Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/780

760 sum includes estimates of the amounts paid by insurance companies for losses and expenses; of the losses for which there was no insurance; and of the outlay in maintaining fire departments in towns and cities. The devastation by fire during the past year equaled in value the insurable property in, say, so large and wealthy a city as Buffalo. Still more wofulwoeful [sic] than the destruction of property by fire were the sufferings of thousands by bodily injuries, and the losses of hundreds of human lives. Of minor but considerable importance is the prevailing dread of fire which its imminent risk creates—a dread deducting so much from comfort and peace of mind, particularly among the people who work or live in tall and unsafe buildings.

All competent students of the subject are agreed that this tax on life and treasure is largely avoidable—avoidable by care in construction and use of buildings, and attention to tried and proved means of extinguishing fire. The fire-tax is the most onerous one paid by the nation, and it was but natural that the first scientific attempt to reduce it should have been made by a class of capitalists upon whom the cost of insurance was most oppressive.

The textile manufacturers of New England have shown how best the risks, losses, and expenses of fire can be reduced to a minimum. In 1835, when Hon. Zachariah Allen, of Providence, established mutual insurance among the mills of Rhode Island, the rates charged by stock companies varied from 1 to 2 per cent. Even at these high figures the business was unprofitable, and the placing of risks often a matter of difficulty. Within the fifty years since 1835, the cost of insurance to the factories of New England has been reduced to two-sevenths of one per cent. This, too, while the ordinary rate of insurance throughout the United States is nearly one per cent on property considered to be on an average less hazardous in character. I will endeavor to state how this result has been brought about.

Principally by full inquiry into the causes of mill fires, which has shown that the three elements of safety are good construction, adequate quenching apparatus, and thorough discipline in its use. Safe construction can not always claim the much-abused term "fire-proof," but it may be practically the same thing, "slow-burning." It need be but little more expensive than the customary bad methods, and proceeds on a few simple rules:

1. Timbers for the frame of both floors and roofs should be made in such solid manner as to burn slowly; all should be open, smooth, with the corners chamfered off.

2. Floors and roofs should be of thick plank, with mortar or sheathing-felt between the planks and boards of floors. No boxed, hollow cornices should ever be constructed.

3. There must be no concealed space under a door, behind a furring, or in a partition, where a "fire can lurk out of the reach of water, or where a rat or mouse can build a nest.