1948 Summer Olympics torch relay then run through Switzerland and France. The route was modified only when Luxembourg and Belgium both requested that the torch travel their territories. A longer Greek route was planned, but reduced from an expected down to due to concerns over instability in the country and a lack of security. The torch lighting ceremony took place on 17 July 1948 in Olympia, Greece. As with the 1936 Summer Olympic relay, the torch relay was begun by focusing the sun's rays onto kindling using a parabolic reflector, which then lit the first torch. The kindling was conducted by a Girl Guide leader
Carl Diem for an Olympic conference in 1934, Diem and Lewald imagined a new symbolic pageant that would cloak the German games with the ancient Greek mantle: the transit of a lit Olympic flame from Greece to Berlin by a relay of torch-bearing runners. While the relay is sometimes believed to be an ancient tradition, it was in fact the wholly modern creation of Lewald and Diem; the ancient games included a ritual flame commemorating the theft of fire from the gods by Prometheus, but not a torch relay. Diem had been organizing long distance road relays ever since 1910. On June