Cars have (or had, I don't know if they're still included) an electric lighter that you pushed in to heat up. It was basically a little metal ring that got really hot. So I think it probably is the heat.

I remember my friend also had a plasma lighter, that unsurprisingly used plasma to light things. It made a really scary noise in the wind and hurt like a motherfucker to touch. We were 18 and dumb.

Lots of people are mentioning old electric car lighters, but not why things burn. The answer is the fire triangle, which just means you need 3 factors: fuel, oxidizer, and heat. Oxygen is obviously the most common oxidizer (hence the name) and basically everywhere in the atmosphere. And any substance that undergoes a sufficiently exothermic reaction will produce enough heat to propagate that oxidation as a chain reaction (i.e. fire) once enough heat is present to start it.

Not all fuels are equal. Ones that burn slowly will smoulder, while the ones that burn extremely fast explode. Too many unintended and destructive fires occur because people don't realize when fuel sources are susceptible to heat (even a tiny spark), such as dust in a grain silo, a pile of oily rags, or even a compost heap (which builds up heat due to bacteria breaking down the contents).

But yes, back to the point, lighters just need to create heat because presumably you already have fuel and oxygen available.

Yes, that is how car lighters work. They use electricity to heat up small coil untill its red hot. Its mostly used to light cigarettes.

Even without electricity you can create fire: https://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Fire-with-Sticks

Lighter is just portable and more convenient way of doing it.

My lighter uses an electric arc, great for cigarettes, doesn't seem to like weed as much.

I’ve lit incense using an electric stove. Also I have a lighter that uses an electric arc

Cars used to come with non-fire cigarette lighters as a safety measure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_auxiliary_power_outlet

I have an electric lighter that uses lightning to ignite stuff. So no, fire isn't needed. Just enough heat to ignite what you want to burn. Great for cigarettes; not very good for lighting the bowl of a pipe tho.

I also am old enough to remember cigarette lighters in cars. They just made a metal coil red hot and you touched it to your cigarette to light it.

Friction is also enough. Ever heard of starting a fire by rubbing two sticks together? Or flint and steel? This is just using friction to generate enough heat to ignite kindling (though the flint and steel makes it easier since the flint gets way hotter and creates sparks much faster than the stick method). This is also why meteors burn up entering the atmosphere and why space craft need all that ceramic plating to survive re-entry: the friction of the air due to the speed of the object is enough to get super heated.

Depends on what you want to use the lighter for. People mentioned car lighters that work with just heat, but if you just want to light a gas stove, than a spark is enough. There are lighters that do just that, or you can even use an emptied regular lighter.

Essentially the 12 volt cigarette lighters in cars are fireless. There's also plasma-like lighters that work with electricity.

So yeah, do they work just as well? Depends. Fire lighters are a handful in windy conditions. Electric lighters are less efficient but they work just fine.

Burning is a chemical reaction which requires relatively much activation energy to start, but then produces enough energy to keep activating (i.e. sustaining) itself.

You just need to deliver enough activation energy to a given point on the material, which you can do with a flame, but also for example an electric spark, a glowing metal or a magnifying glass under sunlight.

You can also put the entire flammable material into an electric oven and slowly turn up the heat, until you reach this temperature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoignition_temperature

Fire is just the result of a self sustaining exothermic reaction - there's no inherent "fireness" that makes heat from a fire different from all other heat sources.

Something quite interesting in relation to that is that it takes a lot more energy to start a wood fire if you would use a heating coil instead of an open flame. Why? There are only about 4 papers about that and they are all old and the methodology weren't up to modern standards so take that with a grain of salt

There are two kinds of electric handheld lighters, the plasma arc kind and the resistance kind. The resistance kind isn't as popular but they still exist. They are similar to car lighters, electric stove coils, etc. I don't know whether a plasma arc would be considered fire, but the heated wire is probably not.

I have an electric lighter that we use for lighting candles. It charges via USB and generates a short spark between two contacts to light the candle.

If you google "electric lighter" you can see a wide variety of lighters that work by either making an arc of electricity or just getting really hot.

There are electrical lighters, which work by providing an arc of electricity. And back in the days, I used to light cigarettes on my electrical stove when the lighter was empty.

Yeah, pretty much. Just look at the old cigeratte lighters in car. No flame needed.

Fire is a chemical reaction. Oily rags and compost can self combust.

Also, earth is the only known planet where fire can burn.