The evolution of fire protection in Industrial buildings

In mythic and legends of different cultural backgrounds, fire is always considered as the most

valuable present from the God and the foundation of human civilization. There is no denying that such

present provide the human being with cooked food which could add years to their lives and illuminating

source to fight against cold dark condition of past ages, however, as far as we know that each coin has

its two sides, fire is also a double edged-sword that has been a vital part of humankind’s existence and

survival since its inception. From the West to the East, from Roman Empire to ancient China, the bruises

of fire hazard can be found everywhere; the ruins of Rome City and London keep reminding people of

fires’ pitiless. Even in nineteenth century when our human being had already acquired significant power

through experiencing the industrial revolution, fire is still stubborn and one of the most terrifying

challenging aspects to life. As a matter of fact, with the acceleration of industrial growth which brought

large factories, the Fire threat is growing in intensity. This safety issue, in a sense, is caused by the

relatively lag behind of materials and lighting techniques compared with the actual need of industrial

society. Quite different from the small scale dwelling and handcraft workshop, the large factories which

grew out of the industrial revolution always possess a gigantic size with wooden floors and supporting

columns, unfortunately, in order to meet the illumination requirement for industrial production,

candlelight and kerosene lamp was forced to undertake such a big responsibility. The consequence of

this “coercion” is frequent fire hazard which results from the knocked candlelight, especially in the

textile mills which filled with a mass of combustible material.

Facing the threat of fire, humankind keeps fighting to protect their lives and property. Their

endeavors were focused on two factors: Fire suppression and Fire prevention, the former means

adopting more effective approaches to handle the projected fire hazard and the later requires reliable

fireproof materials and construction to reduce the fire risk. Moreover, fire evacuation is undoubtedly

the third key point of the endless struggle with fire.

In these three points, Fire suppression is probably the oldest one, as a social animal, the human

being’s firefighting is never be an individual behavior but develop into an collective action under control

of some specialized agencies in a short time. It is well known that collective behavior has a higher

efficiency than individual behavior; nevertheless, the theoretical efficiency was limited by the rough

equipment such as various kinds vessel.

For instance, in the Woonsocket Falls

Village, one of the earliest colonies in

America, fire protection was reckoned on

the bucket brigade. In the early years of

the Woonsocket Falls Village, several

buckets are regarded as a fixture for the

citizens no matter the material. Whenever

there was somewhere catch fire, each

resident were in duty to get to the scene

of the fire with their fire buckets and

http://www.firehydrant.org/pictures/hydrant_history.html

obeyed orders from the fire marshal of organizing two lines which link the nearest source of water and

the site of the fire. This formation will function as “Mechanical chain”: one line would be used to

transport buckets which filled with water to the scene of fire and the other line would pass back empty

buckets to be filled again. Thus, water would be transported to the scene of the fire in a steady stream

through this “body pump”. Despite all their efforts

the residents of Woonsocket Falls Village still lost

the struggle with fire in most cases because of the

limited manpower. This kind of tragedy of failing

after fighting actually is a universal phenomenon at

the time, from 1674 to 1679, Boston as the

wealthiest and most prosperous colony has suffered

a series of fire hazard which resulted in casualties

and property loss, especially the big fire in 1674,

forty-six various kinds of buildings including

dwellings, warehouses was destroyed by fire and the

power which finally terminate the disaster is a rainstorm. As the cities grew larger and more crowed, the

efficiency of old self-assistance was further weaken by new issues according to the current situation. For

example, gigantic city scale has a requirement of maneuverability of fire brigade and equally distributed

water source.

To change this embarrassing position, multiple attempts were made in by humankind. The first

practical way of building equally distributed water source is fire cistern system. Fire cistern is

underground tanks or structures that used to hold water for firefighting use. Then In 1817, George Smith,

a fireman invented the first fire hydrant after aware that Manhattan could not provide enough water to

supply everyone. With the invention of the fire hydrant, Manhattan would have more water for drinking

whil

e

wat

er

coul

d

be

pu

mp

ed

into

the

city

fro

m outside its boundaries so that there would also be enough for fighting fires. The earliest hydrant was

made of wood and then after the cast iron started becoming popular, wooden case hydrant was took

http://www.legeros.com/ralwake/photos/weblog/pivot/entry.php?id=594

Fire cistern and old wood fire hydrant

place by cast iron hydrants. In 1865, Philadelphia began to install cast iron hydrants that were almost

the same with today’s model.

It is well known that the earliest practical way of extinguishing fires is splashing water on it and

the traditional way by applying water is various kinds of vessels such as bucket, but this approach was

already old fashioned because of its low efficiency in struggle with fire hazard. The following technique

is using pump on fire engine if available. One of the earliest pumps for fire engine was created in January

1805, its creator described it as “very easy to work, and capable of throwing water to a considerable

height” but in

fact it was

unwieldy and

inefficiency.

Besides Strutt,

other

pioneers also

made several

interesting

attempts, for

instance,

Samuel Wyatt

installed a

new type of

pump at the

Albion Flour

Mills in

London. This

enormous fire

pump was capable of spouting out a vast column of water through a tube and extinguishing the fire. This

new fire engine quickly became the common equipment for both Britain and the United States fire

brigade. After that French invented the rotary fire pump which has two coarse gears with teeth to move

the water to the gear meet point and then the water would be forced out under pressure. At that time

the rotary fire pump was consider as the best product ever made for industrial buildings. In fact, the

most famous fire pump was made by Moses Merry weather of London. His creature is a cart with four

wheeled and pulled by several horses, and a pump with gun metal cylinders and folding handles was

carried by the cart. This system was under control of almost thirty people.

Even though there was already an effective fire pump, the issue of transporting is still beset the

fire brigades, especially in the growing cities which have complex traffic system and large scale. The

urgent requirement for fire brigade is a practical and effective vehicle. In connection with maneuvering

capability of fire brigade; steam technology was used in designing the practical fire engine. The very

early fire trucks were in fact water pumps on

http://www.practicalmachinist.com

Wheels and these pumps; no matter they were hand or steamed powered, were consisted of human

beings pulling pump. Because of being carried around by people, the

apparatus had little room for personnel, they moved slowly and

when they got to the scene, everything is too late and the

firefighters were often have no power to do anything. In 1853 the

Cincinnati, Ohio, Fire Department Committee formulated a plan that

would entirely change the way fires were handled in Unit States

through combining steam engine with carriage. The product of plan

was a horse-drawn steam engine within steam pumper which would allow four or five men to spray

more water on a fire than hundreds of volunteers using hand pumpers, its main feature was a boiler

made of two square chambers: the inner fire box and the outer one for water and steam. The continuing

development in fire fighting technologies made the horses to lose their core status. The increase in

weight of the fire engine slowly turned the horses as

ineffective as the people were before them. Often, after

moving half a mile, their speed would decrease dramatically.

In order to acquire a new means of propelling the engines,

motorized fire trucks became more and more common by

1910. Horse drawn or steam powered engines started being

replaced by fire trucks. By 1913, Ahrens-Fox Manufacturing

Company from Cincinnati was the leading company when it

came to the conversion. From 1911, Mack Trucks began

producing fire trucks, slowly becoming the most famous

manufacturer in this field.

With the rapid urbanization, brought much more working pressure to Fire Bridge, equipping the

buildings with fire self-help function had been putted on the agenda. On this issue, since their large scale,

the Industrial buildings had a much more insistent requirement. By far the most effective way to control

fires in industrial buildings is undoubted the automatic sprinkler systems. The pioneer in this field is a

British people who designed a 'shower bath' for checking fire and got a patent. The core of his system is

a cistern of water which was putted at the top of the building and connected to a stopcock by pipe in

the ceiling of rooms; its port was designed as a rose. The cock was controlled by a weighed cord

descending into the room, thus, when the cord was burnt through in fire, the released weight will allow

the water to be sprayed from the rose. This 'shower bath' system is just an embryonic form but it

http://www.autoevolution.com/news/fire-truck-history

http://www.iaff4074.com/index.cfm?zone

promoted the development of automatic sprinkler systems. In 1852,

the earliest practical sprinkler system for a mill building was a

perforated pipe system installed Lowell Massachusetts. This system

played a key role in mills for almost 30 years and considered as the

accepted standard. Unfortunately, because of its absence of auto-

activated function, the effectiveness of this system is not sufficient to

satisfy the security requirement in industrial production. Based on

previous efforts, in 1874, Henry Parmelee successfully invented the first

practical sprinkler head which would discharge automatically when a

string or cord was burned through. This achievement quickly caught the

attention from different industrialists and was purchased by the

Providence Gas and Steam Pipe Company in 1875. By 1882, almost

200,000 Parmelee systems were installed by mill owners in New

England. After getting continuous improvement, this system became

the basis for current automatic sprinklers.

As known to all, the reason of suffering huge loss for the industrial buildings is their structures

which are made up of inflammable material such as wood which cause the condition of fire to be out of

control in a short time. Realizing this, enhance the flam resistivity of buildings will be helpful to the

firefighting. After acquiring relative advanced technology, humankind began to find some ways of

changing their passive status in struggle with fire hazard. To achieve the objective, various kinds of fire

prevention elements were integrated into building construction field. After the first industrial revolution,

the earliest skeleton frame had gradually been widely used in industrial buildings construction; however,

this new system was still a timber structure. The vulnerable Multi-story buildings of timber beam and

post construction within masonry walls were always under the threat of fire hazard, especially textile

factories where cotton were handled in an oily were often easily to be ignited by candle light which was

the common lighting equipment. By the 1790s the number of registered disasters is horrible. To handle

the ever-growing security issues, the conception of “fireproof mill” was gradually starting to surface in

building field. The earliest attempts to produce fireproof structures was made in the context of

breakthrough progress has been

made in new material. Because of

various kinds of material including

cast iron and concrete were widely

used as building materials and the

traditional materials such as

wooden were gradually replaced,

the original fireproof structures

involved the use of brick jack arches

and iron columns which was

connected with timber beams.. The

first documented fireproof mill

construction was Derby mill which

http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees

http://www.engineering-timelines.com

was designed in England and its creators’ name is William Strutt and Charles Bage. The shell of Derby

mill was still conventional masonry with wooden beams and skewbacks, but its columns were made of

cast iron. In 1796, Charles Bage first used cast iron beams in his Benyon Marshall and Bage flax mill

design at Shrewsbury. The other construction with same technique was Salford Twist Mill in 1799 which

is more famous than the formers. At this time not only the industrial buildings but also the private

houses were benefited from such vaulted fireproof construction. For instance, In A small villa design by S

H Brooks in 1839 used segmental brick vaulting carried on cast iron

girders, concealed from below by paneled plaster ceilings; and then several projects of Charles Barry

used the similarly structures. From 1792 to 1802, during the ten years, these two pioneers and their

assistants improved their fireproof mill construction to be a stand form which was almost followed by

William Fairbairn without big modifying in 1854. William Fairbairn’s investigation began at 1817, when

he and his friend James Lillie were working as millwrights in Manchester. This work provide Fairbairn

with a lot of experience of using wrought iron, and advanced his technology which was used in shipping

industrial field, high pressure locomotive boilers,

machinery, roofs, and bridges. Based on these valuable

knowledge, Fairbairn and his sons started their own

engineering company which soon became one of the

leading companies. Their company designed fireproof

structures for large numbers of textile and corn mills

throughout the country and the best one which was

regarded as “a source of pride to me” by Fairbairn is the

http://picasaweb.google.com

http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/museum/

fireproof construction of Saltaire Mills. The Saltaire Mills was built in 1850 nearby Bradford, in the

building Fairbairn used cast iron columns to support the beams which were made by same material and

brick arches to support each floors. The brick arches were filled over with lime concrete and were laid

on with stone flags or tiles, except where a timber floor was necessary, for which wodden sleepers were

cast into the concrete. The system was imported into United States belatedly, one of the earliest

examples is an engine room in 1834-7 nearby the Charlestown Naval yard, however, because of the high

cost of importing iron members, Fairbairn’s fireproof system was rare untill 1850.

Besides cast iron frame structural, the other William Strutt’s attempt of achiving fireproof

construction is using terra cotta and concrete. In this system, hollow terra cotta pots which was

invented by Eustaches St-Fart played the key role of building a vaulted ceiling to the top story in his

Derby mill project on March 1792. From this attempt, a bunch of hollow pot roofing and flooring types

were develpoed in England, culminating in system of Bunnett and based on which developed the

american systems in the later nineteenth century

During the struggle with fire hazard, besides fire extingiushment, the other effective way is fire

evacuation which would reduce the loss to the minimum. With the emergence of large scale industrial

buildings with multi-story contains large number of workers inside, fire evacuation was becoming more

and more important in security issue. Under this circumstance, the most effective solution was the fire

escape system. As far as we know that a fire escape is defined as egress from a building during the fire,

this term refers to every emergency exits such as ropes tied to window ledges and poles affixed to

exterior building walls. For industrial buildings, the first approach was external hung iron balcony fire

escape. In 1871 law, fire escapes was required to be erected on all public buildings in Unite States,

however, before factory workers could truly experienced safe working condition, there still be decades

http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/museum/

of tragedy and protest. The issue about fire escape on factories was involved in the broader disscussion

of worker’s rights, equality of the sexes, and child labor laws. Worse of all, the iron balcony fire escape

as a significant life saving approach for industrial buildings had too many serious weaknesses to finish its

job. Thus, after suffering several deadly fire hazards and factory worker strikes, the public began to find

a new way of ensuring the safe conditions for workers. In New York City, a factory building nearby

Centre Street was destoried by fire on Decemebr 1872, inspite of the loss of life is small, the event

brought the horrible conditions of the factories to light. In 1888, the othe fire hazard killed 56 workers at

a factory on Chrystie Street in New York City on August. During this deadly disaster, several serious

shortcomings were exposed. The factory building has fire escapes on its front and rear but during the

fire, most of them were licked and burn down by flames

in a short time, panic driven the miserable vicitims to

jump from windows. In the same year the weakness of

iron balcony fire escapes was proved by the othe big loss

of live in a fire hazard of a local factory, according to the

witnesses and survivors, flameas shot out the window at

this deadly factory fire and make the use of fire escape

to be difficult and dangerous. The dominant material of

early fire escape was cast iron but after suffering several

deadly disasters, the cast iron was took place by wrought

iron. Even though the wrought iron compared with cast

iron is less resistant to corrosion and has a lower heat

resistance, the wrought iron will never broken under

tension without little warning. Moreover, although the

cast iron possessing a high heat resistance, the members

will become very brittle after several years. Wrought

iron is capable of holding the tension and is tough with a

high fatigue resistance and its corrosion resistance will

not declined easily. Unfortunately, the emergence of

new materials could not prevent the iron balcony fire

escape from being replaced by the other newer,

improved methods of egress. In 1911, The Asch Building was destoried by fire and 150 vicitims lost their

lives, this disaster caused a nation-wide examination of the current fire escape techniques and reached

a conclusion that the safety of exterior fire escape is diminished hardly. Due to this consensus, the Unite

States began to take place the traditional exterior fire

escape with fire-safety interior stairwells. However,the

exterior fire escapes were still considered as a practical

approach of accessing for the fire brigade.

http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/museum/

http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/museum/

Bibliography

1. http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/Museum/OtherTrades/SteamMill/FireproofMill.htm

"The old steam Mill by Bev Parker"

This main idea of this article is describing the evolution of one kind fireproof mills and the article

include many useful information of fireproof construction.

2. "History of Fire and Fire Protection In Nineteenth Century Woonsocket"

http://www.woonsocket.org/WoonFire.pdf

This article talks about the revolution of fire protection technology in Nineteenth Century

Woonsocket which is a small city in USA.

3. http://marine.govoffice.com/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC=%7B2CEBBF06-0011-4132-9422-

A48E6C1CBF5B%7D" The city of Marine on st.Croix"

This article talks about the revolution of hand pump technology which plays a key role in the fire

protection field

4. http://magazine.sfpe.org/sprinklers/historical-perspective-evolution-storage-sprinkler-design

"A Historical Perspective on the Evolution of Storage Sprinkler Design"

This article introduces the revolution of Auto Sprinkler technology.

5. http://www.anchorgroup.co.uk/anchor-welding/fireescapeinspection.htm

“Fire Escapes,” London England