The first recorded fire extinguisher put out flames by setting off gunpowder
In 1723 the English chemist Ambrose Godfrey patented a cask of extinguishing liquid with a pewter chamber of gunpowder inside. Lit fuses blew the charge and sprayed the liquid over the blaze, and a London paper in 1729 credited it with stopping a fire. Later designs were less explosive, though some proved dangerously toxic.
The device became portable in 1816, when Captain George William Manby showed British barracks officials his Extincteur: a copper vessel holding about 3 gallons of potassium carbonate solution under compressed air. Chemistry soon supplied the pressure instead. In 1866 France's Francois Carlier patented a soda-acid design in which acid meeting sodium bicarbonate released carbon dioxide, and an American version from 1880 let the user smash a vial of sulfuric acid inside the cylinder to drive water out through a hose.
Foam arrived from Russia in 1904, when Aleksandr Loran mixed sodium bicarbonate with aluminium sulphate and first used the result on a pan of burning naphtha. In 1910 the Pyrene company patented carbon tetrachloride, a liquid that vaporised and interrupted the chemistry of combustion; it was even sold in glass grenades meant to be hurled at a fire. It was withdrawn in the 1950s because it damages the nervous system and organs, and heat can turn it into phosgene, once used as a chemical weapon.
Carbon dioxide units owe their existence to telephones. In 1924 Bell Telephone asked Walter Kidde for something that would not conduct electricity and could tackle switchboard fires; the answer was a tall cylinder holding 7.5 pounds of CO2. It works mainly by pushing oxygen away rather than by cooling, and film crews still rely on it to extinguish stunt performers who have been set alight. Dry chemical powder followed in 1928, and the US Navy developed Purple-K in the late 1960s.
Halon, which also breaks the chain reaction of burning, reached America from Europe in the 1970s, but its environmental harm led Europe and Australia to restrict it severely after the 1987 Montreal Protocol. Today most units are stored-pressure types, handhelds weigh between 0.5 and 26.76 kilograms, and they are designed only for small fires, not blazes that have reached the ceiling or cut off escape.
Source: Fire extinguisher
