Somewhat tangential, but can anyone explain or give any insight into how candles were invented? This has always puzzled me. The idea that if you put a piece of string in some wax, and light it on fire, the string will get hot enough to melt wax, and the molten wax will be sucked into it by capillary action, and burn, before the string itself burns, seems very counterintuitive and hard to come up with before a modern understanding of chemistry and physics. And yet, candles have apparently existed since 700 BC. How?