The Fire Extinguisher, Part 1

It's having to hastily put out fire, that's true. And so we're following up our three episode look at match Sticks with a look at the fire extinguisher, because you know, it's one thing to be a master of fire, but we have to do more than just create and foster the flame, right, We have to be able to manage it and snuff it out, especially when it gets out of control. The fire has a mind and a life of its own, and it will not be tamed so easily.

So when we're gonna ultimately talk about the modern fire extinguisher, but yeah, before we get to that, let's discuss like what a fire extinguisher is, and just in general terms, you can think of it as an active fire protect and device, or perhaps an active fire protection strategy or method, uh, something that you do something it entails action and response in order to deal with an unwanted or unruly blaze.

So not like a sprinkler system, not like a ditch dug around a camp fire or something to that extent, but something that is done, something you can grab and use, or some plan of action you can utilize against the blaze. I see what you're saying. Not a static defenses, not the walls around your city, but the culdron of boiling tar you have on top of the ramparts. So I

think that's that's a good way to think of it. Now, having just done these three episodes about matches and fire creation technology, in a way, it's almost crazy to consider the need to then put out a fire. I know, we spent the last like three episodes trying to figure out how to get one, yeah, and and contemplating say that, you know, the vast time period really in human history where the ability to manipulate fire existed, but the ability

to create it did not. You know, it was this precious thing that had to be gathered, that had to be obtained and then kept and nurtured and guarded, carried from one spot to another. But then to to think about on top of that, you might need to just kill it. Sometimes this precious uh, this precious gleaming god that you've rescued from a you know, a lightning struck stumped in the woods. But you would need to do

this and for a number of key reasons. So first of all, is as a means of keeping unwanted or unruly fires in check. So maybe you have your camp fire, but then what if the campfire spreads to uh, you know, some hides or a tent or something that you do not want on fire. You need to be able to put it out. Also as a means of snuffing a fire to prevent detection by enemies, namely other humans that you might not want aware of your camp fire. Light smoke gives you away, right, And then also a means

of preventing a blaze from growing out of control unattended. Now, um, this this last one raises some interesting questions. I was wondering and doing a little bit of research on this, trying to figure out did ancient humans really make many

efforts to prevent wildfires? You know, I guess a big part of of having a camp fire today is your you know, your knowledge that it needs to be maintained properly needed to prevent this from getting out of control, and when you're done with it, you need to make sure it's out. But aside from, you know, protecting yourself from observation by other human groups out there, I wonder to what extent that was really a matter of concern for ancient people's. Maybe it was, maybe, maybe it wasn't.

I can't tell. Well, I don't know. I mean I would say, if you live in a wooded area, you would not want the woods to catch fire, right, Yeah, true. I mean at the same time, of course, fire was used rather destructively, um, you know, even in ancient times as a as a means of controlling vegetation and controlling animals, and it uses the hunting tactic, et cetera, burning land for agriculture, that kind of thing. But then again, that is when when doing so would definitely benefit the people

in question. So I guess it's not It's not unfair to imagine that that there would have been some level of concern for a fire going out of control, because of course it went out of out of control, it could become a danger to your people as well. Right. I was reading a particular book by Frank Sharman titled Fires and fire laws up to the middle of the

eighteenth century. And in this the historian points out that humans would have known fire uh first as an enemy, which I think is an important point to make sure. I mean the way animals do. Like the first reaction to fire, if you recognize it, is to retreat from it, right And eventually we realized so we can retrieve this, Okay, we can use it. We can we can nurture it, we can control it. But initially there is fire as

this thing that burns, that frightens. That is a dang sure, and it's it's never really stopped being a danger to us. Even as we've even today, as we've learned to to control it so well in certain environments and in certain circumstances, wildfires are still a huge problem. Um. And you know, fires and urban settings are still a big threat. We have to have a great deal of emergency preparedness in place to deal with those blazes. So even a well

maintained fire is something of a sleeping dragon. It can it can wake up, especially if you're not careful. So ancient fire masters would have discovered the means of putting out fires. Obviously, they would have figured out the conditions that cause fires to struggle and devise means of exploiting these conditions as well. So basically these are the general steps you'd want to take to deal with an unwanted flame.

One would be to direct a substance onto the fire that rapidly cools it, right, uh, And this is one of the I mean, many of the things we do to put out fires do more than one different method at the same time of putting out the fire. But so one reason to throw water on a fire is that water takes a lot of energy to heat up and turn into steam. So it's rapidly cooling whatever you're

throwing it on, that's right. And and this gets into our our next issue as well, direct a substance onto the fire that deprives it of oxygen, because again, the fire has to consume that oxygen to exist to be this this flame at all. So if you uh so, if you're able to get rid of the oxygen, you kill the flame. Right. And this is why I say smothering a fire with a blanket or with dirt or sand works. It's because the oxygen now can't get to

the flame. Right. Another thing is, of course, is to direct a substance under the fire that interferes with the chemical reaction that's taking place. Yes, and this is often like there are some modern fire extinguishers or recent fire extinguishers that just have a chemical within them that inhibits the chemical reaction that we call fire. And additionally, one important way to control and ultimately fight a fire is

to deprive it of fuel as well. So much of nurturing and maintaining a fire is about feeding it, and to put it out you just need to you know, take away what it needs to burn. And so this continues to play an important role in firefighting techniques today. Uh, we see this with a control burn in the wilderness settings. So it's still an important tactic make sure that the

fire does not have its next meal. I feel like removal of fuel is much more often a preventative firefighting technique than I mean, it's hard to remove fuel to put out an existing fire, Yeah, at least quickly. It's like a ravenous flaming beast that is eating its meal.

You know, you can just pull the bone out of its jaws, right, but you can perhaps remove the other bones so that doesn't have somewhere to jump next so indeed, a great way to deal with a small en a fire is to stamp it out under your boots, uh, to stuff it out with dirt with a candle. A simple candle snuffer does the job very well. A pair of wet fingertips will often do the job with a match.

But water has always been a st on candidate for extinguishing a typical fire because, like you mentioned, a bucket of water can put out a blaze, you know, extremely well if it's the right side. And this runs the gamut from just a bucket of water at your campsite to you know, the various high pressure, high velocity of water hoses that you see used by firefighters. By the way, another quote from that that from Sharman on how ancient people dealt with fire and their their limited number of

tools to fight flames. Uh, he wrote, quote, Apart from the obvious precautions of taking care of the handling of fire, including extinguishing or covering fires at night, prayer was the chief means of fire prevention, especially as the fire gets bigger. Right, Because like as the fire gets bigger, the primitive tools you would have had available, such as kicking dirt over it or throwing water on it become less and less effective.

They're they're very swiftly outclassed by the blaze. But once again, like you mentioned earlier, water remains a great way to deal with fire, provided you can dump enough of it onto the blaze. Yes, and not just for the reason I said earlier, like one of the one of the reasons I mentioned, of course, is that it takes a lot of energy to heat water up turn it into steam, so that rapidly cools whatever you throw the water on.

But they're they're also downstream benefits and putting out fires. Yeah, So when water comes in contact with the heat, you know, we have the cooling that we mentioned earlier, but the water becomes steam and this this is the conversion that absorbs that heat. And then also the resulting steam displaces air from around the fire, thus removing the oxygen. So again, two out of three, that's that's enough to get it done again, provided there you have enough water to throw

at the problem. Right, it's a two fer. Yeah. Now, And an important caveat to this, of course, is this will not work on a fire with a liquid fuel source, right, say, like oil burning on top of water. You know, throwing water on that doesn't really help much exactly, but but certainly your standard sort of burning wood scenario, or certainly a camp fire scenario, enough water dumped on it will do the job. So when do we first started getting

fire extinguishers? Well, if we're extremely generous with our definition of a fire extinguisher, we might just give credit to whoever invented the bucket, which which of course is just lost to history. But we need not go back quite that far if we rein it in just a little bit, and we consider a particular invention and a particular inventor from ancient Greece. So we're gonna look at someone we've

discussed on the show before. We discussed them in our invention episode on the vending Machine, and we also discussed them in the stuff to Blow your Mind episode on the Singing Colossi of Memnon. That's right, we're talking about Greek inventor and physicists to Sibius of Alexandria who lived two eighty five through two two b c E. And he's attributed with discovering the elasticity of air and creating

several inventions that depended on compressed air. So his his His most famous inventions are probably the water clock and so a water organ, and his writings do not survive, but we know of him through the writings of Vitruvius and also a hero. But he is said to have also invented a gadget that could be used to pump water onto a fire, So it's decipious we're basically talking about.

His invention would have consisted of a pair of cylinders with pistons that discharge into a flaplike valve chamber and out then out through a single outlet, so no hose connections or anything like that. And it's been supposed that each piston would have worked independently via its own lever. But this means that short, quick strokes would be needed to produce a steady jet of water. UH. So I

was I was reading a source on this. UH. One J. S. Rainbird wrote about this in nine six UH seemingly very well regarded book about the vigil Aise of Rome and UH and in that he contends that a single lever would have worked better the Tacibius's invention. He spends a lot of time talking about about Tacibius and his UH invention and later writers writing about that invention before he gets onto the Roman situation, which we will also get

to shortly. Um but yeah, so so basically, Vitruvius centuries later insisted no air was involved in this, which Rainbird writes has bedeviled attempts to understand how it might have worked. So some think it might have used an air chamber to study the water pressure, but Rainbird is not convinced. He writes, quote the notion of Spiritus as a force of for moving water probably reflects the Stoic belief in a world spirit which was responsible for such a natural

phenomena as storms and currents of water. In order to understand the mechanics of the pump, it is best to leave these stoic connotations on one side, and translates Spiritus as pressure, avoiding all mention of air. No ancient pump had an air chamber. That's interesting, So like a problem with the translation of the idea. It could be it's it's almost like saying a way of saying, like the laws of physics or by this mechanism we know of

physics such as pressure. But this has been misinterpreted as there being literal air in there, yes, or at least that was This was Rainbird's argument. I don't know to what extent. You know, there's there's disagreement or agreement on that count nowadays, but he seemed very convinced. So this would have been originally created by Tissibius of Alexandria in the third century BC. But we know that something like this, maybe some derivative product, was being used in ancient Rome.

And to get to that, I think we should lay a little bit of context about ancient Roman firefighting before we get to the specific technology. And this is some devilish territory. Yes, uh, maybe first we should take a break, and then when we come back, we can talk about

firefighting scams. All right, we're back. So the first century b CE Roman statesman Marcus Crassus is sometimes given credit for inventing the first organized firefighting brigade in ancient Rome, but it didn't work exactly like the firefighters we would think of today, because what's the modern progression, right, You you notice a fire, you call nine one one, you say my house is on fire. The firefighters come, they put the fire out, or they at least try to

put the fire out, and then you deal with the aftermath. Yeah, firefighters in today's society like that they are they are true heroes. These are people who come and risk their lives to save the lives of individuals that are trapped in houses or buildings are threatened by the flame. They do what they can to protect you know, your your

your home and the items in it as well. And and it's really hard to think of another class of public servant that is that is really venerated in this way, you know, I mean there's a kind of purity to aid they provide. Yeah, like there's no I don't think there are there even any movies about like dirty firefighters or anything, you know, it would be funny, I mean not. I mean maybe maybe it's exact. I'm sure there's there's

some case to be made. But for the most part, firefighters we tell our children about how they're great and they're they're they're they're brave, and their their heroes. And for the most part, like that remains true throughout your adult life, Like you realize that these are these are this is an important role and the people who do it are are doing very important work. But cross Us he had a different model for how firefighting should work.

So at the time of the republic in in the first century b C. Rome was just going up in flames all the time. Joseph J. Walsh, historian that I'm going to quote from more later, calls Rome a city of fires. The city was overcrowded, and the houses were tall and packed tightly together. It was just kind of a tinder box. Plus it did not have an organized public system for fire fighting at this time. Whatever public

firefighting took place was probably voluntary and ad hoc. So it's just whoever you can get together to try to help you put out a fire, you're kind of on your own. But the ancient Greek author Plutarch, in his biography writes that Marcus Crassis, despite all of his great virtues, was known above all for his avarice and for his

extravagant wealth. Quote the greatest part of this, if one must tell the scandalous truth, he got together out of fire and war, making the public calamities his greatest source of revenue. So there's a disaster, crossis gets dollar signs in his eyes. Uh. And Plutarch writes that, okay, so how do you make money off of war? Well, that was mostly by way of accepting or buying the properties of people who were put to death after military conquests.

But how did he make money off of fire? Well, here's what Plutarch writes, quote moreover, observing how extremely subject the city was to fire and falling down of houses by reason of their height, and they're standing so near together, he bought slaves that were builders and architects, And when he had collected these to the number of more than five hundred, he made it his practice to buy houses that were on fire and those in the neighborhood which

in the immediate danger and uncertainty the proprietors were willing to part with for little or nothing, so that the greatest part of Rome, at one time or another came into his hands. That is so it's so slimy, Yeah, and it's beyond signing. Yeah. Imagine, so, like your house is on fire, you call nine one one, and then what happens Instead of firefighters, a shady real estate developer shows up with like five hundred guys with water buckets just standing there, and he says, okay, you got a

couple options here. You can sell me this house for five thousand dollars right now, or you can watch it burned down and get nothing. And you're like that, why, that's like one percent of what my house is worth. I can't do that. And he's like, okay, four thousand now, um, and so that's your choice. And then meanwhile he's probably he's got people going around all your neighbors saying like, it looks like this one's about to go down yours

this catching fire? Next? What's your price? Yeah? Yeah, crossis is? Um. He had quite a scheme going here. You know, there's a there's a there's a series of Roman detective novels that were written by an author by the name of Stephen Saylure that I think I read all the I read a lot of them when I was in college,

I think. And then there there are a lot of fun you know they He does a great job of putting you in this uh, this Roman setting, and the main character is this, uh, this fictional detective type character. It was very similar in some ways to William of Baskerville. And the name of the rose named Gordian is the finder. And there is a scene in one of the books. I forget which one, uh it is, but there's a

scene where Gordianus is coming over. I think to to speak with Crosses and Crosses in in is in the process of negotiating with someone who's building is about to catch fire via an adjacent building that's already in flames. It is a level of like genius deviousness that I don't know. It's hard to imagine, but I don't know. I feel like the Roman Republic period was full of

stuff like this. So this raises the question, right, Okay, so they're they're offering to put out the fire um or to control of the fire in some way, what are they gonna do? I mean, they're not really they're not really offering to you. It's like they're only there to put out the fire once his crasss his property. Right, yeah, I'll put out my fire, but this is your fire. I could buy this fire, and the thing is about

to consume off of you. Uh yeah. And so it was a while before Rome actually got an effective fire department.

I was reading a book about this by Joseph J. Walsh called The Great Fire of Rome, Life and Death in the Ancient City from Johns Hopkins University Press, twenty nineteen, and according to Walsh, Rome was finally able to estab publish an effective public fire department only under Caesar Augustus in the year six CE, and he writes that the main reason was that Augustus had been able to consolidate enough control over politics in the empire to make a

fire department either, you know, either make it palatable to the other politicians in the city or just overrule whatever their concerns were. Because during the Republican period in Rome, Walsh argues that politicians and leaders feared a fire brigade. Think what this literally consists of hundreds of men armed with axes roaming around the city under control of some bureaucratic commander. They they're thinking, okay, that could be a

weapon of a rival politician or political faction. They get control of the fire brigade, and then they could use that for god knows what right. I mean, Well, I mean, just look at what Crosses is doing with his own private fire brigade. Imagine if there was a you know, an even larger, more established presence that could be corrupted

in his fashion. You know. And also, like, we don't know this, there's no direct evidence, but who's to say Crassis didn't have people going out and starting fires, by the way, I mean exactly when the city's a tinderbox. So Augustus meanwhile, you know, he's basically a king at this point. He's got supreme power, and he's he's got at least enough power that he could create a fire department and nobody could resist or complain. So he did.

And these firefighters were you mentioned their name earlier, the vigil as meaning watchman or vigilant ones and their chief was the prefect Us vigilium or director of the watchman. Uh So they were firefighters, but they were also more than that. They were occasionally used as a kind of auxiliary police force to you know, restore order in quotes, during times of unrest. So it might make sense to think of them as like eighty percent fire department riot

police kind of. And Walsh writes that their modus operandi is is right there in their name, it's watchfulness. The vigilist would patrol the streets of Rome looking for uncontrolled fires, and if they found one, they would immediately raise the alarm and start fighting it. So what kind of technology did they have at their disposal for fighting fires? Well, Walsh rites that we actually know a decent amount about this. First of all, they had the hammy or the water buckets.

Sometimes vigilist would simply carry buckets of water with them as they patrol, which sounds heavy, but you know that that's what you had to do at the time. But there were also plenty of public fountains and these would be positioned around the city, partially for the express purpose of filling water buckets in the event of a fire.

You know, one great thing about Roman infrastructure is they did have the city supplied with a lot of fresh water, right, so if you needed to run a bucket line or a bucket brigade, you would not have to have it go all the way across the city or something unrealistic like that, right, you would have these points scattered all throughout the town where you could get the water. And as you mentioned that, there are a couple of main

methods here. One is just running buckets from the fountain to the house that's on fire, and the other would be if you could get enough people together, you could form a bucket line where you know, you're handing off the buckets and a kind of assembly line fashion. Another option, of course, is rags or fire blankets. These could be

retrieved from nearby stations to smother household blazes. But the water bucket method and the rag method, these would be more effective with smaller fires, almost useless against bigger fires. So what are your options for when things really start to get out of hand, like when a whole house

starts going up. Well, another thing that the vigil as would have carried with them would be the delibri or the pick axes, and these would be partially for access, just like firefighters would use them today, So knocking down doors, knocking through walls to get in, sometimes to rescue people trapped inside. The Walsh rights that rescuing people was not a major priority of the vigil as. They were more concerned with putting out fires and preventing the spread of fires.

Uh so, but that that could all access could also come in there because they could just get closer to wherever the fire was, right, like if it was inside the house and not outside yet they might knock down a door to get in. But tools like hooks and axes could in some circumstances help prevent the spread of fire in their own right. How would this be, Well, if the fire is getting out of control, you start tearing things down. You destroy nearby buildings and structural elements

that could provide more fuel and spread the flames. This is called a firebreak. It's the intentional destruction of any free standing fuel around a fire in order to keep the fire contained. And sometimes this would even involve setting controlled fires around the main fire to rob it of potential fuel, as is sometimes done in wildfire fighting today. Yeah, it's like some of the strategies of of wildfire fighting,

but using an urban setting. Yeah. Now, obviously there's only so much you can do to tear down houses with handheld implements like hooks and axes. So did the Romans have any better options? Why? Yes, Walsh writes, yes they did. One important technology in the ancient Roman firefighting arsenal was originally a class of siege weaponry, primarily the ballista. This was a large mobile piece of heavy artillery used for

launching projectiles at the walls of enemy cities. You can kind of picture a giant crossbow and it would have required ten soldiers and one commanding officer just to operate it. And if firefighting context, this would have been used to blast houses down. So the fire couldn't consume them and spread further, so they would they would literally like wage war against buildings that were in danger of spreading the

flame to the rest of the city. Yes. Uh, And this isn't the only time in history when essentially bombs weapons heavy artillery has been used to stop the spread of a fire. Wall shrites that even in some cases in the twentieth century. You know, if there's some twentieth century urban fires in the United States where we had to resort to dynamiting areas of cities to create a firebreak within the within the city. Right, And of course we'll come back to other uses for explosives in the

few but back to water based options. Walsh does mention that the vigil As had access to pumps for spraying water on the fires, but he does not think they would have been anything like the powerful fire hoses we see today. First of all, the Romans didn't have rubber, so they couldn't create hoses like ours, But they did have these pumps, he thinks they would be they would have been very limited in output, in the pressure and

the volume that they could put out. Yeah. Rainbird comments on this as well and contends that these would have been basically useless, especially especially against any kind of sizeable flame. Yeah, not much better than a bucket. Nevertheless, they did exist, so at least somebody thought they were useful. That they were pumped by hand, uh, and they would squirt out a jet of water onto whatever, you know, you were,

whatever you were trying to put out. Yeah, it does seem like, yeah, they would have to be useful for something. So it basically comes down to either they were useful in in very specific circumstances small blaze, uh, you know, or a blaze like perhaps you know, in just the right space where bucket wouldn't get to it and you

needed to be a little more precise. Maybe the only other possibility would be if it had some sort of symbolic importance, you know, but I don't think there's anything really to support that idea, and you must have had some sort of practical importance. Yeah, I don't know. That's interesting, But both the sources were looking at seems like there's no indication that they would have been especially useful. Yeah.

I guess the other option is somebody was connected and made these and they're like, let's let's make sure all the firefighters have this new technology, it would be great the amazing pumps from Crassis, inc. So I mean that's that. Again, nothing I ran across, nothing to support that idea either, but certainly it's within the realm of possibility. So I want to quote a section from Walsh here that I

thought was interesting. Walsh rights one of the great ironies of life in ancient Rome was that although the city was endowed with a remarkable, indeed unprecedented volume of flowing fresh water, the technology did not allow the Romans to take full advantage of that resource buckets and feeble pumps. The succession of fires grand and middling that our sources

mentioned provides the proof. Still we do not and never will know how many small fires would have become significant had not the vigil as in their basic tools extinguished them. And the emperors continuing substantial investments in the fire service suggests that these investments had an impact. I think we alluded to this a minute ago, but it is such a weird irony that Rome was like the most water

supplied city in the world at the time. You know, it's getting all this water flowing in through their infrastructure, and yet it's also the city of Fires. Yeah. And and man, it's this is one of those things too that I think I have any time I visit like a really big city if I you know, if I'm

saying New York or something. You know, you just look around and you look at just the sheer number of people that that live in a in a very very small area, and you think of all the little fires that are going on all over the place, you know, in you know, in a appliances and stoves, candles, burnt incense, cigarette lighters, etcetera. All these all these little fires, and we all just kind of work together to keep them

from getting out of hand. And then we have this you know, we have of course laws and regulations and uh and then we have safety procedures and we have the fire department doing their important work, but all these things working together to just keep the ever present fire at Bay. Yeah. I think one of the big differences now is that modern cities just tend to have more

static fire protection. We've got sprinkler systems, we've got fire resistant construction, we've got fire resistant city planning, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And fortunately we don't have to bust out the siege equipment. Right, all right, we're gonna take another break, but when we come back, we will continue our journey. We will continue our look at early sort of what proto fire extinguisher technology, and we're gonna take things into the explosive the age of alchemy.

All right, we're back. So again when you ask the question who invented the fire extinguisher? You have to then decide what are you going to consider a fire extinguisher? What counts? Yeah, and for some people the individual we're going to discuss next, and their invention counts. Um, We'll leave you to decide whether you consider this a fire extinguisher or not. But it is definitely an active of

fire prevention device. And and it is a device or is the individual who created it would call it a machine. We're gonna talk here about Ambrose Godfrey A k Ambrose Godfrey the Elder, a k Ambrose Godfrey hunk Wits A k Ambrose hunk Wits who lived sixteen sixty through seventeen forty one. So Godfrey was a German born British phosphorus

manufacturer and apothecary. If you will remember from our previous match episodes phosphorus emerged via the work of German alchemist Hinnig Brand in sixteen sixty nine by an amazing method if you weren't listening to the earlier one. He basically somehow got together about like fifteen hundred gallons of human

urine in his basement and then evaporated it. I guess he's like gently boiled it down until it became a waxy substance that he could play with, right, And I think in his original recipe he also called for it to u um. The word that was used in the source I was looking at in the previous episodes was rot. Let it set around and get even more stagnant. And what an amazing basement that must have been. And as the secret spread and the secret did spread, people realize, Oh,

you don't actually have to let it get grosser. You know, it's basically ready to go. But I think he was actually a funny development on that is, so he's an alchemist. One of the things alchemists Soften wanted to do was find a way to turn various substances off in base

metals like lead into goal old uh. He thought that maybe you could turn urine into gold, right, and he did get something valuable, but it wasn't gold, right, Yeah, because phosphorus does become, you know, as we discussed in the in the previous episodes, uh, of vital importance, especially

in the match industry. So in its transition from alchemical secret to this to this industrial formula, Brand ends up selling the secret to one de Craft of Dresden, and I believe Craft traveled around with it and kind of did like kind of magical performances with the phosphorus Traveling

Urine show. Yeah. But then the urine secret passes on to a couple of individuals, uh, one of whom is English chemist Robert Boyle, and I believe Boyle like basically he was given most of the secret and then guest at the rest was able to apply sort of chemical knowledge to figure out what he needed to do. And then he ends up hiring Ambrose Godfrey at the young age of nineteen years old as an assistant who helps

him crack the use of urine in the brewing a phosphorus. Wait, I'm sorry, I just remembered one more fact we couldn't skip over, is that Hennig Brand thought that you needed specifically, you needed beer drinkers urine. So I think he like sent his steps on out or something, his his second wife's son, to like, go get me a bunch of beer drinkers urine. Well, I mean, I guess it's easier to obtain at the time than to say, go get me the urine of a bunch of people who don't

drink beer. That's right, Yeah, I'm sure that you had volume issues. Yeah. So Godfrey himself goes on to become a major phosphorus manufacturer himself, and indeed invented a method of extinguishing a fire. I was reading that there that he there accounts of him as a chemist, he would occasionally burn himself and set small fires. So you know, in whether you're an alchemist or a chemist, there's going to be occasionally a fire that you do not wish

to have in your presence. And it would behoove you to be able to have some sort of fire extinguishing method. And you don't want to waste your pre just urine throwing it on a fire to put it out right. That urine has his ear marked. So he invented a new method. He invented a new machine he called it, and uh, he wrote about it in an account of the New method of Extinguishing Fires by explosion and suffocation,

And you can actually read this entire text. It's it's a little difficult to read at times because it's you know, the you know, the word edge and all is a little uh antique, shall we say. But he spends a you know, a short books worth of text discussing this new invention that he has unleashed on the world. And it is essentially a grenade, hand grenade to be used against an out of control fire. It was not a gadget that blasted a fire with water or powder or

foam or anything. You threw it or rolled it into an out of control blaze and it would explode. Now this, uh, this is something that has been explored in other contexts. I know there have been some experiments with say, dropping bombs on wildfires to put them out, and I'm not sure that that has been ruled a very effective method overall, but it does have some efficacy because you know, an explosion robs the fire zone of some of the things it needs to do. There's like a burst, I'm sure

that like pushes some oxygen a ount. Explosives do have some fire suppressant capabilities, absolutely, but but this one it has another element to it as well. So very you know, very briefly, he devised about three different sizes and these would have all been essentially kind of kind of like spheres or you know, or or bottles, and all of them contained a liquid mixture of a fire suppressant um. And then it also had a pewter chamber that was

loaded with gunpowder. So you'd like this puppy or or throw it into the fire and it would it would explode and this would spread. The explosion would spread the flame suppressing mixture. So the explosion has some some flame suppressing powers, but he also was loading it with flame retardant, right, So it's one of those situations where we're probably hitting two out of the three ways of combating ablaze. And yeah, so obviously he was really behind this idea. He wrote

the book that we mentioned already. He also apparently had a three story wooden house constructed and then set it ablaze to demonstrate the effectiveness of his machine. Uh So it didn't seem to really catch on to the extent that he wanted it to, but it seemed to work at least in with certain size fires and certain situations. But even though the technology did not become dominant right away,

others continue to improve upon it. So during the eighteen hundreds and then the early nineteen hundreds, newer designs of fire grenades were invented, employing new chemical formulas for the fire suppressing mixture inside. Yeah, but the fire the fire grenades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from what I was reading, we're substant really different. In the most of the ones I was reading about did not contain any

explosive elements. They were more just like they were containers that were loaded with something like we can talk about the ingredients in a minute, but that you know, it wasn't like in the gunpowder mode as much anymore. It was more like this is something you can throw at a fire to quench it. So they were still they were definitely marketed as grenades. There's there's a wonderful image that I came across. Uh. It was actually in a

a page on the Invisible website. The apparently did an episode on fire grenades at the point, and so they had a corresponding page with some images, and this one is for the hardened star hand grenade fire extinguisher, and you have to see it. It has like these two um panels, and in one panel you see this like Victorian looking woman and a child child standing on a stool. There's some sort of fire in the middle of the room.

And then in the next panel you have some minfolks standing around and one of them is hurling a fire grenade and the placement makes it look like that he is hurling it into the flaming room where where his like wife and child are standing with a fire. Right, it looks like they're trapped in the room and the dudes just outside the door chucking the grenades at them. You know, like, don't worry, darling, it's just a bit

of glass. But if you really zoom in in the panel with the guy throwing the grenade, it looks like he's throwing it into a coat closet. Oh yeah it does. Yeah. So I mentioned a minute ago, like what did these bombs actually have inside them? Some of them were very simple and didn't use didn't use any explosives, didn't even

use any complex chemistry. From roughly the eighteen seventies until the nineteen tends, a very popular method of fire prevention was to equip buildings with these wall mounts that would just have fire grenades sitting in them, so you'd have like a little bracket up on the wall and just be there. Often it was painted red, but it would be a glass sphere very similar in shape to a light bulb. Will be usually filled with saltwater. Now, why saltwater?

I read this and I was wondering to saltwater put out fires more effectively than freshwater, and I could not find any evidence that that's the case. And I think the reason saltwater was used was to lower the freezing point of the water inside the bulb, so you could leave it out year round without worrying it would freeze.

Oh well, that does make sense, yeah, because it was just a it's like a cold warehouse environment, for example, it can conceivably be frozen solid and would be rather useless or mostly useless if you were to hurl it into a flame. Right. I found another brand in addition to the hardened Star, the the sure Stop s h u R Stop the automatic Fireman on the Wall. Another popular brand I read about multiple sources was called red Comet. Now, if you wanted a more potent fire suppressant, then just

playing saltwater, which again still works pretty well. You can buy glass grenades full of a chemical fire suppressant called carbon tetra chlora IT or CTC, which is now also known as tetra chloro methane. This was a dense, sweet smelling, extremely toxic, non flammable liquid that, when volatilized, inhibits the chemical reaction that causes fire. It was a chemical flame suppressant.

CTC was first synthesized by humans in eighteen thirty nine by reacting chlorine with chloroform, and it's had a lot of industrial uses over the years as a cleaning solvent, as a refrigerant, and yes, as a fire suppression chemical. But if you happen to come across a vintage CTC fire grenade, sometimes people still have these fire grenades in their houses. You know, they were still being manufactured up

into the nineteen forties and fifties. I think, um, if you if you have one of these in your house, we would not advise trying to use it. I have come across multiple articles by like household goods, museums and antiques experts talking about this, saying if you've got one of these CTC grenades hanging around. You need to find a way to get it safely disposed of through a local fire department or something, because CTC, we have discovered is extremely toxic. Just a few minutes of exposure can

cause potentially fatal injury. It's hippotoxic, toxic to the liver, it's toxic to all kinds of stuff in the body. Uh. Absolute bad news. You do not want to break one of these things. And yet that's the whole mechanism, right, You're supposed to break it by throwing it into the fire. Yeah. Generally these fire grenades would be made of very thin glass so that it was sure to shatter on impact, but some of them had a heat activated trigger mechanism instead.

An example of this might be a spring loaded cap on the container that's held in place by solder, and then when the solder is heated and melted by the fire, the cap gets released in the fire suppressant material escapes. But he would still be a it would still be a it wouldn't be a passive method, it would still be active, I think, so you'd still probably want to throw it in. I don't know, technically that might something that we were kind of like a sprinkler system. Yeah,

if you had enough of them around. If you haven't had enough, um uh, you know, fragile spheres of of toxic chemicals just hanging around the place, like all throughout the ceiling. You've just got spheres of water that have like a solder cork on the bottom. And yeah, you could just stick with the water, that's right. You don't need to do the CTC version. Yeah. I I haven't seen anything like that around, but but yeah, there'd be

an interesting idea. Maybe somebody had that. But so anyway, these grenades style fire extinguishers eventually did go out of style because they were less effective than modern fire extinguishers. According to an article I was reading by David McCormick for the Antique Trader magazine, they were known to fail, and they were much more effective when a fire was just breaking out than once it was raging and extremely hot.

This is a repeating theme we're seeing as we discussed a lot of these technologies, right, because it does seem like, especially if you're dealing with just a a grenade that is full of salt water, it's kind of a fancy bucket of water. Really, it's a bucket of water that's always available, ready to go, easier to throw. Maybe you could, yeah, you definitely get I think better distance on that, but it's still delivering about the same amount of water, maybe

a little less. That is what's what the appeal of most of these grenades was. I think it was that they would be right there on the wall the moment you needed them. You wouldn't so if a fire breaks out, you wouldn't need to say, oh my goodness and run and get a bucket and get to the pump in the backyard and start. But you know, all that stuff,

it would just be right there. Yeah, you know. Maybe this was another advantage to use salt water so that like the local Homer Simpson does not drink them all because he's thirsty. Then again, salt is delicious. You might use them to marinate his meat and to wash his socks. I guess they'd be brining, brining his meat, brining pork

chops in the with the fire grenade. So at this point we've we've discussed several of these different inventions, these different devices, these different approaches to comp adding the flame, and I guess one of the real take comes thus far, is that none of these devices kind of match the the you know, the the energy, the potency of the

fire of the dragon fire, you know. And I think that's something about the modern fire extinguisher that is that is central to not only its effectiveness, but just sort of the appeal of it. Like it is a thing that blasts the fire back to put the fire out. It is like a uh, you know, the the opposite the anti dragon that is just on the shelf, ready to go, and it is St. George, Yeah, and it and it also he does utilize a number of the

different is will explore in the next episode. The modern fire extinguisher uses a number of the principles that are employed in these earlier inventions, but it brings them all together into UH an even better technology. It's Ripley in the loader coming up against the monster, all right, And we will explore that in the next episode of Invention,

which will come out next Monday. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes, if you want to check out our three partner on Matches, which is not just to look at matches, but a look at the evolution of fire UH technology itself. You will find those anywhere you get your podcasts. If you head on over to invention pod dot com, that'll shoot you over

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