustion”. I thought I knew the basics growing up in a semi-rural area of New York State, where farmers would harvest hay and store it too early. When this happens, as many of us understand, the heat inside a bale of damp hay can get so hot that the hay erupts into fire and, in many cases, can take down the entire barn in flames.

However, while I was right about this concept, this was not the type of spontaneous combustion that my roommate was reading about.

In the book he was reading, he showed me photographs of humans who had “caught on fire,” yet their clothes were completely uncharred. I told him outright that this was impossible and the photographs must have been altered. I told him he was being “gaslighted”, though the term “gaslighting” was not in common use at that time, so I must have used a similar expression with the same meaning.

He contradicted me at every turn and said, according to the book, it was possible that a normal person could just “combust” without burning their clothes. At that point, I said it was time for dinner, and we left it at that.

A few days later, during one of my science labs, I noticed that the professor had left a Fresnel (freh-nel’) lens lying around, a piece of plastic that would bend light in a way that the lens would act as a magnifying glass. No one noticed as I took it to “borrow” for a day or two.

It was exactly this time of year, late March, early April, when I thought I would play a trick on my spontaneous combustion-believing roommate. Our dorm windows faced the Southwest. During the day, when he was in class, I went outside the dorm window and focused the sunlight from that Fresnel lens on his stack of books. Even through the glass of the window, I was able to get some of the pages of his textbooks to smolder just enough to turn some edges black. Fortunately, common sense prevailed, and I just smoldered a few pages and then gave it up. I knew I was literally playing with fire, and this could be disastrous.

A few days later, after a particularly cold and long Winter that year, a few of us decided to get some sunlight. We walked across a narrow campus road close to the dorms to an area that was on a small hillside covered with dry grass from the previous year, an area that had never been mowed since, in fact, it was not a part of the college at the time. All of us were lying down enjoying the strong Spring Sun when I decided to try my borrowed Fresnel lens again, but this time on some dry grass. Super big mistake. The grass smoldered, alright, and then burst into flames. Within seconds, the entire hillside was ablaze. I ran down to the dorm, called the Campus Operator, who called the volunteer fire department. When they had arrived, the fire had pretty much gone out on its own, and the four volunteer firemen put out what was left with backpack water sprayers.

Then, the leader of the fire brigade came over to thank me for calling in the fire, a fire which I had unintentionally started. I could not bring myself to admit that I was the one responsible for the conflagration.

That Monday, I returned the lens, never to pick it up again. But I still don’t believe that people can spontaneously combust, regardless of what my roommate believed. But, I do know that dry grass combined with a lack of common sense mixed with stupidity can combust in what today we will call “a nano-second.”