Firemen and Their Exploits / With some account of the rise and development of fire-brigades, of various appliances for saving life at fires and extinguishing the flames.

by F. M. Holmes

When a tight-fitting piston working in a cylinder is drawn upward, the air in the cylinder is drawn up also, and a partial vacuum created; if the cylinder is connected with water not too far distant by a pipe, the water will then rush upward to fill the vacuum. Then, if the bottom of the cylinder be fitted with a valve opening upward only, it is closed when the piston is pushed down again; and the water would burst the cylinder, if enough power were applied to the piston, but escape is afforded along another pipe as an outlet, which in the case of the fire-engine opens into the air-chamber, and which is opened and closed by another valve. Thus is the water not only raised from the source of supply, but is forced along another channel.

And the modern fire-engine—which we date from Newsham's engines in England about 1726—is a combination of the principles of the force-pump and of the air-chamber, which acts by reason of the great elasticity of compressed air.

Other inventors made improvements as well as Newsham, namely, Dickenson, Bramah, Furst, Rowntree, and others, though the differences were chiefly in details. An engraving mentioned in an old work of reference sets forth that a London merchant named John Lofting was the patentee and inventor of the fire-engine. His invention must have been since the Great Fire, because the Monument is depicted in one corner of the engraving and the Royal Exchange in another. Rowntree made an engine for the Sun and some other fire-offices, which protected the feed-pipe more efficiently from mud and gravel; and Bramah devised a hemispherical perforated nozzle, which distributed water in all directions, so that the ceilings, sides, and floor of a room would become equally drenched.

Bramah also applied the rotary principle to the fire-engine. He studied the principles of hydraulics, and introduced many improvements into machinery for pumping, a rotary principle being one of them. He attained this object by changing the form of the cylinder and piston, the part acting directly on the water being shaped as a "slider," and working round a cavity in form of a cylinder, and maintained in its place by a groove. He applied the rotative principle to many objects, one being the fire-engine. His fire-engine was patented in 1793; but we cannot discover that it changed any vital principle of the machine, which, as we have seen, consists in essence of a movable force-pump, steadied and strengthened by a compressed air-chamber and a flexible delivery-hose.

Joseph Bramah, however, is doubtless best known to fame as the inventor of the hydraulic press, though he is also celebrated for the safety-lock which bears his name. He was a farmer's son, and was born at Stainborough in Yorkshire in 1748; but an accident rendering him lame, he was apprenticed to a carpenter. Engaging in business as a cabinet-maker in London, he was employed one day to fit up some sanitary appliances, and their imperfections led him to devise improvements. He took out his first patent in 1778 and this contrivance proved to be the first of a long series. His lock followed, and then, assisted in one detail by Henry Maudslay, he introduced his hydraulic press, a machine which he foresaw was capable of immense development.

Several of his improvements are concerned with water, such as contrivances connected with pumps and fire-engines, and with building boilers for steam-engines. It is also said he was one of the first proposers of the screw-propeller for steamships. Altogether, he was the author of eighteen patents; though it has been pointed out that he improved and applied the inventions of others, rather than originated the whole thing himself. While he contributed improvements to the fire-engine, the vital principle of the air-chamber and the flexible hose remained the same. Up to about the year 1832, the larger engines generally in use in London seem to have thrown some eighty-eight gallons a minute from fifty to seventy feet high.

The next notable development was the application of steam to work the force-pumps. But this addition, which was made about 1830 by John Braithwaite, also did not alter the principle of the air-chamber.

John Braithwaite came of an engineering family. He was born in 1797, the third son of John Braithwaite, the constructor of one of the first diving-bells. The ancestors of the Braithwaites had conducted an engineer's business, or something analogous to it, at St. Albans ever since the year 1695.

The younger John entered his father's business, and from 1823, after his father and brother died, conducted it alone. Those were the days when steam was coming into vogue, and he began to manufacture high-pressure steam-engines. Together with Ericsson, he constructed the "Novelty," the locomotive which competed in the famous railway-engine contest at Rainhill in 1829, when Stephenson's "Rocket" won the prize. Braithwaite's engine, though it did not fulfil all the conditions of the competition, yet is said by some to have been the first locomotive to run a mile a minute—or rather more, for it is held to have covered a mile in fifty-six seconds. He used a bellows to fan the fire; and in his steam fire-engine, he also employed bellows, though on one day of the Rainhill contest the failure of the bellows rendered the locomotive incapable of doing work.

In the fire-engine, the bellows were worked by the wheels of the machine, and eighteen or twenty minutes were required to raise the steam. At the present time, a hundred pounds of steam can be raised in five minutes in the biggest engine of the London Brigade, this result being due, in one respect at least, to the use of water-tube boilers.