Fire Fighting Vehicles

An early device used to squirt water onto a fire was known as a squirt or fire syringe. Hand squirts and hand pumps were invented around the 2nd century B.C. The fire pump was reinvented in Europe during the 16th century, reportedly used in Augsburg in 1518 and Nuremberg in 1657. A book of 1655 inventions mentions a steam engine (called a fire engine) pump used to "raise a column of water 40 feet, but there was no mention of whether it was portable. The earliest engines were small and were either carried by four men, or mounted on skids and dragged to a fire. As the engines grew larger they became horse-drawn and later, self-propelled by steam engines. Until the mid-19th century, most fire engines were maneuvered by men, but the introduction of horse-drawn fire engines considerably improved the response time to incidents. The first self-propelled steam-driven fire engine was built in New York in 1841. Motorized fire engines did not become commonplace until the early 20th century. By 1905, the idea of combining gas engine motor trucks into fire engines was attracting great attention. For many years firefighters sat on the sides of the fire engines, or even stood on the rear of the vehicles, exposed to the elements. This arrangement was uncomfortable and dangerous (some firefighters were thrown to their deaths when their fire engines made sharp turns on the road), and today nearly all fire engines have fully enclosed seating areas for their crews.