4 million years ago, before the existence of written language, the Internet and the vast porn cache known as Know Your Meme, a caveman used two sticks to masturbate to one of those stone statues of a naked fat lady that cavemen liked to make for some reason. The friction created sparks which caused a fire and accidentally burned down a neighboring forest. This is considered by many archaeologists to be not only the invention of fire, but also the first known evidence of inflation fetishism and hot gluing.
The Ancient Greeks were known to have a hard-on for fire, to the point where the philosopher, astronomer and Bill Nye’s ancestor Aristotle made fire one of his 5 classical elements that he claimed were a part of everything in the entire universe. Unfortunately, he was wrong…. but HOLY SHIT HOW METAL WOULD THAT BE? In fact, the concept was so -blam!-ing metal, that every ancient civilization from Egypt to India to Japan stole borrowed it.
In stark contrast to their pyrophiliac neighbors, the Romans thought fire and lava and all that shit was -blam!-ing stupid, as it kept reking all their shit (See: Pompeii). In 68 AD, the friction caused by too many orgy members rubbing against each other caused the city of Rome itself to burst into flames. The emperor Nero,instead of going “HOLY SHIT ROME’S ON FIRE, -blam!- YEAH!”, just ignored it and played a harp like a pretentious douche.
Roman Christians saw this douchebaggery, said “Screw these boring dweebs.”, split the Roman Empire in half and became the Byzantine Empire: like the Romans, but with blackjack and Jesus. Historians assume that it was their hatred for the other half of Rome that, in 672 AD, made them decide to make fire 100,000x more awesome. Through what can only be assumed was voodoo bullshit and copious amounts of hax, they managed to make fire that was so -blam!-ing fiery that water itself couldn’t do -blam!-ing shit against it, giving it the ability to burn in -blam!-ing water, as well as murder even more shit than usual. They named the invention “Greek fire” in honor of the Greeks’ legendary boner for flames and to spite those fire-hating jerkwads back in Rome, who were at the time getting rekt by barbarians. They then decided that other peoples’ boats weren’t as cool as theirs, and that those people needed to die for it, so they put their voodoo fire in a cannon and murdered them with it.
Unfortunately, after the Byzantines were rekt by the Ottomans in 1453 for insulting their boats, the recipe to make such awesomeness was lost to history, and so mankind lost the ability to burn the shit out of water.
After this horrific tragedy, man was rendered unable to use fire to reliably murder things from really far away. Russia made an attempt to fix this in the 1800s with the invention of Molotov cocktails, throwable bottles of booze with towels jammed in them, but soon realized that not only would that be a waste of good booze, but mass-producing them would likely cause their mostly vodka-based economy to collapse.
Then, in 1918, a magnificent German bastard named Richard Fiedler woke up one day and decided he wanted to burn someone to death for insulting his glorious mustache.
However, he was too far away from him and was unable to use matches. Instead of giving up, the absolute madman took gasoline, put it in a tank, connected that tank to a hose-gun, and murdered the -blam!- out of said guy with his “flame-hose-gun 9000” (German: flammenschlauchgewehr nuen-tausend). However, since that didn’t exactly look good on a patent, he changed the name to flammenwerfer. (American: FLAMETHROWER).
Years later, the United States stole borrowed Fiedler’s flame-hose-gun technology, and made it shoot flammable Jell-O instead, improving the already-awesome flamethrower to throw flame even better. The U.S loved the idea of burning people with dessert products so much, they put their flaming Jell-O in a bomb, called it napalm, and used them in the Vietnam War to purge communist Asians for the grave sin of inventing hentai and Sword Art Onlin
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The Souls of the Innocent.