Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: you welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. And it turns out we weren't done
Speaker 1: playing with fire, that's right. Or or let's say this,
Speaker 1: what is the natural next step from playing with fire?
Speaker 1: It's having to hastily put out fire, that's true. And
Speaker 1: so we're following up our three episode look at match
Speaker 1: Sticks with a look at the fire extinguisher, because you know,
Speaker 1: it's one thing to be a master of fire, but
Speaker 1: we have to do more than just create and foster
Speaker 1: the flame, right, We have to be able to manage
Speaker 1: it and snuff it out, especially when it gets out
Speaker 1: of control. The fire has a mind and a life
Speaker 1: of its own, and it will not be tamed so easily.
Speaker 1: So when we're gonna ultimately talk about the modern fire extinguisher,
Speaker 1: but yeah, before we get to that, let's discuss like
Speaker 1: what a fire extinguisher is, and just in general terms,
Speaker 1: you can think of it as an active fire protect
Speaker 1: and device, or perhaps an active fire protection strategy or method, uh,
Speaker 1: something that you do something it entails action and response
Speaker 1: in order to deal with an unwanted or unruly blaze.
Speaker 1: So not like a sprinkler system, not like a ditch
Speaker 1: dug around a camp fire or something to that extent,
Speaker 1: but something that is done, something you can grab and use,
Speaker 1: or some plan of action you can utilize against the blaze.
Speaker 1: I see what you're saying. Not a static defenses, not
Speaker 1: the walls around your city, but the culdron of boiling
Speaker 1: tar you have on top of the ramparts. So I
Speaker 1: think that's that's a good way to think of it. Now,
Speaker 1: having just done these three episodes about matches and fire
Speaker 1: creation technology, in a way, it's almost crazy to consider
Speaker 1: the need to then put out a fire. I know,
Speaker 1: we spent the last like three episodes trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how to get one, yeah, and and contemplating say that,
Speaker 1: you know, the vast time period really in human history
Speaker 1: where the ability to manipulate fire existed, but the ability
Speaker 1: to create it did not. You know, it was this
Speaker 1: precious thing that had to be gathered, that had to
Speaker 1: be obtained and then kept and nurtured and guarded, carried
Speaker 1: from one spot to another. But then to to think
Speaker 1: about on top of that, you might need to just
Speaker 1: kill it. Sometimes this precious uh, this precious gleaming god
Speaker 1: that you've rescued from a you know, a lightning struck
Speaker 1: stumped in the woods. But you would need to do
Speaker 1: this and for a number of key reasons. So first
Speaker 1: of all, is as a means of keeping unwanted or
Speaker 1: unruly fires in check. So maybe you have your camp fire,
Speaker 1: but then what if the campfire spreads to uh, you know,
Speaker 1: some hides or a tent or something that you do
Speaker 1: not want on fire. You need to be able to
Speaker 1: put it out. Also as a means of snuffing a
Speaker 1: fire to prevent detection by enemies, namely other humans that
Speaker 1: you might not want aware of your camp fire. Light
Speaker 1: smoke gives you away, right, And then also a means
Speaker 1: of preventing a blaze from growing out of control unattended. Now, um,
Speaker 1: this this last one raises some interesting questions. I was
Speaker 1: wondering and doing a little bit of research on this,
Speaker 1: trying to figure out did ancient humans really make many
Speaker 1: efforts to prevent wildfires? You know, I guess a big
Speaker 1: part of of having a camp fire today is your
Speaker 1: you know, your knowledge that it needs to be maintained
Speaker 1: properly needed to prevent this from getting out of control,
Speaker 1: and when you're done with it, you need to make
Speaker 1: sure it's out. But aside from, you know, protecting yourself
Speaker 1: from observation by other human groups out there, I wonder
Speaker 1: to what extent that was really a matter of concern
Speaker 1: for ancient people's. Maybe it was, maybe, maybe it wasn't.
Speaker 1: I can't tell. Well, I don't know. I mean I
Speaker 1: would say, if you live in a wooded area, you
Speaker 1: would not want the woods to catch fire, right, Yeah, true.
Speaker 1: I mean at the same time, of course, fire was
Speaker 1: used rather destructively, um, you know, even in ancient times
Speaker 1: as a as a means of controlling vegetation and controlling animals,
Speaker 1: and it uses the hunting tactic, et cetera, burning land
Speaker 1: for agriculture, that kind of thing. But then again, that
Speaker 1: is when when doing so would definitely benefit the people
Speaker 1: in question. So I guess it's not It's not unfair
Speaker 1: to imagine that that there would have been some level
Speaker 1: of concern for a fire going out of control, because
Speaker 1: of course it went out of out of control, it
Speaker 1: could become a danger to your people as well. Right.
Speaker 1: I was reading a particular book by Frank Sharman titled
Speaker 1: Fires and fire laws up to the middle of the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century. And in this the historian points out that
Speaker 1: humans would have known fire uh first as an enemy,
Speaker 1: which I think is an important point to make sure.
Speaker 1: I mean the way animals do. Like the first reaction
Speaker 1: to fire, if you recognize it, is to retreat from it,
Speaker 1: right And eventually we realized so we can retrieve this, Okay,
Speaker 1: we can use it. We can we can nurture it,
Speaker 1: we can control it. But initially there is fire as
Speaker 1: this thing that burns, that frightens. That is a dang sure,
Speaker 1: and it's it's never really stopped being a danger to us.
Speaker 1: Even as we've even today, as we've learned to to
Speaker 1: control it so well in certain environments and in certain circumstances,
Speaker 1: wildfires are still a huge problem. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: fires and urban settings are still a big threat. We
Speaker 1: have to have a great deal of emergency preparedness in
Speaker 1: place to deal with those blazes. So even a well
Speaker 1: maintained fire is something of a sleeping dragon. It can
Speaker 1: it can wake up, especially if you're not careful. So
Speaker 1: ancient fire masters would have discovered the means of putting
Speaker 1: out fires. Obviously, they would have figured out the conditions
Speaker 1: that cause fires to struggle and devise means of exploiting
Speaker 1: these conditions as well. So basically these are the general
Speaker 1: steps you'd want to take to deal with an unwanted flame.
Speaker 1: One would be to direct a substance onto the fire
Speaker 1: that rapidly cools it, right, uh, And this is one
Speaker 1: of the I mean, many of the things we do
Speaker 1: to put out fires do more than one different method
Speaker 1: at the same time of putting out the fire. But
Speaker 1: so one reason to throw water on a fire is
Speaker 1: that water takes a lot of energy to heat up
Speaker 1: and turn into steam. So it's rapidly cooling whatever you're
Speaker 1: throwing it on, that's right. And and this gets into
Speaker 1: our our next issue as well, direct a substance onto
Speaker 1: the fire that deprives it of oxygen, because again, the
Speaker 1: fire has to consume that oxygen to exist to be
Speaker 1: this this flame at all. So if you uh so,
Speaker 1: if you're able to get rid of the oxygen, you
Speaker 1: kill the flame. Right. And this is why I say
Speaker 1: smothering a fire with a blanket or with dirt or
Speaker 1: sand works. It's because the oxygen now can't get to
Speaker 1: the flame. Right. Another thing is, of course, is to
Speaker 1: direct a substance under the fire that interferes with the
Speaker 1: chemical reaction that's taking place. Yes, and this is often
Speaker 1: like there are some modern fire extinguishers or recent fire
Speaker 1: extinguishers that just have a chemical within them that inhibits
Speaker 1: the chemical reaction that we call fire. And additionally, one
Speaker 1: important way to control and ultimately fight a fire is
Speaker 1: to deprive it of fuel as well. So much of
Speaker 1: nurturing and maintaining a fire is about feeding it, and
Speaker 1: to put it out you just need to you know,
Speaker 1: take away what it needs to burn. And so this
Speaker 1: continues to play an important role in firefighting techniques today. Uh,
Speaker 1: we see this with a control burn in the wilderness settings.
Speaker 1: So it's still an important tactic make sure that the
Speaker 1: fire does not have its next meal. I feel like
Speaker 1: removal of fuel is much more often a preventative firefighting
Speaker 1: technique than I mean, it's hard to remove fuel to
Speaker 1: put out an existing fire, Yeah, at least quickly. It's
Speaker 1: like a ravenous flaming beast that is eating its meal.
Speaker 1: You know, you can just pull the bone out of
Speaker 1: its jaws, right, but you can perhaps remove the other
Speaker 1: bones so that doesn't have somewhere to jump next so indeed,
Speaker 1: a great way to deal with a small en a
Speaker 1: fire is to stamp it out under your boots, uh,
Speaker 1: to stuff it out with dirt with a candle. A
Speaker 1: simple candle snuffer does the job very well. A pair
Speaker 1: of wet fingertips will often do the job with a match.
Speaker 1: But water has always been a st on candidate for
Speaker 1: extinguishing a typical fire because, like you mentioned, a bucket
Speaker 1: of water can put out a blaze, you know, extremely
Speaker 1: well if it's the right side. And this runs the
Speaker 1: gamut from just a bucket of water at your campsite
Speaker 1: to you know, the various high pressure, high velocity of
Speaker 1: water hoses that you see used by firefighters. By the way,
Speaker 1: another quote from that that from Sharman on how ancient
Speaker 1: people dealt with fire and their their limited number of
Speaker 1: tools to fight flames. Uh, he wrote, quote, Apart from
Speaker 1: the obvious precautions of taking care of the handling of fire,
Speaker 1: including extinguishing or covering fires at night, prayer was the
Speaker 1: chief means of fire prevention, especially as the fire gets bigger. Right,
Speaker 1: Because like as the fire gets bigger, the primitive tools
Speaker 1: you would have had available, such as kicking dirt over
Speaker 1: it or throwing water on it become less and less effective.
Speaker 1: They're they're very swiftly outclassed by the blaze. But once again,
Speaker 1: like you mentioned earlier, water remains a great way to
Speaker 1: deal with fire, provided you can dump enough of it
Speaker 1: onto the blaze. Yes, and not just for the reason
Speaker 1: I said earlier, like one of the one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I mentioned, of course, is that it takes a
Speaker 1: lot of energy to heat water up turn it into steam,
Speaker 1: so that rapidly cools whatever you throw the water on.
Speaker 1: But they're they're also downstream benefits and putting out fires. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So when water comes in contact with the heat, you know,
Speaker 1: we have the cooling that we mentioned earlier, but the
Speaker 1: water becomes steam and this this is the conversion that
Speaker 1: absorbs that heat. And then also the resulting steam displaces
Speaker 1: air from around the fire, thus removing the oxygen. So again,
Speaker 1: two out of three, that's that's enough to get it
Speaker 1: done again, provided there you have enough water to throw
Speaker 1: at the problem. Right, it's a two fer. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: And an important caveat to this, of course, is this
Speaker 1: will not work on a fire with a liquid fuel source, right, say,
Speaker 1: like oil burning on top of water. You know, throwing
Speaker 1: water on that doesn't really help much exactly, but but
Speaker 1: certainly your standard sort of burning wood scenario, or certainly
Speaker 1: a camp fire scenario, enough water dumped on it will
Speaker 1: do the job. So when do we first started getting
Speaker 1: fire extinguishers? Well, if we're extremely generous with our definition
Speaker 1: of a fire extinguisher, we might just give credit to
Speaker 1: whoever invented the bucket, which which of course is just
Speaker 1: lost to history. But we need not go back quite
Speaker 1: that far if we rein it in just a little bit,
Speaker 1: and we consider a particular invention and a particular inventor
Speaker 1: from ancient Greece. So we're gonna look at someone we've
Speaker 1: discussed on the show before. We discussed them in our
Speaker 1: invention episode on the vending Machine, and we also discussed
Speaker 1: them in the stuff to Blow your Mind episode on
Speaker 1: the Singing Colossi of Memnon. That's right, we're talking about
Speaker 1: Greek inventor and physicists to Sibius of Alexandria who lived
Speaker 1: two eighty five through two two b c E. And
Speaker 1: he's attributed with discovering the elasticity of air and creating
Speaker 1: several inventions that depended on compressed air. So his his
Speaker 1: His most famous inventions are probably the water clock and
Speaker 1: so a water organ, and his writings do not survive,
Speaker 1: but we know of him through the writings of Vitruvius
Speaker 1: and also a hero. But he is said to have
Speaker 1: also invented a gadget that could be used to pump
Speaker 1: water onto a fire, So it's decipious we're basically talking about.
Speaker 1: His invention would have consisted of a pair of cylinders
Speaker 1: with pistons that discharge into a flaplike valve chamber and
Speaker 1: out then out through a single outlet, so no hose
Speaker 1: connections or anything like that. And it's been supposed that
Speaker 1: each piston would have worked independently via its own lever.
Speaker 1: But this means that short, quick strokes would be needed
Speaker 1: to produce a steady jet of water. UH. So I
Speaker 1: was I was reading a source on this. UH. One J. S.
Speaker 1: Rainbird wrote about this in nine six UH seemingly very
Speaker 1: well regarded book about the vigil Aise of Rome and
Speaker 1: UH and in that he contends that a single lever
Speaker 1: would have worked better the Tacibius's invention. He spends a
Speaker 1: lot of time talking about about Tacibius and his UH
Speaker 1: invention and later writers writing about that invention before he
Speaker 1: gets onto the Roman situation, which we will also get
Speaker 1: to shortly. Um but yeah, so so basically, Vitruvius centuries
Speaker 1: later insisted no air was involved in this, which Rainbird
Speaker 1: writes has bedeviled attempts to understand how it might have worked.
Speaker 1: So some think it might have used an air chamber
Speaker 1: to study the water pressure, but Rainbird is not convinced.
Speaker 1: He writes, quote the notion of Spiritus as a force
Speaker 1: of for moving water probably reflects the Stoic belief in
Speaker 1: a world spirit which was responsible for such a natural
Speaker 1: phenomena as storms and currents of water. In order to
Speaker 1: understand the mechanics of the pump, it is best to
Speaker 1: leave these stoic connotations on one side, and translates Spiritus
Speaker 1: as pressure, avoiding all mention of air. No ancient pump
Speaker 1: had an air chamber. That's interesting, So like a problem
Speaker 1: with the translation of the idea. It could be it's
Speaker 1: it's almost like saying a way of saying, like the
Speaker 1: laws of physics or by this mechanism we know of
Speaker 1: physics such as pressure. But this has been misinterpreted as
Speaker 1: there being literal air in there, yes, or at least
Speaker 1: that was This was Rainbird's argument. I don't know to
Speaker 1: what extent. You know, there's there's disagreement or agreement on
Speaker 1: that count nowadays, but he seemed very convinced. So this
Speaker 1: would have been originally created by Tissibius of Alexandria in
Speaker 1: the third century BC. But we know that something like this,
Speaker 1: maybe some derivative product, was being used in ancient Rome.
Speaker 1: And to get to that, I think we should lay
Speaker 1: a little bit of context about ancient Roman firefighting before
Speaker 1: we get to the specific technology. And this is some
Speaker 1: devilish territory. Yes, uh, maybe first we should take a break,
Speaker 1: and then when we come back, we can talk about
Speaker 1: firefighting scams. All right, we're back. So the first century
Speaker 1: b CE Roman statesman Marcus Crassus is sometimes given credit
Speaker 1: for inventing the first organized firefighting brigade in ancient Rome,
Speaker 1: but it didn't work exactly like the firefighters we would
Speaker 1: think of today, because what's the modern progression, right, You
Speaker 1: you notice a fire, you call nine one one, you
Speaker 1: say my house is on fire. The firefighters come, they
Speaker 1: put the fire out, or they at least try to
Speaker 1: put the fire out, and then you deal with the aftermath. Yeah,
Speaker 1: firefighters in today's society like that they are they are
Speaker 1: true heroes. These are people who come and risk their
Speaker 1: lives to save the lives of individuals that are trapped
Speaker 1: in houses or buildings are threatened by the flame. They
Speaker 1: do what they can to protect you know, your your
Speaker 1: your home and the items in it as well. And
Speaker 1: and it's really hard to think of another class of
Speaker 1: public servant that is that is really venerated in this way,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean there's a kind of purity to
Speaker 1: aid they provide. Yeah, like there's no I don't think
Speaker 1: there are there even any movies about like dirty firefighters
Speaker 1: or anything, you know, it would be funny, I mean not.
Speaker 1: I mean maybe maybe it's exact. I'm sure there's there's
Speaker 1: some case to be made. But for the most part,
Speaker 1: firefighters we tell our children about how they're great and
Speaker 1: they're they're they're they're brave, and their their heroes. And
Speaker 1: for the most part, like that remains true throughout your
Speaker 1: adult life, Like you realize that these are these are
Speaker 1: this is an important role and the people who do
Speaker 1: it are are doing very important work. But cross Us
Speaker 1: he had a different model for how firefighting should work.
Speaker 1: So at the time of the republic in in the
Speaker 1: first century b C. Rome was just going up in
Speaker 1: flames all the time. Joseph J. Walsh, historian that I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote from more later, calls Rome a city
Speaker 1: of fires. The city was overcrowded, and the houses were
Speaker 1: tall and packed tightly together. It was just kind of
Speaker 1: a tinder box. Plus it did not have an organized
Speaker 1: public system for fire fighting at this time. Whatever public
Speaker 1: firefighting took place was probably voluntary and ad hoc. So
Speaker 1: it's just whoever you can get together to try to
Speaker 1: help you put out a fire, you're kind of on
Speaker 1: your own. But the ancient Greek author Plutarch, in his
Speaker 1: biography writes that Marcus Crassis, despite all of his great virtues,
Speaker 1: was known above all for his avarice and for his
Speaker 1: extravagant wealth. Quote the greatest part of this, if one
Speaker 1: must tell the scandalous truth, he got together out of
Speaker 1: fire and war, making the public calamities his greatest source
Speaker 1: of revenue. So there's a disaster, crossis gets dollar signs
Speaker 1: in his eyes. Uh. And Plutarch writes that, okay, so
Speaker 1: how do you make money off of war? Well, that
Speaker 1: was mostly by way of accepting or buying the properties
Speaker 1: of people who were put to death after military conquests.
Speaker 1: But how did he make money off of fire? Well,
Speaker 1: here's what Plutarch writes, quote moreover, observing how extremely subject
Speaker 1: the city was to fire and falling down of houses
Speaker 1: by reason of their height, and they're standing so near together,
Speaker 1: he bought slaves that were builders and architects, And when
Speaker 1: he had collected these to the number of more than
Speaker 1: five hundred, he made it his practice to buy houses
Speaker 1: that were on fire and those in the neighborhood which
Speaker 1: in the immediate danger and uncertainty the proprietors were willing
Speaker 1: to part with for little or nothing, so that the
Speaker 1: greatest part of Rome, at one time or another came
Speaker 1: into his hands. That is so it's so slimy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's beyond signing. Yeah. Imagine, so, like your house
Speaker 1: is on fire, you call nine one one, and then
Speaker 1: what happens Instead of firefighters, a shady real estate developer
Speaker 1: shows up with like five hundred guys with water buckets
Speaker 1: just standing there, and he says, okay, you got a
Speaker 1: couple options here. You can sell me this house for
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars right now, or you can watch it
Speaker 1: burned down and get nothing. And you're like that, why,
Speaker 1: that's like one percent of what my house is worth.
Speaker 1: I can't do that. And he's like, okay, four thousand now, um,
Speaker 1: and so that's your choice. And then meanwhile he's probably
Speaker 1: he's got people going around all your neighbors saying like,
Speaker 1: it looks like this one's about to go down yours
Speaker 1: this catching fire? Next? What's your price? Yeah? Yeah, crossis is? Um.
Speaker 1: He had quite a scheme going here. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a there's a there's a series of Roman detective novels
Speaker 1: that were written by an author by the name of
Speaker 1: Stephen Saylure that I think I read all the I
Speaker 1: read a lot of them when I was in college,
Speaker 1: I think. And then there there are a lot of
Speaker 1: fun you know they He does a great job of
Speaker 1: putting you in this uh, this Roman setting, and the
Speaker 1: main character is this, uh, this fictional detective type character.
Speaker 1: It was very similar in some ways to William of Baskerville.
Speaker 1: And the name of the rose named Gordian is the finder.
Speaker 1: And there is a scene in one of the books.
Speaker 1: I forget which one, uh it is, but there's a
Speaker 1: scene where Gordianus is coming over. I think to to
Speaker 1: speak with Crosses and Crosses in in is in the
Speaker 1: process of negotiating with someone who's building is about to
Speaker 1: catch fire via an adjacent building that's already in flames.
Speaker 1: It is a level of like genius deviousness that I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's hard to imagine, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel like the Roman Republic period was full of
Speaker 1: stuff like this. So this raises the question, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: so they're they're offering to put out the fire um
Speaker 1: or to control of the fire in some way, what
Speaker 1: are they gonna do? I mean, they're not really they're
Speaker 1: not really offering to you. It's like they're only there
Speaker 1: to put out the fire once his crasss his property. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll put out my fire, but this is your fire.
Speaker 1: I could buy this fire, and the thing is about
Speaker 1: to consume off of you. Uh yeah. And so it
Speaker 1: was a while before Rome actually got an effective fire department.
Speaker 1: I was reading a book about this by Joseph J.
Speaker 1: Walsh called The Great Fire of Rome, Life and Death
Speaker 1: in the Ancient City from Johns Hopkins University Press, twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: and according to Walsh, Rome was finally able to estab
Speaker 1: publish an effective public fire department only under Caesar Augustus
Speaker 1: in the year six CE, and he writes that the
Speaker 1: main reason was that Augustus had been able to consolidate
Speaker 1: enough control over politics in the empire to make a
Speaker 1: fire department either, you know, either make it palatable to
Speaker 1: the other politicians in the city or just overrule whatever
Speaker 1: their concerns were. Because during the Republican period in Rome,
Speaker 1: Walsh argues that politicians and leaders feared a fire brigade.
Speaker 1: Think what this literally consists of hundreds of men armed
Speaker 1: with axes roaming around the city under control of some
Speaker 1: bureaucratic commander. They they're thinking, okay, that could be a
Speaker 1: weapon of a rival politician or political faction. They get
Speaker 1: control of the fire brigade, and then they could use
Speaker 1: that for god knows what right. I mean, Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: just look at what Crosses is doing with his own
Speaker 1: private fire brigade. Imagine if there was a you know,
Speaker 1: an even larger, more established presence that could be corrupted
Speaker 1: in his fashion. You know. And also, like, we don't
Speaker 1: know this, there's no direct evidence, but who's to say
Speaker 1: Crassis didn't have people going out and starting fires, by
Speaker 1: the way, I mean exactly when the city's a tinderbox.
Speaker 1: So Augustus meanwhile, you know, he's basically a king at
Speaker 1: this point. He's got supreme power, and he's he's got
Speaker 1: at least enough power that he could create a fire
Speaker 1: department and nobody could resist or complain. So he did.
Speaker 1: And these firefighters were you mentioned their name earlier, the
Speaker 1: vigil as meaning watchman or vigilant ones and their chief
Speaker 1: was the prefect Us vigilium or director of the watchman.
Speaker 1: Uh So they were firefighters, but they were also more
Speaker 1: than that. They were occasionally used as a kind of
Speaker 1: auxiliary police force to you know, restore order in quotes,
Speaker 1: during times of unrest. So it might make sense to
Speaker 1: think of them as like eighty percent fire department riot
Speaker 1: police kind of. And Walsh writes that their modus operandi
Speaker 1: is is right there in their name, it's watchfulness. The
Speaker 1: vigilist would patrol the streets of Rome looking for uncontrolled fires,
Speaker 1: and if they found one, they would immediately raise the
Speaker 1: alarm and start fighting it. So what kind of technology
Speaker 1: did they have at their disposal for fighting fires? Well,
Speaker 1: Walsh rites that we actually know a decent amount about this.
Speaker 1: First of all, they had the hammy or the water buckets.
Speaker 1: Sometimes vigilist would simply carry buckets of water with them
Speaker 1: as they patrol, which sounds heavy, but you know that
Speaker 1: that's what you had to do at the time. But
Speaker 1: there were also plenty of public fountains and these would
Speaker 1: be positioned around the city, partially for the express purpose
Speaker 1: of filling water buckets in the event of a fire.
Speaker 1: You know, one great thing about Roman infrastructure is they
Speaker 1: did have the city supplied with a lot of fresh water, right,
Speaker 1: so if you needed to run a bucket line or
Speaker 1: a bucket brigade, you would not have to have it
Speaker 1: go all the way across the city or something unrealistic
Speaker 1: like that, right, you would have these points scattered all
Speaker 1: throughout the town where you could get the water. And
Speaker 1: as you mentioned that, there are a couple of main
Speaker 1: methods here. One is just running buckets from the fountain
Speaker 1: to the house that's on fire, and the other would
Speaker 1: be if you could get enough people together, you could
Speaker 1: form a bucket line where you know, you're handing off
Speaker 1: the buckets and a kind of assembly line fashion. Another option,
Speaker 1: of course, is rags or fire blankets. These could be
Speaker 1: retrieved from nearby stations to smother household blazes. But the
Speaker 1: water bucket method and the rag method, these would be
Speaker 1: more effective with smaller fires, almost useless against bigger fires.
Speaker 1: So what are your options for when things really start
Speaker 1: to get out of hand, like when a whole house
Speaker 1: starts going up. Well, another thing that the vigil as
Speaker 1: would have carried with them would be the delibri or
Speaker 1: the pick axes, and these would be partially for access,
Speaker 1: just like firefighters would use them today, So knocking down doors,
Speaker 1: knocking through walls to get in, sometimes to rescue people
Speaker 1: trapped inside. The Walsh rights that rescuing people was not
Speaker 1: a major priority of the vigil as. They were more
Speaker 1: concerned with putting out fires and preventing the spread of fires.
Speaker 1: Uh so, but that that could all access could also
Speaker 1: come in there because they could just get closer to
Speaker 1: wherever the fire was, right, like if it was inside
Speaker 1: the house and not outside yet they might knock down
Speaker 1: a door to get in. But tools like hooks and
Speaker 1: axes could in some circumstances help prevent the spread of
Speaker 1: fire in their own right. How would this be, Well,
Speaker 1: if the fire is getting out of control, you start
Speaker 1: tearing things down. You destroy nearby buildings and structural elements
Speaker 1: that could provide more fuel and spread the flames. This
Speaker 1: is called a firebreak. It's the intentional destruction of any
Speaker 1: free standing fuel around a fire in order to keep
Speaker 1: the fire contained. And sometimes this would even involve setting
Speaker 1: controlled fires around the main fire to rob it of
Speaker 1: potential fuel, as is sometimes done in wildfire fighting today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like some of the strategies of of wildfire fighting,
Speaker 1: but using an urban setting. Yeah. Now, obviously there's only
Speaker 1: so much you can do to tear down houses with
Speaker 1: handheld implements like hooks and axes. So did the Romans
Speaker 1: have any better options? Why? Yes, Walsh writes, yes they did.
Speaker 1: One important technology in the ancient Roman firefighting arsenal was
Speaker 1: originally a class of siege weaponry, primarily the ballista. This
Speaker 1: was a large mobile piece of heavy artillery used for
Speaker 1: launching projectiles at the walls of enemy cities. You can
Speaker 1: kind of picture a giant crossbow and it would have
Speaker 1: required ten soldiers and one commanding officer just to operate it.
Speaker 1: And if firefighting context, this would have been used to
Speaker 1: blast houses down. So the fire couldn't consume them and
Speaker 1: spread further, so they would they would literally like wage
Speaker 1: war against buildings that were in danger of spreading the
Speaker 1: flame to the rest of the city. Yes. Uh, And
Speaker 1: this isn't the only time in history when essentially bombs
Speaker 1: weapons heavy artillery has been used to stop the spread
Speaker 1: of a fire. Wall shrites that even in some cases
Speaker 1: in the twentieth century. You know, if there's some twentieth
Speaker 1: century urban fires in the United States where we had
Speaker 1: to resort to dynamiting areas of cities to create a
Speaker 1: firebreak within the within the city. Right, And of course
Speaker 1: we'll come back to other uses for explosives in the
Speaker 1: few but back to water based options. Walsh does mention
Speaker 1: that the vigil As had access to pumps for spraying
Speaker 1: water on the fires, but he does not think they
Speaker 1: would have been anything like the powerful fire hoses we
Speaker 1: see today. First of all, the Romans didn't have rubber,
Speaker 1: so they couldn't create hoses like ours, But they did
Speaker 1: have these pumps, he thinks they would be they would
Speaker 1: have been very limited in output, in the pressure and
Speaker 1: the volume that they could put out. Yeah. Rainbird comments
Speaker 1: on this as well and contends that these would have
Speaker 1: been basically useless, especially especially against any kind of sizeable flame. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not much better than a bucket. Nevertheless, they did exist,
Speaker 1: so at least somebody thought they were useful. That they
Speaker 1: were pumped by hand, uh, and they would squirt out
Speaker 1: a jet of water onto whatever, you know, you were,
Speaker 1: whatever you were trying to put out. Yeah, it does
Speaker 1: seem like, yeah, they would have to be useful for something.
Speaker 1: So it basically comes down to either they were useful
Speaker 1: in in very specific circumstances small blaze, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: or a blaze like perhaps you know, in just the
Speaker 1: right space where bucket wouldn't get to it and you
Speaker 1: needed to be a little more precise. Maybe the only
Speaker 1: other possibility would be if it had some sort of
Speaker 1: symbolic importance, you know, but I don't think there's anything
Speaker 1: really to support that idea, and you must have had
Speaker 1: some sort of practical importance. Yeah, I don't know. That's interesting,
Speaker 1: But both the sources were looking at seems like there's
Speaker 1: no indication that they would have been especially useful. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess the other option is somebody was connected and
Speaker 1: made these and they're like, let's let's make sure all
Speaker 1: the firefighters have this new technology, it would be great
Speaker 1: the amazing pumps from Crassis, inc. So I mean that's that. Again,
Speaker 1: nothing I ran across, nothing to support that idea either,
Speaker 1: but certainly it's within the realm of possibility. So I
Speaker 1: want to quote a section from Walsh here that I
Speaker 1: thought was interesting. Walsh rights one of the great ironies
Speaker 1: of life in ancient Rome was that although the city
Speaker 1: was endowed with a remarkable, indeed unprecedented volume of flowing
Speaker 1: fresh water, the technology did not allow the Romans to
Speaker 1: take full advantage of that resource buckets and feeble pumps.
Speaker 1: The succession of fires grand and middling that our sources
Speaker 1: mentioned provides the proof. Still we do not and never
Speaker 1: will know how many small fires would have become significant
Speaker 1: had not the vigil as in their basic tools extinguished them.
Speaker 1: And the emperors continuing substantial investments in the fire service
Speaker 1: suggests that these investments had an impact. I think we
Speaker 1: alluded to this a minute ago, but it is such
Speaker 1: a weird irony that Rome was like the most water
Speaker 1: supplied city in the world at the time. You know,
Speaker 1: it's getting all this water flowing in through their infrastructure,
Speaker 1: and yet it's also the city of Fires. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: and man, it's this is one of those things too
Speaker 1: that I think I have any time I visit like
Speaker 1: a really big city if I you know, if I'm
Speaker 1: saying New York or something. You know, you just look
Speaker 1: around and you look at just the sheer number of
Speaker 1: people that that live in a in a very very
Speaker 1: small area, and you think of all the little fires
Speaker 1: that are going on all over the place, you know,
Speaker 1: in you know, in a appliances and stoves, candles, burnt incense,
Speaker 1: cigarette lighters, etcetera. All these all these little fires, and
Speaker 1: we all just kind of work together to keep them
Speaker 1: from getting out of hand. And then we have this
Speaker 1: you know, we have of course laws and regulations and
Speaker 1: uh and then we have safety procedures and we have
Speaker 1: the fire department doing their important work, but all these
Speaker 1: things working together to just keep the ever present fire
Speaker 1: at Bay. Yeah. I think one of the big differences
Speaker 1: now is that modern cities just tend to have more
Speaker 1: static fire protection. We've got sprinkler systems, we've got fire
Speaker 1: resistant construction, we've got fire resistant city planning, all that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And fortunately we don't
Speaker 1: have to bust out the siege equipment. Right, all right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take another break, but when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will continue our journey. We will continue our look
Speaker 1: at early sort of what proto fire extinguisher technology, and
Speaker 1: we're gonna take things into the explosive the age of alchemy.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. So again when you ask the
Speaker 1: question who invented the fire extinguisher? You have to then
Speaker 1: decide what are you going to consider a fire extinguisher?
Speaker 1: What counts? Yeah, and for some people the individual we're
Speaker 1: going to discuss next, and their invention counts. Um, We'll
Speaker 1: leave you to decide whether you consider this a fire
Speaker 1: extinguisher or not. But it is definitely an active of
Speaker 1: fire prevention device. And and it is a device or
Speaker 1: is the individual who created it would call it a machine.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk here about Ambrose Godfrey A k Ambrose
Speaker 1: Godfrey the Elder, a k Ambrose Godfrey hunk Wits A
Speaker 1: k Ambrose hunk Wits who lived sixteen sixty through seventeen
Speaker 1: forty one. So Godfrey was a German born British phosphorus
Speaker 1: manufacturer and apothecary. If you will remember from our previous
Speaker 1: match episodes phosphorus emerged via the work of German alchemist
Speaker 1: Hinnig Brand in sixteen sixty nine by an amazing method
Speaker 1: if you weren't listening to the earlier one. He basically
Speaker 1: somehow got together about like fifteen hundred gallons of human
Speaker 1: urine in his basement and then evaporated it. I guess
Speaker 1: he's like gently boiled it down until it became a
Speaker 1: waxy substance that he could play with, right, And I
Speaker 1: think in his original recipe he also called for it
Speaker 1: to u um. The word that was used in the
Speaker 1: source I was looking at in the previous episodes was rot.
Speaker 1: Let it set around and get even more stagnant. And
Speaker 1: what an amazing basement that must have been. And as
Speaker 1: the secret spread and the secret did spread, people realize, Oh,
Speaker 1: you don't actually have to let it get grosser. You know,
Speaker 1: it's basically ready to go. But I think he was
Speaker 1: actually a funny development on that is, so he's an alchemist.
Speaker 1: One of the things alchemists Soften wanted to do was
Speaker 1: find a way to turn various substances off in base
Speaker 1: metals like lead into goal old uh. He thought that
Speaker 1: maybe you could turn urine into gold, right, and he
Speaker 1: did get something valuable, but it wasn't gold, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because phosphorus does become, you know, as we discussed in
Speaker 1: the in the previous episodes, uh, of vital importance, especially
Speaker 1: in the match industry. So in its transition from alchemical
Speaker 1: secret to this to this industrial formula, Brand ends up
Speaker 1: selling the secret to one de Craft of Dresden, and
Speaker 1: I believe Craft traveled around with it and kind of
Speaker 1: did like kind of magical performances with the phosphorus Traveling
Speaker 1: Urine show. Yeah. But then the urine secret passes on
Speaker 1: to a couple of individuals, uh, one of whom is
Speaker 1: English chemist Robert Boyle, and I believe Boyle like basically
Speaker 1: he was given most of the secret and then guest
Speaker 1: at the rest was able to apply sort of chemical
Speaker 1: knowledge to figure out what he needed to do. And
Speaker 1: then he ends up hiring Ambrose Godfrey at the young
Speaker 1: age of nineteen years old as an assistant who helps
Speaker 1: him crack the use of urine in the brewing a phosphorus. Wait,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I just remembered one more fact we couldn't
Speaker 1: skip over, is that Hennig Brand thought that you needed specifically,
Speaker 1: you needed beer drinkers urine. So I think he like
Speaker 1: sent his steps on out or something, his his second
Speaker 1: wife's son, to like, go get me a bunch of
Speaker 1: beer drinkers urine. Well, I mean, I guess it's easier
Speaker 1: to obtain at the time than to say, go get
Speaker 1: me the urine of a bunch of people who don't
Speaker 1: drink beer. That's right, Yeah, I'm sure that you had
Speaker 1: volume issues. Yeah. So Godfrey himself goes on to become
Speaker 1: a major phosphorus manufacturer himself, and indeed invented a method
Speaker 1: of extinguishing a fire. I was reading that there that
Speaker 1: he there accounts of him as a chemist, he would
Speaker 1: occasionally burn himself and set small fires. So you know,
Speaker 1: in whether you're an alchemist or a chemist, there's going
Speaker 1: to be occasionally a fire that you do not wish
Speaker 1: to have in your presence. And it would behoove you
Speaker 1: to be able to have some sort of fire extinguishing method.
Speaker 1: And you don't want to waste your pre just urine
Speaker 1: throwing it on a fire to put it out right.
Speaker 1: That urine has his ear marked. So he invented a
Speaker 1: new method. He invented a new machine he called it,
Speaker 1: and uh, he wrote about it in an account of
Speaker 1: the New method of Extinguishing Fires by explosion and suffocation,
Speaker 1: And you can actually read this entire text. It's it's
Speaker 1: a little difficult to read at times because it's you know,
Speaker 1: the you know, the word edge and all is a
Speaker 1: little uh antique, shall we say. But he spends a
Speaker 1: you know, a short books worth of text discussing this
Speaker 1: new invention that he has unleashed on the world. And
Speaker 1: it is essentially a grenade, hand grenade to be used
Speaker 1: against an out of control fire. It was not a
Speaker 1: gadget that blasted a fire with water or powder or
Speaker 1: foam or anything. You threw it or rolled it into
Speaker 1: an out of control blaze and it would explode. Now this, uh,
Speaker 1: this is something that has been explored in other contexts.
Speaker 1: I know there have been some experiments with say, dropping
Speaker 1: bombs on wildfires to put them out, and I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that that has been ruled a very effective method overall,
Speaker 1: but it does have some efficacy because you know, an
Speaker 1: explosion robs the fire zone of some of the things
Speaker 1: it needs to do. There's like a burst, I'm sure
Speaker 1: that like pushes some oxygen a ount. Explosives do have
Speaker 1: some fire suppressant capabilities, absolutely, but but this one it
Speaker 1: has another element to it as well. So very you know,
Speaker 1: very briefly, he devised about three different sizes and these
Speaker 1: would have all been essentially kind of kind of like
Speaker 1: spheres or you know, or or bottles, and all of
Speaker 1: them contained a liquid mixture of a fire suppressant um.
Speaker 1: And then it also had a pewter chamber that was
Speaker 1: loaded with gunpowder. So you'd like this puppy or or
Speaker 1: throw it into the fire and it would it would
Speaker 1: explode and this would spread. The explosion would spread the
Speaker 1: flame suppressing mixture. So the explosion has some some flame
Speaker 1: suppressing powers, but he also was loading it with flame retardant, right,
Speaker 1: So it's one of those situations where we're probably hitting
Speaker 1: two out of the three ways of combating ablaze. And yeah,
Speaker 1: so obviously he was really behind this idea. He wrote
Speaker 1: the book that we mentioned already. He also apparently had
Speaker 1: a three story wooden house constructed and then set it
Speaker 1: ablaze to demonstrate the effectiveness of his machine. Uh So
Speaker 1: it didn't seem to really catch on to the extent
Speaker 1: that he wanted it to, but it seemed to work
Speaker 1: at least in with certain size fires and certain situations.
Speaker 1: But even though the technology did not become dominant right away,
Speaker 1: others continue to improve upon it. So during the eighteen
Speaker 1: hundreds and then the early nineteen hundreds, newer designs of
Speaker 1: fire grenades were invented, employing new chemical formulas for the
Speaker 1: fire suppressing mixture inside. Yeah, but the fire the fire
Speaker 1: grenades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from what I
Speaker 1: was reading, we're substant really different. In the most of
Speaker 1: the ones I was reading about did not contain any
Speaker 1: explosive elements. They were more just like they were containers
Speaker 1: that were loaded with something like we can talk about
Speaker 1: the ingredients in a minute, but that you know, it
Speaker 1: wasn't like in the gunpowder mode as much anymore. It
Speaker 1: was more like this is something you can throw at
Speaker 1: a fire to quench it. So they were still they
Speaker 1: were definitely marketed as grenades. There's there's a wonderful image
Speaker 1: that I came across. Uh. It was actually in a
Speaker 1: a page on the Invisible website. The apparently did an
Speaker 1: episode on fire grenades at the point, and so they
Speaker 1: had a corresponding page with some images, and this one
Speaker 1: is for the hardened star hand grenade fire extinguisher, and
Speaker 1: you have to see it. It has like these two
Speaker 1: um panels, and in one panel you see this like
Speaker 1: Victorian looking woman and a child child standing on a stool.
Speaker 1: There's some sort of fire in the middle of the room.
Speaker 1: And then in the next panel you have some minfolks
Speaker 1: standing around and one of them is hurling a fire
Speaker 1: grenade and the placement makes it look like that he
Speaker 1: is hurling it into the flaming room where where his
Speaker 1: like wife and child are standing with a fire. Right,
Speaker 1: it looks like they're trapped in the room and the
Speaker 1: dudes just outside the door chucking the grenades at them.
Speaker 1: You know, like, don't worry, darling, it's just a bit
Speaker 1: of glass. But if you really zoom in in the
Speaker 1: panel with the guy throwing the grenade, it looks like
Speaker 1: he's throwing it into a coat closet. Oh yeah it does. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I mentioned a minute ago, like what did these
Speaker 1: bombs actually have inside them? Some of them were very
Speaker 1: simple and didn't use didn't use any explosives, didn't even
Speaker 1: use any complex chemistry. From roughly the eighteen seventies until
Speaker 1: the nineteen tends, a very popular method of fire prevention
Speaker 1: was to equip buildings with these wall mounts that would
Speaker 1: just have fire grenades sitting in them, so you'd have
Speaker 1: like a little bracket up on the wall and just
Speaker 1: be there. Often it was painted red, but it would
Speaker 1: be a glass sphere very similar in shape to a
Speaker 1: light bulb. Will be usually filled with saltwater. Now, why saltwater?
Speaker 1: I read this and I was wondering to saltwater put
Speaker 1: out fires more effectively than freshwater, and I could not
Speaker 1: find any evidence that that's the case. And I think
Speaker 1: the reason saltwater was used was to lower the freezing
Speaker 1: point of the water inside the bulb, so you could
Speaker 1: leave it out year round without worrying it would freeze.
Speaker 1: Oh well, that does make sense, yeah, because it was
Speaker 1: just a it's like a cold warehouse environment, for example,
Speaker 1: it can conceivably be frozen solid and would be rather
Speaker 1: useless or mostly useless if you were to hurl it
Speaker 1: into a flame. Right. I found another brand in addition
Speaker 1: to the hardened Star, the the sure Stop s h
Speaker 1: u R Stop the automatic Fireman on the Wall. Another
Speaker 1: popular brand I read about multiple sources was called red Comet. Now,
Speaker 1: if you wanted a more potent fire suppressant, then just
Speaker 1: playing saltwater, which again still works pretty well. You can
Speaker 1: buy glass grenades full of a chemical fire suppressant called
Speaker 1: carbon tetra chlora IT or CTC, which is now also
Speaker 1: known as tetra chloro methane. This was a dense, sweet smelling,
Speaker 1: extremely toxic, non flammable liquid that, when volatilized, inhibits the
Speaker 1: chemical reaction that causes fire. It was a chemical flame suppressant.
Speaker 1: CTC was first synthesized by humans in eighteen thirty nine
Speaker 1: by reacting chlorine with chloroform, and it's had a lot
Speaker 1: of industrial uses over the years as a cleaning solvent,
Speaker 1: as a refrigerant, and yes, as a fire suppression chemical.
Speaker 1: But if you happen to come across a vintage CTC
Speaker 1: fire grenade, sometimes people still have these fire grenades in
Speaker 1: their houses. You know, they were still being manufactured up
Speaker 1: into the nineteen forties and fifties. I think, um, if
Speaker 1: you if you have one of these in your house,
Speaker 1: we would not advise trying to use it. I have
Speaker 1: come across multiple articles by like household goods, museums and
Speaker 1: antiques experts talking about this, saying if you've got one
Speaker 1: of these CTC grenades hanging around. You need to find
Speaker 1: a way to get it safely disposed of through a
Speaker 1: local fire department or something, because CTC, we have discovered
Speaker 1: is extremely toxic. Just a few minutes of exposure can
Speaker 1: cause potentially fatal injury. It's hippotoxic, toxic to the liver,
Speaker 1: it's toxic to all kinds of stuff in the body. Uh.
Speaker 1: Absolute bad news. You do not want to break one
Speaker 1: of these things. And yet that's the whole mechanism, right,
Speaker 1: You're supposed to break it by throwing it into the fire. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Generally these fire grenades would be made of very thin
Speaker 1: glass so that it was sure to shatter on impact,
Speaker 1: but some of them had a heat activated trigger mechanism instead.
Speaker 1: An example of this might be a spring loaded cap
Speaker 1: on the container that's held in place by solder, and
Speaker 1: then when the solder is heated and melted by the fire,
Speaker 1: the cap gets released in the fire suppressant material escapes.
Speaker 1: But he would still be a it would still be
Speaker 1: a it wouldn't be a passive method, it would still
Speaker 1: be active, I think, so you'd still probably want to
Speaker 1: throw it in. I don't know, technically that might something
Speaker 1: that we were kind of like a sprinkler system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you had enough of them around. If you haven't
Speaker 1: had enough, um uh, you know, fragile spheres of of
Speaker 1: toxic chemicals just hanging around the place, like all throughout
Speaker 1: the ceiling. You've just got spheres of water that have
Speaker 1: like a solder cork on the bottom. And yeah, you
Speaker 1: could just stick with the water, that's right. You don't
Speaker 1: need to do the CTC version. Yeah. I I haven't
Speaker 1: seen anything like that around, but but yeah, there'd be
Speaker 1: an interesting idea. Maybe somebody had that. But so anyway,
Speaker 1: these grenades style fire extinguishers eventually did go out of
Speaker 1: style because they were less effective than modern fire extinguishers.
Speaker 1: According to an article I was reading by David McCormick
Speaker 1: for the Antique Trader magazine, they were known to fail,
Speaker 1: and they were much more effective when a fire was
Speaker 1: just breaking out than once it was raging and extremely hot.
Speaker 1: This is a repeating theme we're seeing as we discussed
Speaker 1: a lot of these technologies, right, because it does seem like,
Speaker 1: especially if you're dealing with just a a grenade that
Speaker 1: is full of salt water, it's kind of a fancy
Speaker 1: bucket of water. Really, it's a bucket of water that's
Speaker 1: always available, ready to go, easier to throw. Maybe you could, yeah,
Speaker 1: you definitely get I think better distance on that, but
Speaker 1: it's still delivering about the same amount of water, maybe
Speaker 1: a little less. That is what's what the appeal of
Speaker 1: most of these grenades was. I think it was that
Speaker 1: they would be right there on the wall the moment
Speaker 1: you needed them. You wouldn't so if a fire breaks out,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't need to say, oh my goodness and run
Speaker 1: and get a bucket and get to the pump in
Speaker 1: the backyard and start. But you know, all that stuff,
Speaker 1: it would just be right there. Yeah, you know. Maybe
Speaker 1: this was another advantage to use salt water so that
Speaker 1: like the local Homer Simpson does not drink them all
Speaker 1: because he's thirsty. Then again, salt is delicious. You might
Speaker 1: use them to marinate his meat and to wash his socks.
Speaker 1: I guess they'd be brining, brining his meat, brining pork
Speaker 1: chops in the with the fire grenade. So at this
Speaker 1: point we've we've discussed several of these different inventions, these
Speaker 1: different devices, these different approaches to comp adding the flame,
Speaker 1: and I guess one of the real take comes thus far,
Speaker 1: is that none of these devices kind of match the
Speaker 1: the you know, the the energy, the potency of the
Speaker 1: fire of the dragon fire, you know. And I think
Speaker 1: that's something about the modern fire extinguisher that is that
Speaker 1: is central to not only its effectiveness, but just sort
Speaker 1: of the appeal of it. Like it is a thing
Speaker 1: that blasts the fire back to put the fire out.
Speaker 1: It is like a uh, you know, the the opposite
Speaker 1: the anti dragon that is just on the shelf, ready
Speaker 1: to go, and it is St. George, Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: and it also he does utilize a number of the
Speaker 1: different is will explore in the next episode. The modern
Speaker 1: fire extinguisher uses a number of the principles that are
Speaker 1: employed in these earlier inventions, but it brings them all
Speaker 1: together into UH an even better technology. It's Ripley in
Speaker 1: the loader coming up against the monster, all right, And
Speaker 1: we will explore that in the next episode of Invention,
Speaker 1: which will come out next Monday. In the meantime, if
Speaker 1: you want to check out other episodes, if you want
Speaker 1: to check out our three partner on Matches, which is
Speaker 1: not just to look at matches, but a look at
Speaker 1: the evolution of fire UH technology itself. You will find
Speaker 1: those anywhere you get your podcasts. If you head on
Speaker 1: over to invention pod dot com, that'll shoot you over
Speaker 1: to the I heart page for the show. Wherever you
Speaker 1: get the show, just make sure that you subscribe, that
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Speaker 1: always to our excellent audio producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. If
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Speaker 1: feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
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