Hydrant History: Standardizing Wet-Barrel Hydrants After its first major fire in 1851, a San Francisco foundry began casting wet-barrel hydrants. A century later, Greenberg’s collaboration with water districts all over California had forever united hydrant engineering with municipal water management. But that didn’t mean the water providers and customers could live happily ever after. First, […]
Hydrant History: The California Type Hydrant Until 1850, hydrant innovation focused on dry-barrel designs that worked well in the cold. But California’s climate called for different types of fire hydrants. San Francisco was reeling from a destructive blaze in 1851. At that time, there were no fire insurance companies: what was lost in the fire […]
Hydrant History: The World’s First Fire Hydrants Getting water out of the ground remained an unsolved problem in 1800, despite all the advances in underground infrastructure; firefighters had either to plunge buckets in the nearest cistern or dig down to perforate the wooden mains that conveyed water before metal pipes. Before the invention of hydrants, […]
Hydrant History: Founding Fathers & Firefighters The History of Philadelphia’s Union Fire Company Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere, John Hancock, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams: what do they have in common? Yes, protecting home and hearth from the Redcoats and, as it happens, the red flames. The invigorating mixture of new cities and revolutionary fervor […]
Hydrant History: America’s First Fire Teams A Look at Colonial America’s Earliest Organizations, and New England’s First Paid Firefighter From bucket brigades to the first professional firefighter, early American settlers never stopped innovating to keep fire from consuming their growing cities. The first American settlement, Jamestown, was founded in 1607. Captain John Smith led […]
Hydrant History: The Great Fire of London of 1666 A Look at One of History’s Most Destructive Fires London in 1666 was a wooden city. Houses leaned up against each other like logs in a bonfire. Typical building materials were good tinder at best, or purely combustible at worst. Many of the city’s poor lived […]
Hydrant History: The Great Fire of Rome, 64 AD A Glimpse into Firefighting Tactics in the Roman Empire One of the first conflagrations of recorded history gives an example of how dramatically an urban landscape can change after demolition by fire. Like the California of today, Rome had been suffering years of drought. The […]
Hydrant History: Introduction A Series on the History of Firefighting, Fire and Water Reform, and Hydrant Technology Hydrant Guard is grateful for the work of water agencies and fire departments. Our above-grade check valves work with municipal water systems to provide a solution to hydrant shears. Those same water systems have evolved over centuries to […]