text: The ealiest flame throwers date as far back as 5th century BC, which was a tube filled with burning solids, such as sulfer or coal, and worked like a blow gun (you blow through one end of the tube to prepel fire at the target). The flamethrower was refined over the following centuries. The models seen in the early days of WW I were developed at the turn of the 20th century.  The German army tested two models of flamethrower - or Flammenwerfer in German - in the early 1900s, one large and one small, both developed by Richard Fiedler.