History of Fire Fighting and Prevention
More
than two thousand years ago, Roman emperor Augustus organized2 a group of
watchmen whose job was mainly to look out for fires and sound an alarm in the
event of one. For many centuries that followed, fire equipment was limited to
buckets of water that got passed from person to person. The ax3 was later found
to be a useful tool both for removing fuel in large fires and for opening holes
to allow smoke and flames to escape from burning buildings. Watchmen also
learned to create firebreaks with long hooked poles and ropes in order to pull
down structures that provided fuel for a fire. In 1066, in order to reduce the
risk of fire in thatched-roof houses, King William the Conqueror made a ruling:
Citizens had to extinguish their cooking fires at night. His term couvre-feu,
meaning “cover fire,” is the origin of the modern day term curfew, which
no longer carries a literal translation.
The
event that had the largest influence in the history of fire fighting was the Great
Fire of London in 1666. The devastating blaze originated at the King’s Bakery
near the London Bridge. At the onset, Lord Mayor Bludworth showed little
concern for the fire, assuming it would extinguish itself before he could
organize a group of men to attend to it.
However, the summer of 1666 had been uncharacteristically hot and dry, and the
wooden houses nearby caught fire quickly. Within a short time* the wind had
carried the fire across the city, burning down over 300 houses in its path.
Although the procedure of pulling down buildings to prevent a fire from
spreading was standard in Britain, the mayor grew concerned over the cost it
would involve to rebuild the city and ordered that the surrounding structures
be left intact. By the time the king ordered the destruction of buildings in
the fire’s path, the fire was too large to control. It was not until the Duke
of York ordered the Paper House to be destroyed in order to create a crucial
firebreak that the London fire finally began to lose its fuel.
When
it became clear that four-fifths of the city had been destroyed by the fire, drastic
measures were taken in London to create a system of organized fire prevention. At
the hands of architects such as Christopher Wren, most of London was rebuilt
using stone and brick, materials that were far less flammable than wood and
straw. Because of the long history of fires in London, those who could
afford to build new homes and businesses
began to seek insurance for their properties. As insurance became a profitable
business, companies soon realized1 the monetary benefits of hiring men to
extinguish fires. In the early years of insurance companies, all insured
properties were marked with an insurance company’s name or logo. If a fire
broke out and a building did not contain the insurance mark, the fire brigades
were called away and the building was left to burn.
The
British insurance companies were largely responsible for employing people to
develop new technology for extinguishing fires. The first fire engines were simple
tubs on wheels that were pulled to the location of the fire, with water being
supplied by a bucket brigade. Eventually, a hand pump was designed to push the
water out of the tub into a hose with a nozzle. The pump allowed for a steady
stream of water to shoot through a hose directly at the fire source. Before long,
companies began to utilize water pipes made from hollowed tree trunks that were
built under the roadway. By digging down into the road, firemen could insert a
hole into the tree-trunk pipe and access the water to feed into the pump.
Fire
fighting became a competitive business, as companies fought to be the first to arrive
at a scene to access the water pipes. After a series of fires destroyed parts
of London, fire-fighting companies were forced to reconsider their intentions.
By the eighteenth century, fire brigades began to join forces, and in 1833 the
Sun Insurance Company along with ten other London companies created the London
Fire Engine Establishment. In 1865, the government became involved, bringing
standards to both fire prevention and fire fighting and establishing London’s
Metropolitan Fire Brigade. Though the firemen were well paid, they were
constantly on duty and thus obliged to call their fire station home for both
themselves and their families.
New
technology for fighting fires continued to develop in both Europe and the New
World. Leather hoses with couplings that joined the lengths together were hand-sewn
in the Netherlands and used until the latel800s, when rubber hoses became
available. The technology for steam engine fire trucks was available in Britain
and America in 1829, but most brigades were hesitant to use them until the 1850s.
It was the public that eventually forced the brigades into putting the more efficient
equipment to use. In the early 1900s, when the internal-combustion engine was
developed, the trucks became motorized. This was a timely advancement in
fire-fighting history, as World War I put added pressure on brigades throughout
the world.
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