Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/501

Rh was put in service. It did good work, but in winter the hardships of the men were so great that few would serve, and the boat was abandoned. This was a forerunner of the fire boats with which so many of the larger cities are now provided.

Messrs. A. L. Pennock and James Sellers, of Philadelphia, in 1818 invented and manufactured the first leather copper-riveted hose used in this country. Burr and Shaw, of Providence, established a similar business a few years later.

Boston had no ladder truck until 1820. Having provided many new ladders and hooks, the authorities purchased a rather worn-out express wagon upon which the articles mentioned could be carried to fires more readily. A company was formed to man the same.

During the early part of the century the departments of the larger towns realized that the private pumps and wells did not form a sufficient water supply, and town pumps and cisterns were placed at convenient intervals about the streets. Instead of filling the engines by means of lines of bucket-passers, it was often possible to pump directly into the machine. This led to pumping direct from the stationary pumps into the fire hose when the pumps were in close proximity to the fire, and soon hose companies were formed. A famous company of this kind was formed in Providence. Equipped with a hose carriage and one thousand feet of hose, its members competed for honors with the finest engine companies. This was one of the first hose carriages used. The leading hose of the engines had always been carried on the machines, and this custom was generally continued. Mr. George W. Sheldon, in his history of the New York Volunteer Firemen, states that David J. Hubbs, foreman of one of the companies, introduced the first separate hose carriage in the New York department. It was a very simple device, a reel on the axle between two ordinary wheels. This was known as "Hubbs's Baby." It was either tied behind the engine or pulled by two of the members of the company.

Up to the year 1820 the fire apparatus in use had improved but little. The larger towns only were provided with engines, and, as has been stated, these were box affairs that were filled by lines of bucket-passers or by stationary pumps. The brakes and pumps, it is true, had been greatly improved, and, indeed, besides the piston-pump engines worked by brakes there was a rotary pump in use, driven by a crank and geared to greater speed by cog wheels, but the engines were limited in their usefulness by the unsatisfactory method employed in supplying them with water. Somewhere between 1819 and 1822, although the exact date is in question, a new era was begun in the method of fighting fire.