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:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“The treasury of America lies in those ambitions and those energies that cannot be restricted to a special, favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men; upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.”
—Miguel De Cervantes (1547–1616)