This is the stunt in which one match, resting on another, suddenly jumps, due to friction applied on the supporting match by your fingernail. The trick appeared without attribution in Will Goldston's Great Tricks Revealed, 1935, p. 31. In the same year it was also included in an article on impromptu magic by Harry Blackstone in Popular Mechanics, 1935, p. 242. The article was ghost-written by Walter Gibson, see J. Randolph Cox's bibliography of Gibson, Man of Magic and Mystery, 1988, p. 111 (where the article is listed but misdated as 1930).

(Three years later the trick is credited to William H. McCaffrey in Greater Magic, 1938, p. 830.)

Corvello from Holland published “Improved Jumping Match” in The Gen, Vol. 9 No. 3, July 1953, p. 71, in which the flick is hidden even more due to a slight preparation of one match.