Fire Hydrant - Historical Inventions and Innovations

Historical Inventions and Innovations

Before the modern fire hydrant, a primitive fire suppression system was to bury a wooden water pipe (often no more than a hollowed out log) along the streets.

In the event of a fire, teams would dig down to the buried wooden water main and auger a hole in the pipe, and out would come the water to fill buckets. Then a bucket brigade would be started to extinguish the fire. When the teams were finished, they would need to hammer a wooden plug into the log to stop the flow of water. Hence the origin of the term “fire plug.”

Read more about this topic:  Fire Hydrant

Famous quotes containing the words historical, inventions and/or innovations:

    This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
    Kenneth MacKenzie Clark, Baron of Saltwood (1903–1983)

    By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.
    Miguel De Cervantes (1547–1616)