Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/511

Rh played at once. When using the one powerful stream at the bow a brick wall can be penetrated, and the fire is not only deluged, but the force of the stream knocks the flaming timbers to pieces, and so distributes the fire that it can be quenched more rapidly. When playing a multitude of smaller streams the fire boat can go between a warehouse and a group of vessels, no matter how furious the fire may be, and there obtain a point of vantage impossible to a land engine. It is stated that the New-Yorker could sink herself in fifty seconds. The crew live in a house on the wharf where the boat is stationed, and can reach their places as rapidly as the members of a land fire company can reach their engines. Fires are kept banked at all hours, and every alarm within reach of the water front is answered. It will not be out of place to quote a passage from an article on Modern Fire Apparatus in Scribner's of January, 1891:

"It is not uninteresting to note that there are floating fire engines in London. They consist of steam pumps placed on scows which are moored at long intervals along the water front. When an alarm of fire comes in, the captain of the scow goes whooping up and down the water front to get a tug to tow him to the place from which the alarm has come!"

Many cities increase the possibilities of fire boats by laying empty pipe lines from the water front inland. The fire boat can couple on the line nearest the fire and the land engines can draw from this unlimited water supply in addition to the regular city system. The time is probably not far distant when every town and city bordering navigable water will have one or more fire boats in its department.

Steam locomotives can be made to serve as fire engines by attaching a device made by the Nathan Manufacturing Company of New York. It consists of a pipe placed at a point just below the level of the stationary water tanks in use on the railroad. There are two receiving nozzles in the center and two delivery nozzles at the base. The former are connected with a tank or an ordinary hydrant, and steam entering at the top of the pipe will force one eleven-sixteenths-inch stream one hundred and fifteen feet or two half-inch streams sixty feet. This device can be used very effectively in crowded freight yards where the regular firemen have difficulty in working with promptness, and also at way stations where there is no fire department.

It has long been known that certain chemicals will not support combustion, and during the middle of this century a number of chemists began to devise means by which such chemicals could be used to advantage at fires. The first practical results were five to ten gallon cans filled with a mixture of gas and water. Small hose was attached, through which the fluid could be played.