Buckets

For almost a century these were the only way of putting water on the flames. In many cities, each house and business had to keep at least one bucket, sometimes painted with the owner’s name. At the cry of “Fire!” everybody was required to race to the site and join the bucket brigade.

Hand Pumpers

Since at least the ancient Romans, man has sought a mechanical means of spraying water on fires. One of the first people to make it practical was Richard Newsham of London. In 1731 New York City purchased two of Newsham’s simple hand-pumped engines, eventually building its first firehouse to store them. When fires broke out, men dragged the engines to the site and formed a bucket brigade to fill their reservoirs. Then the pumps were manned and water began to shoot out of a gooseneck nozzle emerging from the top.

Hoses

Leather fire hoses, invented in seventeenth-century Holland, leaked and needed too much care to be very useful. But when, in 1808, a Philadelphia company devised a method of closing the seams with copper rivets, leather hoses quickly made buckets obsolete. However, they still needed constant maintenance with grease and oil to keep them from drying and cracking. With the arrival of canvas and rubber hoses in the 1820s, firefighters thankfully said goodbye to leather hoses forever.

Water Mains

Until the early nineteenth century firefighters had to rely on wells, rivers, ponds, and reservoirs for water. If one of these wasn’t nearby, the building burned to the ground. New York City’s first water mains were hollowed-out logs. They leaked and clogged, but they were better than nothing. In 1808 one was fitted with the first fire plug—a sort of large cork—and the first real fire hydrant came in 1817. Today firefighters in most high-rise areas use high-pressure mains as their source of water.

Fire Alarms

The first fire alarm was somebody seeing smoke and yelling. By the mid-nineteenth century New York City had a series of eight watchtowers manned by sentries looking for signs of flame. In 1852 a Boston doctor named William Channing invented an alarm system that could send a telegraph signal from a street box to an alarm office. Soon every big city had telegraph alarm boxes, which lasted until the 1970s, when more efficient telephone systems were developed. Today most alarms come in from home phones and cell phones, with the information sent to centralized dispatch centers.

Steam Pumpers

Many volunteer fire companies fought tooth and nail against the purchase of the first steam-powered fire engines. At demonstrations, the men proved they could pump harder and shoot water higher than the early smoke-belching machines. But for government officials, the clincher was that the steam-powered engines never got tired. Starting in Cincinnati in the 1850s, every major city switched over to steam. By the turn of the century the