Ancient Rome's first fire brigade haggled with owners while their houses burned
Marcus Licinius Crassus assembled 500 men who raced to burning buildings in Rome and then did nothing. Crassus would offer the frantic owner a pitiful price for the property. If the owner sold, the fire was put out; if not, it burned. He then rebuilt and rented out what he had bought.
Rome had no public fire service for a long time. Wealthy citizens relied on slaves and supporters to pass buckets, smother small blazes and pull down neighbouring buildings to create firebreaks; sources speak of fires being contained until they burned out, not extinguished. Accounts differ on when a state force appeared. One tradition credits Augustus with founding the Vigiles, while another says Nero set up a corps of 7,000 after a disastrous fire in AD 60, armed with buckets and axes and doubling as police.
Equipment evolved slowly. In the third century BC the Alexandrian inventor Ctesibius built a double force pump that used compressed air to shoot a steady jet of water. Large wheeled syringes appeared in the sixteenth century, alongside the bucket brigade, often with men passing full buckets toward the fire and women and children returning empty ones. Amsterdam produced early fire engines in the 1600s, and in 1721 Richard Newsham built a popular hand-pumped model. Steam pumps arrived in the 1850s and gave way to internal combustion engines in the early 1930s.
Insurance shaped modern brigades. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Nicholas Barbon introduced fire insurance and formed his own brigade to cut losses, and rivals followed. Insured buildings carried badges, but the popular idea that uninsured houses were left to burn is a misconception. In America, Benjamin Franklin founded Philadelphia's Union Fire Company in 1736, whose volunteers carried salvage bags and bed keys to dismantle valuable wooden bed frames, and in 1740 he organised a successful insurance scheme. Britain unified its fire services under a 1938 act that took effect in August 1939.
The job remains perilous. Firefighters face smoke, lack of oxygen, extreme heat, toxic gases, violent air currents, falls and collapsing structures, and carry breathing apparatus to survive. Operations start with reconnaissance to locate the fire and assess hazards, and extinguishers are matched to fire classes such as grease or electrical. Prevention matters too, through safety education and inspections against fire codes.
Source: Firefighting
