The Fire Extinguisher, Part 2

We talked about anti fire grenades, those that had gunpowder elements and tried to stop fires through explosions, and those that were just basically glass light bulbs full of water or seawater or not seawater, saltwater or other very dangerous chemicals. Yeah, And of course in all of that we really didn't get to something that would even really be recognizable as as like a modern fire extinguisher. But that's where we're getting to in this episode. We're going to discuss where

this more or less modern fire extinguisher emerges. Right, because when you think of a modern fire extinguisher, what do you picture? It's some kind of tank, right, You've kind of tank with contents under pressure, and you operate some kind of leaver nozzle to spray the pressurized contents out onto a fire to put it out. Where does that

come in? I guess the closest we actually got in the last episode would have been the pumps based on Tacibius of Alexandria's model, which, uh, some of the historians we looked at last time or or engineers thought would not have been very effective, right, right, Yeah, it was pretty pretty much agreed that they would have been more you know, I mean, maybe useful for very specific small fires you needed to put out, but certainly when a blaze got out of hand, it was out of hand,

and that's when you have to bring in the siege equipment. Right, But but maybe not much more effective than a bucket. Right, We're talking about the the handheld but powerful units that I don't know about everybody else, but my my earliest exposure two was watching the original horror film The Blob, because they used the fire extinguishers on the Blob in order to like drive it back. I don't remember that detail.

I've seen The Blob, but I've forgotten about that. I know as a child a movie scene that really stuck in My memory was in one of the bad James Bond movies. I think it was in Diamonds Are Forever that Sean Connery uses a fire extinguisher to murder a man. I think he just kind of sprays him in the face until he dies. Oh man. Yeah, they are occasionally used his way. Usually you see them used as more of a bulk weapon, you know, it just as a

means of braining somebody. I think there's some of that too. Yeah, it's a general fight. It ends with a lot of spraying. But we're not We're not gonna be using fire extinguishers to kill people today. We're gonna be talking about the

origins of the portable pressurized fire extinguisher. And in order to do that, I discovered that we would have to end up looking at a very interesting fellow named George William Man who lives seventeen sixty five to eighteen fifty four, who was an English inventor, a naval officer, and a I sort of think of as a boreal obsessive, a man with the Arctic on the brain. I think obsession is a is a key thing to keep in mind

with this character. Uh, just across the board because his life does seem to be just a series of obsessions after obsessions, sometimes very fruitful obsessions, other times not so much. But but I guess that's like perhaps that sort of mind he had, like once it had latched onto something, it was not going to let go until it had, you know, until it had reached the end of the journey. I really did not expect as interesting a biography as this to lie at the origins of the portable pressurized

fire extinguisher. So I'm very excited. So I was looking at several sources about man best life. I couldn't find a book about him or anything that seemed appropriate, like you know, the ultimate authority on the subject. But the best thing I came across was a paper by a historian and scholar named William Barr, no relation at all

to the current U. S. Attorney General William Barr. This William Barr is a research fellow in residence at the Arctic Institute of North America at the University of Calgary. He's sort of an Arctic researcher and historian. And this paper was written in two thousand one for the journal Polar Record, which is apparently a publication of Cambridge University Press. It's called Harpoon Guns, the Lost Greenland Settlement and Penal Colonies. George Manby's Arctic obsessions so man be as recounted by

William Barr here. George William Manby was born on November seventeen sixty five. He was the son of a captain in the Welsh Few Silly Years. I hope I'm saying that right, but basically these would be troops that used few sills, a type of musket. And he grew up at a family estate called wood Hall in Norfolk, East Anglia. So if you're trying to picture this, this is on the east coast of England, sort of up north of

London and to the east. When George was twelve, his father had him enrolled at a prep school for future artillery officers. I think he wanted George to follow in his military footsteps. He's like, okay, you know you can command the guns. You'll be the artillery officer of tomorrow. And this prep school for artillery boys was housed at the Tower of London, which seems like a very strange place to hold a prep school for young boys of calls Dungeon. Yeah, well, it calls to mind the fates

of like Edward the fifth and his brother Richard. Apparently, young George in artillery school absolutely hated math, which is a surprising fact to learn about a young inventor, and he ultimately failed to pass the qualification tests to be an officer in the Royal Artillery. So he's got this career path laid out for him, but it involves a lot of math, because you know, to be an artillery officer at the time, you didn't have a computer to do it. You had to calculate trajectories and know how

to aim the guns and all that. It was a very math heavy and he couldn't hack it. It kind of had to be uh, some version of an art childery meant hat to handle the computations. So instead he became an officer in the less math heavy branch of the armed forces, the Cambridgeshire Militia, where he ultimately became a captain. But even here he ran into trouble again because he could not keep up with the physical demands of the job because of some unspecified problems with his feet.

And I don't know if this amounts to a real disease or real disability, or if it was just him complaining that his feet hurt. I can't suss out the source of this complaint because it could have been any if it were a legitimate ailment there. It could have been any number of ailment ranging from you know, gut to bone spurs to flat feet, etcetera. So he had to resign his militia post in seventeen nine, so he did not qualify for artillery, even though he'd been planning

on it. Then he got disappointment, but then couldn't hack the physical requirements and done there too. So George William Manby's first wife was named Jane Preston, and she was the daughter of an Anglican rector who had been friends with George his father. George married her just before Christmas of seventeen again, the same year he got forced out of his his military service. Apparently they both had issues with money. Jane was described as spoiled and extremely extravagant,

and George was, in Bar's words, totally unbusinesslike. Within within like five years, they were completely out of cash, deep in arrears, and to settle their debts they had to sell Manby's family estate, so by by Wood Hall that's gone. And after this, man Bey tried to make a living writing guide books. And just as a side note, I love outdated travel books. They are so often full of weird lies, and I'm sure these would be amazing to read.

I think he was writing them mostly about his own region, about like you know, guide books to places in East East Anglia, to Clifton or whatever. And while he was doing that, meanwhile Jane began an affair with an officer of the East India Company named Captain Pogson. And here things get crazy and I'll just have to read a quote from bar quote. Under circumstances that remain rather confused, Pogson shot man Be in the back of the head. One story is that they had fought a duel and

that man Bey had started running away. The wound, although serious, was not fatal, but the bullet had driven pieces of the felt hat Manby had been wearing deep into his skull. Well Over a year later, man Be underwent a series of operations to remove the bullet and rotting pieces of felt. The operation was a success and that man Be survived, but damage was done to his brain and his behavior

thereafter was somewhat peculiar. Now this is interesting. We we spoke recently in an episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind about changes to the brain, injuries to the brain, and their their effect on personality, but sometimes even on one's ability to to excel at certain tasks. So I wonder if would be going too far to to wonder about those possibilities here with Mandy. Yeah, obviously nothing here can be proved, but it does appear it's at least

interesting that he suffered traumatic brain injury. He got a bullet in the brain, survived it, and then after this was before his inventing career began, right, Yeah, I guess it's more realistic to to state that he simply went on to become a noted inventor in spite of having been shot in the back of the head, rather cause of it. But but anyway, the sidebar for a further discussion on brain injuries and other episodes. But he wasn't

there yet. So after being shot in the head, having the bullet and the rotting felt removed Manby's old friend Charles Yorke, who happened to have become Secretary of War at the time or Secretary for War. I think it was called I'm not quite sure, maybe out of pity or for whatever reason, granted man be a position that bar calls a near sinecure, as a barrack master of the Yarmouth Barracks. Now sinecure up, you know, like a position where you don't really have to do much work.

You know, you're kind of getting getting paid for not much. So why a near sinecure? Why would it be this easy job to be barrack master of the Armouth Barracks. Well, it seems this is because there were rarely any troops in the Armouth Barracks, only occasionally during training or when they were being moved from one place to another, so a lot of the time he didn't have much to do.

And during his time in this role, Manby was technically still married to Jane, but he apparently spent most of his attention, energy and time cultivating the the persona of a gentleman about town. He would go entertaining, he would go to social functions with naval officers, and he really liked to dress up and show off his cool clothes. He was the kind of person that at this time would have been derisively called a dandy. But for the most part he's he's really not doing much at this point,

like he barely has a has any responsibilities. He's just having a good time around town. He's partying, yeah, yeah, living the party life. But then around the year eighteen o seven, something happened that changed Manby's life, and it

was that he witnessed a shocking calamity. So off the coast of East Anglia there are these long stretches of coastal bars, and a bar is essentially a shallow submerged bank or coast running parallel to the real bank or coast right so it can be made of sand or gravel or something that kind of comes up pretty close to the waterline but stays below it at a distance from the actual shore. And these of course can cause strange types of wave activity around them. Uh, they can

pose a couple of hazards to ships. Ships can run aground on them and become stuck. But also waves can be very high and very powerful in the bar zone, easily capsizing even larger vessels. And on one night in February eighteen o seven, during bad weather, several ships were all wrecked on the bar off the coast of Yarmouth,

including a gun brig called the HMS Snipe. Now, according to some resources I was reading from the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, these wrecks would have been approximately sixty yards or like fifty five meters offshore. Imagine how maddeningly

close that is. Uh. And so, along with most of the citizens of the town, man be spent that night on the beach trying to find or watching people try to find a way to rescue the people from the wreck who were drowning in the waves, like within clear sight. But there was no way to help them. I mean, imagine that they're right there. If it was across ground, you could run to them in a matter of seconds.

But because of the surf and the bars and the heavy wind, bad weather, you couldn't just go out to them. You couldn't go out and rescue boats. So what can you do? Bar rights that The next morning quote the beach at Yarmouth was littered with a hundred and forty four corpses, sixty seven of which had come from the HMS Snipe. According to the Norfolk Museums, a total of two hundred and fourteen people died in the disaster. So

it was a huge disaster, I mean hundreds dead. But out of this tragedy an idea began to form in Manby's head. So he thought, okay, if you could just get a strong rope out to the wreckage of the boat and anchor one end at the shore secure the other end to the ship, you'd have a chance to get people in safely along the line. And in fact, this is what rescuers on the beach at Yarmouth had been trying in vain to do to to get a line out to the boat, but they couldn't do it.

The distance was too far, Like how would you get a line secured to the ship from the shore. But man Be thought back to his artillery school training. This is the subject in which he had been you know, like he'd kicked and screamed against the arc trajectory equations.

He didn't like the math. Uh, he had failed to qualify as an officer, but he still of course had the knowledge of what you basically do when you're working with artillery, and he thought, if you could essentially load a rescue line into a mortar, you could fire it from the or to the wreck secured it both ends and then maybe use that line to carry a heavy rope from the shore to the wreck and bring the victims onto the beach across that suspended rope or cable.

And of course, anybody who's ever watched say, a bunch of Batman cartoons that this should sound rather familiar. This is exactly the sort of thing Batman is liable to do with his uh, his little grappling hook launcher device, the back claw or the zip line. Yea, yeah, But of course they didn't have whatever you know, pneumatic magic Batman is using. They did have cannons, So maybe we should take a break and then we come back. We can explore the idea of the life saving cannon. Alright,

we're back, so um yeah. Obviously cannon technology was already um you know, well established, but generally for the purposes of of bringing about death and destruction, not preventing it. Right, So Manby has this idea for a life saving gun to rescue people from shipwrecks trapped out on a bar

out from the shore. Now, again, math was not man be strong suit, but due to his role at the Armouth Barracks, he fortunately had access to artillery where he could perform hands on experimentation, and that's what he did. He tried attaching lines to cannon shot and then firing these lines across the fields. And at first this didn't work because the heat of the cannon shot inevitably burned

through the rope material that he attached to it. But he discovered that if he attached the line to the shot with an intermediate length of braided leather, the leather was not burned away. It would hold fast. And so basically he discovered, yeah, this invention would work. He gave a demonstration on it on a beach near low Stofft in August eight, ten oh seven, and he got a metal from the Sufful Humane Society. So this this rescue

line mortar, sometimes known as a man be mortar. It achieved half of the goal, right, But just getting a line in place wasn't everything you needed, Like what what are the crew supposed to do? Then? Like shimmy across at cliffhanger style? Was I mentioning that? So Manby's next invention was basically the bottom half of this. Once you have a line secured, you need something to move back and forth underneath the line to get people to and from the boat, and what he created was the other

half of the equation here. Essentially, it was an unsinkable lifeboat. This would be a tiny vessel secured with casks on its sides for really high buoyancy. It would be super floaty, it would be really hard to sink. So you what you would do is you'd fire a line from the mortar out to the wreck. You'd attach it to the wreck somehow, I think naturally. They said it would often wrap around the rigging or you know part if part of the mast was left, it could wrap around that.

It would get tangled on the wreck. And then you would attach the unsinkable lifeboat to the line and send it back and forth along the line and to bring

crew members to shore. Then, in February eighteen o eight, this would have been just about a year after the wreck of the HMS Snipe and the other boats that that inspired this idea, Manby got a chance to try his inventions out in the field because on the night of February twelve that year, there was a small ship called the Elizabeth that was again wrecked on the bar, and within half an hour man Bey had a rescue line shot out to the boat, and the entire crew

was successfully brought in on board Manby's unstakable lifeboat along the line of life. UH. And then man be demonstrated the life saving power of this invention on other occasions. Eventually he began pairing the mortar with something known as a breaches booy instead of a lifeboat. So if you're trying to picture this, UH, the way you would be brought in on the line was in a kind of suspended, floaty diaper type thing. UH. Imagine a life preserver, you know,

the ring shaped ones. But in the middle of this life preserver there is a huge pair of underwear and that's what your life and I think that's an accurate description. And by all accounts, Manby's invention here was incredibly successful. It worked, it saved lives, and after these inventions, Manby became generally obsessed with the idea of creating a national

life saving service in Britain. UH. He was eventually given a stipend by the British government to survey the eastern coast of England and identify the best places to have his life saving mortar line installed. But we mentioned earlier that Manby would not be satisfied just having invented one life saving device. He kind of got stuck on the subject.

It seemed like he just wanted to frantically turn his attention from one type of life threatening scenario to another, asking could there be an invention to stop people from dying here? Or how about here? And I wish I had more insight into the psychology that brings that about, Like what's going on with him? Like how does he get is does he just become addicted to the idea of having in intoed a device for the good of humankind? Yeah? Yeah,

it makes you wonder. I mean part of it also could just be the success of it, right, I mean I've done, I've done, like this is what I'm capable of, and I actually saved lives I I need In a way, he kind of perhaps becomes a kind of Batman, right, you know, he's saving people and and let's see where

else I can I can work this magic. I wonder if it's especially potent, like having achieved that, like he made the thing and it worked and it saved people's lives, like after having been pretty much a total screw up for like the first half of his life and then nearly losing his life as well. Yeah. So then he turned to another one and we will get to the

fire extinguisher, but we're not there yet. Before he got to that, another interesting, uh, life or death scenario he explored was a problem that William Barr identifies as surprisingly common as a mode of death in the early eighteen hundreds, and this was falling through thin ice on frozen lakes. Uh. I guess the frozen body of water, you know, or rivers, ponds and all that. People, especially he talks about in Scotland, people just going out on the ice, falling through and

dying all the time. That strikes me as a rare and exotic form of death today. But maybe I don't know. I mean, part of that could could be due to the region in which we live, where frozen lakes are not that common. Um, but certainly in places where where lakes are commonly frozen over, I mean, people venture out into the ice for a number of reasons, for recreation, for ice fishing. Uh. It is a way to travel

between point A and point B. Uh. As I've probably mentioned in the show before, I spent some of my childhood in Newfoundland, Canada, where certainly like the bay's freeze over, And there were lots of stories that are a call of you know, people you know, driving on the ice and losing a car into it. You know, people either falling through the ice or like young people jumping from

ice flow to ice flow and sometimes encountering mishaps. So I guess it basically comes down to the question is there enough uh, frozen lakes or bays, et cetera, that are accessible to people and are they there long enough for people to get out there and fall through it, because people inevitably will. The ice that seems solid at first will end up the you know, actually being less so, and then once it starts breaking, it can can become

very difficult to navigate. Yeah, so many actually created a couple of different inventions for dealing with people who had fallen through ice. One was this was interesting. I've never seen anything like this. It was a kind of sectional

ladder with buoys at the top. So imagine a ladder that floats on the water where the ice has broken, and it also has hinged sections so it can, or at least one version of it did, so you know, you could put it out along the ice flat and then the section would hinge down into the water, so you could catch hold of that and climb up, kind

of forming like a pool ladder type thing. Yeah, I could say that would be especially useful at that that that region of of broken and breaking ice, uh, that you need to climb up over to get out of the water. And of course I mean the obvious thing too here is the time is of the essence because you are in freezing water. Yes, and that's why it also had a grappling iron to snag the clothing of people who were unconscious or unable to climb out themselves.

But what about where the ice is too thin for a floating ladder to work there? Man Be also invented a quote wicker sledge boat to be propelled by a spiked pole. So imagine it's a lightweight land to water rescue vehicle. So if you're needing to go over the ice, you can push it out over the ice like a sledge and then if the ice breaks, if the ice

is too thin, it will float and function as a boat. Uh. Yeah again again a perfect, perfect invention to navigate that that tricky zone where you're not on like solid ice yet and you're also not in open water right and bar rights quote. His inventions were amazingly successful. In one period of three days, they saved the lives of sixteen people who had fallen through the ice on the lake at St. James Park while walking or skating. And this

brings us up to the eighteen tens. So in the year eighteen fourteen, Manby's first wife, Jane, who he was technically still married to at this time. I don't think they were I don't think they had a functional marriage, but I think, like a lot of people at the time probably like maybe may have considered divorce untenable socially

or something, so they were still technically married. Uh. And she passed away in eighteen fourteen, and this apparently freedman By to to say, oh, now I can get married again. This time he married a woman named Sophia Gooch. I guess say, my all time favorite last name. Not the first time I've encountered it, because I've been to North

Georgia and there's a bunch of Gooch stuff. They're Gooch highways, and uh, I don't know if Sophia is related to the founder of the Gooch Freeway or the Gooch Bypass or whatever it's called. Uh, just spite all of the the admirable qualities that that man Be is now manifesting. It does seem, at least according to his letters and notes from the time, and he doesn't seem like he

was a great husband. It seems like he was, uh sort of not really, They're like very neglectful of him, right, And that was before he suffered the injury as well. I mean there was already evidence of that. And then the the the gunshot wound to the back of his head, uh, like he said, seemed to have made him even more difficult to be around. Yeah, he engaged in obsessive behavior with his inventions and stuff. Does not seem like he

was a very attentive family member. But to get to his next invention, here is where we finally get to the actual fire extinguisher, the first invention of the type of fire extinguisher we would recognize today that you know, the pressurized tank. So man Be started thinking about another common way to die. I guess he's just sitting around

the all day thinking about ways that people die. And this way was accidental fires bar rights that in early nineteenth century Britain quote firefighting was almost entirely in the hands of large insurance companies who were interested solely in protecting the property of their clients. So this would have been, you know, not quite as bad as cross us in the Roman Republic, but still not the kind of firefighting ethos of public service that we've come to expect today.

This would be a you know, a private for profit firefighting service, kind of an inverse crossis like, instead of him buying your home for a pittance while it's on fire and then putting it out, you pay premiums to a company to protect the value of your home, and then they're liable if your home burns down, so they put it out if it catches on fire. Interesting, it's hard to really equate that, at least to like individual

experience with insurance. It would it be like if you had car insurance and the insurance company was like, we really don't want to pay off on this policy, so we're gonna have somebody ride with you at all times. Well, yeah, I mean, if you ever had to argue with an insurance company and they didn't want to pay a claim, imagine that's happening while your house is on fire. Now. Also,

as we discussed in the last episode. The bigger a fire gets, the harder it is to put out, right, Like a lot of times you'd have urban fires where even as late as the nineteenth century, your your main recourse was just to create fire breaks, like you'd have to pull down houses and stuff to prevent the fire from spreading. So those crucial early seconds and minutes what what man Be would come to call incipient fires, Those can be your window into containing a fire that would

otherwise get out of control. Speed is everything. So man Be proposed a better solution. He was like, you know, we should have full time public fire patrols to wander the cities, putting out fires as early as possible, with the right kind of technology to allow them to do that. And this, of course is very Roman solution. This brings to mind, uh, you know our last episode. Yeah, but now the the ideas that these fire patrols would be equipped with technology that the vige lace of ancient Rome

didn't have. And now, again, of course you'd run into difficulties here like how do you get enough fire snuffing potential into a small enough package that it's fully portable. Again, you know, imagine a firefighters wandering the street, they hear somebody screaming that the fire has broken out in their kitchen, and then they have to start running buckets from a pump or a water source to you know, one at a time. Or they could try to raise the alarm

to form a bucket line get more people involved. But this takes time to come together, and by the time it happens, the fire might be twenty times bigger. So what you need is an invention to increase the density and portability of fire extinguishing power, like a lot of fire extinguishing power in a small package that you can move around. And it was in this spirit that man Be invented a portable fire extinguisher. UH. If you want to read about it at length, I found a book

that Manby wrote with illustrations. It was published in eighteen thirty eight. UH. He describes his inventions in detail. It has a one of those like titles that's impossibly long that just begins an address to the British public if you want to look it up and read it. But Manby's invention consisted of a large tank containing a pressurized solution of fire suppressing chemicals, or as he calls them antiphlogistic fluid. I think he's buying into the now discredited

Flagistan theory. Now, in reality, this antiflogistic fluid was primarily potassium carbonate, or as he calls it, pearl ash, and this would be dissolved in water. Uh. The tank originally had a capacity of either three or four gallons. I've seen both. Some sources like Britannica say three bars has four, But either way, this would be a cylindrical tank of pressurized solution that could be wheeled around the city on

a hand cart. And then whenever you wanted to spray it onto a fire, you would aim the nozzle and release the valve, and the release of pressurized air would cause a spray of the mixture out in a powerful at and Bar writes that Manby's invention was tremendously useful and effective, but that man Bey did not take out a patent on it. Instead, man Be sort of expected to be rewarded for his inventions with public recognition by

the crown, probably in the form of a knighthood. But it did not work out for a strangely seed and petty reason. So I'm just going to read from Bar here explaining why he did not get his knighthood. Quote. In eighteen oh six, his brother Thomas had been named as one of Princess Caroline's lovers at the Commission of Inquiry convened by the government into her morals otherwise known as the quote delicate investigation that sounds like a nightmare.

When Thomas vehemently denied any philandering with the princess despite an alleged bribe of forty thou pounds offered by the Prince region later King George the Fourth, he and by association his brother George, incurred the p It's regions eternal enmity. Thus a knighthood for Mandy was never in the cards. Oh man, So yeah that that time it wasn't even manby himself that managed to mess things up. It was

his brother Thomas, I mean allegedly allegedly yes. Um. Thomas, by the way, was a career military man Um who would later die of an opium overdose some twenty years prior to to Mandy's own death. This was the age of of opium in England, and I mean I think it would have been not long before this that Erasmus Darwin is hanging handing out handing out opium prescriptions to whoever needs has a problem. But yeah, there's a kind

of like horrible ironic tragedy here. Like it combines a couple of different themes we've seen from invention history, both noble and otherwise. Like, so Manby declines to pursue intellectual property rights on life saving inventions. Uh, giving these inventions as a kind of free gift for the public good would And there are a number of inventors we've discussed who went this route, right, Wilhelm Rundkin and the x ray. Right, you know, he said, I'm not going to try to

make money off this. You know, this is a gift to the world. It will save lives. We saw the same with fleming and penicillin salk in, the polio vaccine. You know, it happens a decent amount. And of course that part of it is that inevitably other people if you do this, other people will make money off of it. You know, they're gonna be a fire extinguishing companies that that that that come online. There were X ray companies

that came online and profited from this. Right, but you you renounce your you know, you renounced and he claimed to say, no, you owe me a cut of that. Um. But also it expects this kind of gift back from the state, right, the gift in recognition of his achievements for the for national pride or for the people. Uh think of the pension that Louis de Gere got from the French government for his gift of the Daguero type

to the French people. But yeah, apparently for some reasons related to family grudges, this did not work out for man By Um. So in addition to the man be mortar, he actually also worked on whaling harpoons. Yeah. I was reading a little bit about this and William Barr's article as well. He had some innovations in mind for the whaling harpoon, which which makes sense because the man be mortar had a lot in common with with whaling harpoon technology. Sure.

But but then apparently on an expedition in which he was going to try it out. Uh, it sounds like he managed to tick off the crew enough that they sabotaged his invention. Yes, so he began getting really interested in whaling harpoons around the year eighteen nineteen. He had ideas for hand harpoons and for harpoon guns. And then it was in the year eighteen twenty one that Manby went on an Arctic expedition to Greenland with the Captain William Scoresby Jr. Um Again, it was mostly with the

intention to try his new inventions in the field. Uh though it sounds like a miserable experience. Bar in in several places quotes from uh They's journals, and one of the quotes he actually begins his article with it. And I just had to share this. So Manby is writing about what it's like to sleep on this boat going

to the Arctic. He says, in the night, I felt the inconvenience of a tight ship for the wind blowing hard agitated the bilge water, and only aginous matter left last voyage to the production of a gas of so extremely pungent and nature as to render respiration difficult and almost to produce suffocation. So the bilge water. I wonder what this only aginous material is. I mean, I guess it's just like whatever kind of junk on the boat drains down into the bilge traps just comes back up

as a foul odor and gas. Uh Yeah, And the crew they were not fans of man By, They did not cooperate with him, they were not helpful. However, this voyage had a profound effect on man By anyway, and afterwards he it seems like he spent the rest of his life totally pre occupied with weird ideas about Greenland. Yeah, again coming back to just the obsessive nature of his personality, and um, yeah, so there were it was kind of threefold.

I believe One of his obsessions was that that that England needs to acquire at least a large portion of Greenland, and then that they need to use that acquired land as a penal colony. They must, Yes, But then this other area that was this quite interesting, Uh, it was. It was Manby's obsession with the idea of a lost Norse settlement in Greenland and the possibility of not only finding the remnants of such a settlement, but finding the living descendants of like modern norsemen of a sort that's

they're still living in Greenland somewhere. So he's basically like the you know, somewhere in Greenland there's a city of the descendants of the Vikings, and they're still there and nobody knows, and we need to set out on an expedition to find it. Um So I was reading a

bit about this in uh in Bars article. So first of all, here here's the main deal, like the facts about Greenland occupation, Greenland new human travelers and settlers as far back as um b C. It was known to early Paleo Eskimo cultures Innuit Greenlanders, who's descended still live

there today. They arrived roughly dred C. But the land was unknown really to Europeans until roughly the tenth century, when it is recorded to have been spotted by gun Born Olson, and then in nine and then in the year two, Eric the Red was exiled there for a number of years for a murder. And so while he's there he explores a bit, and then when he comes back, he says, let's get some settlers together. Let's go to Greenland and set up some settlements. Let's let's make some money.

Let's let's settle some land. Uh, you know, Viking style and uh. And so that's what happened. Norse settlements in Greenland lasted for some four hundred and fifty to five hundred years, so from roughly CE two somewhere between fourteen fifty and the year fifteen hundred. Now, various factors seem to have contributed to the ultimate demise of Norse influence there, and you know, a lot has been been written about this.

So some of the potential reasons uh include climate change, environmental damage, conflict with Inuit tribes UH, the opening of regions elsewhere due to plague depopulation that were more attractive than Greenland. UH. It's also thought that the trade in walrus ivory might have played a role here. You might have had, to say, an influx of ivory from other markets that affected the value of the ivory that they

could acquire there. And then also possibly playing into this would have been the over hunting of Greenland walruses, which which then would have made it even harder to hold onto these settlements. Okay, so the evidence we have today indicates that whatever descendants of Norse settlers had been on on Greenland had probably been gone for over three hundred years by the time Manby gets interested in this. So what what gets man Be and Scoresby and these people

going on the idea of a lost Norse settlement. Well Bar writes that man Be's obsession is probably due to a misunderstanding um, he writes, quote, the concept of the lost colony or lost settlement arose from a misunderstanding. The old Norse settlement in Greenland had consisted of two main areas, known as Ulster Baggot or East Settlement and vist Bigot

or West Settlement. The former was the area of the present settlement of Quaker Talk, and the later lay farther to the northwest, in the area of the present capital uh Nook. Both settlements thus lay on the southwest coast

of Greenland, west of Cap Farville. So Be and man Be assumed that the East Settlement lay on the southeast coast of Greenland, that is, northeast of Cap Farville, an area that had not been examined for centuries, and hence they had hopes the descendants of the North settlers might

still survive there. So there was geographic confusion, geographic confusion combined with like just less knowledge of that area, you know, because that's the way it is today with a lot of things, right, we don't we don't really know this wilderness all that well, maybe there's a Sasquatch there, maybe there is a low civilization there, you know. Yeah, and this plays into other ideas of lost settlements and lost civilizations and you know, throughout throughout the world. Uh so, yeah,

he became rather obsessed with this notion. Of course, there's actually, as it turns out, there is there was no last settlement. They were wrong, they were wrong. There's no evidence to

support this idea. That certainly that I've come across. But that didn't despite not finding that civilization, it didn't prevent him from pursuing his other ideas again, being that like he was obsessed with the idea that Britain had to claim an area of East Greenland north of the area claimed by Denmark and say okay, this is England now, and also that it had to be a penal colony.

Got to make it a penal colony. Yeah, it seems like it's kind of implied that it's it's sort of like the journey there was his his previous journeys were so miserable that he kind of like had it out for the region. Uh. But yeah, again, he's he was. His obsession was such that in cases where he was onto something like he was able to really follow through and develop some life saving technologies. But in these cases there was just no meat there, but he still chewed

the heck out of it for a number of years. Yeah, And ultimately Manby died in his home in Yarmouth in eighteen fifty four. What a strange arc of a life. So he goes from kind of like artillery school dropout, you know, kind of a screw up dandy too, very successful inventor creating very influential inventions that save people's lives, to crank obsessed with a with a disproven theory about greenland. Yeah, yeah,

kind of a conspiracy theorist really in a sense. Um, Yeah, there's no telling what what he would be into, now, what ideas he would be obsessed with, given our own current, you know, a climate regarding sort of outsider theories and whatnot. But yeah, it's certainly an interesting life and certainly more yeah, more more of an interesting life than one would you might have suspected from the fire extinguisher inventor. All right,

on that note, let's take one more break. But when we come back, we'll talk about talk a little bit about fire extinguishers in use today. All right, we're back, so to talk about the kinds of fire extinguishers you will encounter today. Um, I think many or most of them could could be considered basically dire privative of Manby's original design, there's still some kind of tank with contents under pressure inside, and those contents are sprayed out of

a nozzle to put out a fire. And I guess there are like three main types that we can focus on. So there are of course still extinguishers that are basically water tanks with spray nozzles. UH. These of course are mostly useful for small fires with fuel sources like wood or cloth. They would not be recommended for use on fires with a liquid fuel, so like kitchen fires, grease fires, or on electrical fires for all the reasons you might imagine. You know, you wouldn't want to spray a bunch of

water on an electrical fire. Uh. Some fire extinguishers of today contain carbon dioxide and it's compressed liquid form which on operation is sprayed out as a kind of c O two gas snow to smother the fire into private of oxygen. And carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it will tend to settle down on the fuel source and provide provide a layer of area between the fuel

and the oxygen that it needs. But another common solution that's interesting is in pressurized fire extinguishers to use a dry chemical suppressant, which is a tank that sprays the type of powder or foam mixture based on sodium bicarbonate, also known as baking soda. Now under heat, baking soda quickly breaks down and releases c O two gas, which again helps to deprive the fire of oxygen and kind

of smothers. It becomes like a gas blanket. And I'm really unsure what they were using on the blob, you know, I'm suspecting that the blob was the use of fire extinguishers, and the blob was perhaps based on the the rough idea that the blob does not like cold, and fire extinguishers are cold, and that's what they're doing. They're like freezing the blob with fire extinguishers. Uh yeah, I don't know. I mean, so those are like the main type skull

I think you'll find today. You might find some other Maybe they were spraying them with old CTC fire still that had was a carbon tetrachloride. Yeah, the poison and stuff we talked about in the last episode, So it could be there, just like spraying it within you know, like a blob aside, yeah, or it was just cheap, right you just in terms of special effects, like you just grab some fire extinguishers and use them, and you know, it looks like you're doing stuff to the blob. It's

impressive looking. I don't know. Maybe the blob needs to breathe air, and by spraying it with fire extinguishers, you're surrounding it with carbon dioxide, making it hard for it to breathe. That would makes sense, now, speaking of the blob an entity that science fiction comes from space, I was reading about actual fire extinguishers in space, and I

found this rather interesting. I kept coming across articles really sort of revolving around UH, the year UH and and that seems to be because that at that time there were two different sorts of extinguishers that you would find on the International Space Station. There was there were Russian water foam extinguished years and then the U and those were used in the Russian sections, and then in the

U S sections you had carbon dioxide extinguishers. And there was an effort at the time by NASA to develop a fine water missed portable fire extinguisher for use on board the I S S in those American sections. And this is because there were you know, obvious problems with using c O two extinguishers on board uh the I S S. So for starters, it would create an unsafe breathing environment exasperated by the I S S is uh

emergency breathing equipment's inability to filter c O two. But then there was another interesting fact that I ran across, and that's giving the given the unique qualities of low G fire, gas based extinguishers, they work less well in space than they do on Earth, so they end up directing air and oxygen to the fire, providing additional fuel. Oh that's interesting because yeah, if you've seen fire in in microgravity environments, it tends to be circular, doesn't rise up,

you know. Yeah. I was looking at some really weird like thermal imaging, like altered color thermal imaging of like what um like low G or zero G fire consists of. And it's it's crazy, it's it's it's a different basically spherical like yeah, but with this weird um like there's almost a sense of um a spherical but with this this uh, this it reminded me of like a an image of a of a young seed beginning to grow

a plant. It was. It's it's quite interesting, but what does the fire kind of gather around the fuel source the way that like when you ring out a wet towel in in microgravity, the liquid just kind of pools around the fuel source. Maybe, so that I feel like, just from my brief research on it earlier, this is something we could probably do an episode of stuff to blow your mind on, like the nature of fire and outer space, like what we know, what we suspect because

it is quite interesting and it is a danger. I mean it as uh has has posed a danger in the past. I think there was there was a major fire on the was the Russian Mirror space station at one point. So it's it's very much on on the on the minds of of of individuals that are working on these stations and planning for the safety of these stations and uh so. In fact, in after a total eighteen years of development, the water missed alternative was finally rolled out on the I S S. So apparently you

will you will find that system on board today. This has been such a strange journey. Yeah, what a long, strange trip it's been. Robert, Yeah, it's been all the way from just stomping fire with your feet, um, pouring water on it too, going into space, and again using a misspray of water as the fire. Yeah. So yeah, this has been This has been a fun one and uh, certainly I feel like with just fire technology and fire

prevention techno anology, we could easily keep going. We could choose some other angle of fire based technology and will inevitably come back to some version of fire based technology because you really cannot have technology as we we know it with without the flame. I mean, it is play. It plays such a central role in the in in the technological evolution of our species. We carry the fire and the fire carries us absolutely alright, So we're gonna go ahead and leave it there. But as always, we'd

love to hear your thoughts. We'd love to hear your recommendations. What sorts of inventions, what sorts of technologies would you like to hear us explore on this show. If you want to check out other episodes of Invention, head on over to Invention pod dot com. Bat will shoot you over to the I heart listing for this show. But you can find this show wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. You know, we don't care as long as you subscribe, you rate in your review.

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