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.”

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