Speaker 1: Welcome to Invention, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our
Speaker 1: exploration of the fire extinguisher. Now a brief refresher. On
Speaker 1: the last episode, we talked about firefighting techniques that would
Speaker 1: have been available to ancient people's. We talked about firefighting
Speaker 1: in ancient Rome, real estate, hustles, crassus, pumps, axes, ballistas.
Speaker 1: We talked about anti fire grenades, those that had gunpowder
Speaker 1: elements and tried to stop fires through explosions, and those
Speaker 1: that were just basically glass light bulbs full of water
Speaker 1: or seawater or not seawater, saltwater or other very dangerous chemicals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And of course in all of that we really didn't
Speaker 1: get to something that would even really be recognizable as
Speaker 1: as like a modern fire extinguisher. But that's where we're
Speaker 1: getting to in this episode. We're going to discuss where
Speaker 1: this more or less modern fire extinguisher emerges. Right, because
Speaker 1: when you think of a modern fire extinguisher, what do
Speaker 1: you picture? It's some kind of tank, right, You've kind
Speaker 1: of tank with contents under pressure, and you operate some
Speaker 1: kind of leaver nozzle to spray the pressurized contents out
Speaker 1: onto a fire to put it out. Where does that
Speaker 1: come in? I guess the closest we actually got in
Speaker 1: the last episode would have been the pumps based on
Speaker 1: Tacibius of Alexandria's model, which, uh, some of the historians
Speaker 1: we looked at last time or or engineers thought would
Speaker 1: not have been very effective, right, right, Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: pretty pretty much agreed that they would have been more
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, maybe useful for very specific small
Speaker 1: fires you needed to put out, but certainly when a
Speaker 1: blaze got out of hand, it was out of hand,
Speaker 1: and that's when you have to bring in the siege equipment. Right,
Speaker 1: But but maybe not much more effective than a bucket. Right,
Speaker 1: We're talking about the the handheld but powerful units that
Speaker 1: I don't know about everybody else, but my my earliest
Speaker 1: exposure two was watching the original horror film The Blob,
Speaker 1: because they used the fire extinguishers on the Blob in
Speaker 1: order to like drive it back. I don't remember that detail.
Speaker 1: I've seen The Blob, but I've forgotten about that. I
Speaker 1: know as a child a movie scene that really stuck
Speaker 1: in My memory was in one of the bad James
Speaker 1: Bond movies. I think it was in Diamonds Are Forever
Speaker 1: that Sean Connery uses a fire extinguisher to murder a man.
Speaker 1: I think he just kind of sprays him in the
Speaker 1: face until he dies. Oh man. Yeah, they are occasionally
Speaker 1: used his way. Usually you see them used as more
Speaker 1: of a bulk weapon, you know, it just as a
Speaker 1: means of braining somebody. I think there's some of that too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a general fight. It ends with a lot of spraying.
Speaker 1: But we're not We're not gonna be using fire extinguishers
Speaker 1: to kill people today. We're gonna be talking about the
Speaker 1: origins of the portable pressurized fire extinguisher. And in order
Speaker 1: to do that, I discovered that we would have to
Speaker 1: end up looking at a very interesting fellow named George
Speaker 1: William Man who lives seventeen sixty five to eighteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: who was an English inventor, a naval officer, and a
Speaker 1: I sort of think of as a boreal obsessive, a
Speaker 1: man with the Arctic on the brain. I think obsession
Speaker 1: is a is a key thing to keep in mind
Speaker 1: with this character. Uh, just across the board because his
Speaker 1: life does seem to be just a series of obsessions
Speaker 1: after obsessions, sometimes very fruitful obsessions, other times not so much.
Speaker 1: But but I guess that's like perhaps that sort of
Speaker 1: mind he had, like once it had latched onto something,
Speaker 1: it was not going to let go until it had,
Speaker 1: you know, until it had reached the end of the journey.
Speaker 1: I really did not expect as interesting a biography as
Speaker 1: this to lie at the origins of the portable pressurized
Speaker 1: fire extinguisher. So I'm very excited. So I was looking
Speaker 1: at several sources about man best life. I couldn't find
Speaker 1: a book about him or anything that seemed appropriate, like
Speaker 1: you know, the ultimate authority on the subject. But the
Speaker 1: best thing I came across was a paper by a
Speaker 1: historian and scholar named William Barr, no relation at all
Speaker 1: to the current U. S. Attorney General William Barr. This
Speaker 1: William Barr is a research fellow in residence at the
Speaker 1: Arctic Institute of North America at the University of Calgary.
Speaker 1: He's sort of an Arctic researcher and historian. And this
Speaker 1: paper was written in two thousand one for the journal
Speaker 1: Polar Record, which is apparently a publication of Cambridge University Press.
Speaker 1: It's called Harpoon Guns, the Lost Greenland Settlement and Penal Colonies.
Speaker 1: George Manby's Arctic obsessions so man be as recounted by
Speaker 1: William Barr here. George William Manby was born on November
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty five. He was the son of a captain
Speaker 1: in the Welsh Few Silly Years. I hope I'm saying
Speaker 1: that right, but basically these would be troops that used
Speaker 1: few sills, a type of musket. And he grew up
Speaker 1: at a family estate called wood Hall in Norfolk, East Anglia.
Speaker 1: So if you're trying to picture this, this is on
Speaker 1: the east coast of England, sort of up north of
Speaker 1: London and to the east. When George was twelve, his
Speaker 1: father had him enrolled at a prep school for future
Speaker 1: artillery officers. I think he wanted George to follow in
Speaker 1: his military footsteps. He's like, okay, you know you can
Speaker 1: command the guns. You'll be the artillery officer of tomorrow.
Speaker 1: And this prep school for artillery boys was housed at
Speaker 1: the Tower of London, which seems like a very strange
Speaker 1: place to hold a prep school for young boys of
Speaker 1: calls Dungeon. Yeah, well, it calls to mind the fates
Speaker 1: of like Edward the fifth and his brother Richard. Apparently,
Speaker 1: young George in artillery school absolutely hated math, which is
Speaker 1: a surprising fact to learn about a young inventor, and
Speaker 1: he ultimately failed to pass the qualification tests to be
Speaker 1: an officer in the Royal Artillery. So he's got this
Speaker 1: career path laid out for him, but it involves a
Speaker 1: lot of math, because you know, to be an artillery
Speaker 1: officer at the time, you didn't have a computer to
Speaker 1: do it. You had to calculate trajectories and know how
Speaker 1: to aim the guns and all that. It was a
Speaker 1: very math heavy and he couldn't hack it. It kind
Speaker 1: of had to be uh, some version of an art
Speaker 1: childery meant hat to handle the computations. So instead he
Speaker 1: became an officer in the less math heavy branch of
Speaker 1: the armed forces, the Cambridgeshire Militia, where he ultimately became
Speaker 1: a captain. But even here he ran into trouble again
Speaker 1: because he could not keep up with the physical demands
Speaker 1: of the job because of some unspecified problems with his feet.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if this amounts to a real
Speaker 1: disease or real disability, or if it was just him
Speaker 1: complaining that his feet hurt. I can't suss out the
Speaker 1: source of this complaint because it could have been any
Speaker 1: if it were a legitimate ailment there. It could have
Speaker 1: been any number of ailment ranging from you know, gut
Speaker 1: to bone spurs to flat feet, etcetera. So he had
Speaker 1: to resign his militia post in seventeen nine, so he
Speaker 1: did not qualify for artillery, even though he'd been planning
Speaker 1: on it. Then he got disappointment, but then couldn't hack
Speaker 1: the physical requirements and done there too. So George William
Speaker 1: Manby's first wife was named Jane Preston, and she was
Speaker 1: the daughter of an Anglican rector who had been friends
Speaker 1: with George his father. George married her just before Christmas
Speaker 1: of seventeen again, the same year he got forced out
Speaker 1: of his his military service. Apparently they both had issues
Speaker 1: with money. Jane was described as spoiled and extremely extravagant,
Speaker 1: and George was, in Bar's words, totally unbusinesslike. Within within
Speaker 1: like five years, they were completely out of cash, deep
Speaker 1: in arrears, and to settle their debts they had to
Speaker 1: sell Manby's family estate, so by by Wood Hall that's gone.
Speaker 1: And after this, man Bey tried to make a living
Speaker 1: writing guide books. And just as a side note, I
Speaker 1: love outdated travel books. They are so often full of
Speaker 1: weird lies, and I'm sure these would be amazing to read.
Speaker 1: I think he was writing them mostly about his own region,
Speaker 1: about like you know, guide books to places in East
Speaker 1: East Anglia, to Clifton or whatever. And while he was
Speaker 1: doing that, meanwhile Jane began an affair with an officer
Speaker 1: of the East India Company named Captain Pogson. And here
Speaker 1: things get crazy and I'll just have to read a
Speaker 1: quote from bar quote. Under circumstances that remain rather confused,
Speaker 1: Pogson shot man Be in the back of the head.
Speaker 1: One story is that they had fought a duel and
Speaker 1: that man Bey had started running away. The wound, although serious,
Speaker 1: was not fatal, but the bullet had driven pieces of
Speaker 1: the felt hat Manby had been wearing deep into his skull.
Speaker 1: Well Over a year later, man Be underwent a series
Speaker 1: of operations to remove the bullet and rotting pieces of felt.
Speaker 1: The operation was a success and that man Be survived,
Speaker 1: but damage was done to his brain and his behavior
Speaker 1: thereafter was somewhat peculiar. Now this is interesting. We we
Speaker 1: spoke recently in an episode of Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind about changes to the brain, injuries to the brain,
Speaker 1: and their their effect on personality, but sometimes even on
Speaker 1: one's ability to to excel at certain tasks. So I
Speaker 1: wonder if would be going too far to to wonder
Speaker 1: about those possibilities here with Mandy. Yeah, obviously nothing here
Speaker 1: can be proved, but it does appear it's at least
Speaker 1: interesting that he suffered traumatic brain injury. He got a
Speaker 1: bullet in the brain, survived it, and then after this
Speaker 1: was before his inventing career began, right, Yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: it's more realistic to to state that he simply went
Speaker 1: on to become a noted inventor in spite of having
Speaker 1: been shot in the back of the head, rather cause
Speaker 1: of it. But but anyway, the sidebar for a further
Speaker 1: discussion on brain injuries and other episodes. But he wasn't
Speaker 1: there yet. So after being shot in the head, having
Speaker 1: the bullet and the rotting felt removed Manby's old friend
Speaker 1: Charles Yorke, who happened to have become Secretary of War
Speaker 1: at the time or Secretary for War. I think it
Speaker 1: was called I'm not quite sure, maybe out of pity
Speaker 1: or for whatever reason, granted man be a position that
Speaker 1: bar calls a near sinecure, as a barrack master of
Speaker 1: the Yarmouth Barracks. Now sinecure up, you know, like a
Speaker 1: position where you don't really have to do much work.
Speaker 1: You know, you're kind of getting getting paid for not much.
Speaker 1: So why a near sinecure? Why would it be this
Speaker 1: easy job to be barrack master of the Armouth Barracks. Well,
Speaker 1: it seems this is because there were rarely any troops
Speaker 1: in the Armouth Barracks, only occasionally during training or when
Speaker 1: they were being moved from one place to another, so
Speaker 1: a lot of the time he didn't have much to do.
Speaker 1: And during his time in this role, Manby was technically
Speaker 1: still married to Jane, but he apparently spent most of
Speaker 1: his attention, energy and time cultivating the the persona of
Speaker 1: a gentleman about town. He would go entertaining, he would
Speaker 1: go to social functions with naval officers, and he really
Speaker 1: liked to dress up and show off his cool clothes.
Speaker 1: He was the kind of person that at this time
Speaker 1: would have been derisively called a dandy. But for the
Speaker 1: most part he's he's really not doing much at this point,
Speaker 1: like he barely has a has any responsibilities. He's just
Speaker 1: having a good time around town. He's partying, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: living the party life. But then around the year eighteen
Speaker 1: o seven, something happened that changed Manby's life, and it
Speaker 1: was that he witnessed a shocking calamity. So off the
Speaker 1: coast of East Anglia there are these long stretches of
Speaker 1: coastal bars, and a bar is essentially a shallow submerged
Speaker 1: bank or coast running parallel to the real bank or
Speaker 1: coast right so it can be made of sand or
Speaker 1: gravel or something that kind of comes up pretty close
Speaker 1: to the waterline but stays below it at a distance
Speaker 1: from the actual shore. And these of course can cause
Speaker 1: strange types of wave activity around them. Uh, they can
Speaker 1: pose a couple of hazards to ships. Ships can run
Speaker 1: aground on them and become stuck. But also waves can
Speaker 1: be very high and very powerful in the bar zone,
Speaker 1: easily capsizing even larger vessels. And on one night in
Speaker 1: February eighteen o seven, during bad weather, several ships were
Speaker 1: all wrecked on the bar off the coast of Yarmouth,
Speaker 1: including a gun brig called the HMS Snipe. Now, according
Speaker 1: to some resources I was reading from the Norfolk Museums
Speaker 1: and Archaeology Service, these wrecks would have been approximately sixty
Speaker 1: yards or like fifty five meters offshore. Imagine how maddeningly
Speaker 1: close that is. Uh. And so, along with most of
Speaker 1: the citizens of the town, man be spent that night
Speaker 1: on the beach trying to find or watching people try
Speaker 1: to find a way to rescue the people from the
Speaker 1: wreck who were drowning in the waves, like within clear sight.
Speaker 1: But there was no way to help them. I mean,
Speaker 1: imagine that they're right there. If it was across ground,
Speaker 1: you could run to them in a matter of seconds.
Speaker 1: But because of the surf and the bars and the
Speaker 1: heavy wind, bad weather, you couldn't just go out to them.
Speaker 1: You couldn't go out and rescue boats. So what can
Speaker 1: you do? Bar rights that The next morning quote the
Speaker 1: beach at Yarmouth was littered with a hundred and forty
Speaker 1: four corpses, sixty seven of which had come from the
Speaker 1: HMS Snipe. According to the Norfolk Museums, a total of
Speaker 1: two hundred and fourteen people died in the disaster. So
Speaker 1: it was a huge disaster, I mean hundreds dead. But
Speaker 1: out of this tragedy an idea began to form in
Speaker 1: Manby's head. So he thought, okay, if you could just
Speaker 1: get a strong rope out to the wreckage of the
Speaker 1: boat and anchor one end at the shore secure the
Speaker 1: other end to the ship, you'd have a chance to
Speaker 1: get people in safely along the line. And in fact,
Speaker 1: this is what rescuers on the beach at Yarmouth had
Speaker 1: been trying in vain to do to to get a
Speaker 1: line out to the boat, but they couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: The distance was too far, Like how would you get
Speaker 1: a line secured to the ship from the shore. But
Speaker 1: man Be thought back to his artillery school training. This
Speaker 1: is the subject in which he had been you know,
Speaker 1: like he'd kicked and screamed against the arc trajectory equations.
Speaker 1: He didn't like the math. Uh, he had failed to
Speaker 1: qualify as an officer, but he still of course had
Speaker 1: the knowledge of what you basically do when you're working
Speaker 1: with artillery, and he thought, if you could essentially load
Speaker 1: a rescue line into a mortar, you could fire it
Speaker 1: from the or to the wreck secured it both ends
Speaker 1: and then maybe use that line to carry a heavy
Speaker 1: rope from the shore to the wreck and bring the
Speaker 1: victims onto the beach across that suspended rope or cable.
Speaker 1: And of course, anybody who's ever watched say, a bunch
Speaker 1: of Batman cartoons that this should sound rather familiar. This
Speaker 1: is exactly the sort of thing Batman is liable to
Speaker 1: do with his uh, his little grappling hook launcher device,
Speaker 1: the back claw or the zip line. Yea, yeah, But
Speaker 1: of course they didn't have whatever you know, pneumatic magic
Speaker 1: Batman is using. They did have cannons, So maybe we
Speaker 1: should take a break and then we come back. We
Speaker 1: can explore the idea of the life saving cannon. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, so um yeah. Obviously cannon technology was already
Speaker 1: um you know, well established, but generally for the purposes
Speaker 1: of of bringing about death and destruction, not preventing it. Right,
Speaker 1: So Manby has this idea for a life saving gun
Speaker 1: to rescue people from shipwrecks trapped out on a bar
Speaker 1: out from the shore. Now, again, math was not man
Speaker 1: be strong suit, but due to his role at the
Speaker 1: Armouth Barracks, he fortunately had access to artillery where he
Speaker 1: could perform hands on experimentation, and that's what he did.
Speaker 1: He tried attaching lines to cannon shot and then firing
Speaker 1: these lines across the fields. And at first this didn't
Speaker 1: work because the heat of the cannon shot inevitably burned
Speaker 1: through the rope material that he attached to it. But
Speaker 1: he discovered that if he attached the line to the
Speaker 1: shot with an intermediate length of braided leather, the leather
Speaker 1: was not burned away. It would hold fast. And so
Speaker 1: basically he discovered, yeah, this invention would work. He gave
Speaker 1: a demonstration on it on a beach near low Stofft
Speaker 1: in August eight, ten oh seven, and he got a
Speaker 1: metal from the Sufful Humane Society. So this this rescue
Speaker 1: line mortar, sometimes known as a man be mortar. It
Speaker 1: achieved half of the goal, right, But just getting a
Speaker 1: line in place wasn't everything you needed, Like what what
Speaker 1: are the crew supposed to do? Then? Like shimmy across
Speaker 1: at cliffhanger style? Was I mentioning that? So Manby's next
Speaker 1: invention was basically the bottom half of this. Once you
Speaker 1: have a line secured, you need something to move back
Speaker 1: and forth underneath the line to get people to and
Speaker 1: from the boat, and what he created was the other
Speaker 1: half of the equation here. Essentially, it was an unsinkable lifeboat.
Speaker 1: This would be a tiny vessel secured with casks on
Speaker 1: its sides for really high buoyancy. It would be super floaty,
Speaker 1: it would be really hard to sink. So you what
Speaker 1: you would do is you'd fire a line from the
Speaker 1: mortar out to the wreck. You'd attach it to the
Speaker 1: wreck somehow, I think naturally. They said it would often
Speaker 1: wrap around the rigging or you know part if part
Speaker 1: of the mast was left, it could wrap around that.
Speaker 1: It would get tangled on the wreck. And then you
Speaker 1: would attach the unsinkable lifeboat to the line and send
Speaker 1: it back and forth along the line and to bring
Speaker 1: crew members to shore. Then, in February eighteen o eight,
Speaker 1: this would have been just about a year after the
Speaker 1: wreck of the HMS Snipe and the other boats that
Speaker 1: that inspired this idea, Manby got a chance to try
Speaker 1: his inventions out in the field because on the night
Speaker 1: of February twelve that year, there was a small ship
Speaker 1: called the Elizabeth that was again wrecked on the bar,
Speaker 1: and within half an hour man Bey had a rescue
Speaker 1: line shot out to the boat, and the entire crew
Speaker 1: was successfully brought in on board Manby's unstakable lifeboat along
Speaker 1: the line of life. UH. And then man be demonstrated
Speaker 1: the life saving power of this invention on other occasions.
Speaker 1: Eventually he began pairing the mortar with something known as
Speaker 1: a breaches booy instead of a lifeboat. So if you're
Speaker 1: trying to picture this, UH, the way you would be
Speaker 1: brought in on the line was in a kind of suspended,
Speaker 1: floaty diaper type thing. UH. Imagine a life preserver, you know,
Speaker 1: the ring shaped ones. But in the middle of this
Speaker 1: life preserver there is a huge pair of underwear and
Speaker 1: that's what your life and I think that's an accurate description.
Speaker 1: And by all accounts, Manby's invention here was incredibly successful.
Speaker 1: It worked, it saved lives, and after these inventions, Manby
Speaker 1: became generally obsessed with the idea of creating a national
Speaker 1: life saving service in Britain. UH. He was eventually given
Speaker 1: a stipend by the British government to survey the eastern
Speaker 1: coast of England and identify the best places to have
Speaker 1: his life saving mortar line installed. But we mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that Manby would not be satisfied just having invented one
Speaker 1: life saving device. He kind of got stuck on the subject.
Speaker 1: It seemed like he just wanted to frantically turn his
Speaker 1: attention from one type of life threatening scenario to another,
Speaker 1: asking could there be an invention to stop people from
Speaker 1: dying here? Or how about here? And I wish I
Speaker 1: had more insight into the psychology that brings that about,
Speaker 1: Like what's going on with him? Like how does he
Speaker 1: get is does he just become addicted to the idea
Speaker 1: of having in intoed a device for the good of humankind? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes you wonder. I mean part of it also
Speaker 1: could just be the success of it, right, I mean
Speaker 1: I've done, I've done, like this is what I'm capable of,
Speaker 1: and I actually saved lives I I need In a way,
Speaker 1: he kind of perhaps becomes a kind of Batman, right,
Speaker 1: you know, he's saving people and and let's see where
Speaker 1: else I can I can work this magic. I wonder
Speaker 1: if it's especially potent, like having achieved that, like he
Speaker 1: made the thing and it worked and it saved people's lives,
Speaker 1: like after having been pretty much a total screw up
Speaker 1: for like the first half of his life and then
Speaker 1: nearly losing his life as well. Yeah. So then he
Speaker 1: turned to another one and we will get to the
Speaker 1: fire extinguisher, but we're not there yet. Before he got
Speaker 1: to that, another interesting, uh, life or death scenario he
Speaker 1: explored was a problem that William Barr identifies as surprisingly
Speaker 1: common as a mode of death in the early eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: and this was falling through thin ice on frozen lakes. Uh.
Speaker 1: I guess the frozen body of water, you know, or rivers,
Speaker 1: ponds and all that. People, especially he talks about in Scotland,
Speaker 1: people just going out on the ice, falling through and
Speaker 1: dying all the time. That strikes me as a rare
Speaker 1: and exotic form of death today. But maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, part of that could could be due to
Speaker 1: the region in which we live, where frozen lakes are
Speaker 1: not that common. Um, but certainly in places where where
Speaker 1: lakes are commonly frozen over, I mean, people venture out
Speaker 1: into the ice for a number of reasons, for recreation,
Speaker 1: for ice fishing. Uh. It is a way to travel
Speaker 1: between point A and point B. Uh. As I've probably
Speaker 1: mentioned in the show before, I spent some of my
Speaker 1: childhood in Newfoundland, Canada, where certainly like the bay's freeze over,
Speaker 1: And there were lots of stories that are a call
Speaker 1: of you know, people you know, driving on the ice
Speaker 1: and losing a car into it. You know, people either
Speaker 1: falling through the ice or like young people jumping from
Speaker 1: ice flow to ice flow and sometimes encountering mishaps. So
Speaker 1: I guess it basically comes down to the question is
Speaker 1: there enough uh, frozen lakes or bays, et cetera, that
Speaker 1: are accessible to people and are they there long enough
Speaker 1: for people to get out there and fall through it,
Speaker 1: because people inevitably will. The ice that seems solid at
Speaker 1: first will end up the you know, actually being less so,
Speaker 1: and then once it starts breaking, it can can become
Speaker 1: very difficult to navigate. Yeah, so many actually created a
Speaker 1: couple of different inventions for dealing with people who had
Speaker 1: fallen through ice. One was this was interesting. I've never
Speaker 1: seen anything like this. It was a kind of sectional
Speaker 1: ladder with buoys at the top. So imagine a ladder
Speaker 1: that floats on the water where the ice has broken,
Speaker 1: and it also has hinged sections so it can, or
Speaker 1: at least one version of it did, so you know,
Speaker 1: you could put it out along the ice flat and
Speaker 1: then the section would hinge down into the water, so
Speaker 1: you could catch hold of that and climb up, kind
Speaker 1: of forming like a pool ladder type thing. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: could say that would be especially useful at that that
Speaker 1: that region of of broken and breaking ice, uh, that
Speaker 1: you need to climb up over to get out of
Speaker 1: the water. And of course I mean the obvious thing
Speaker 1: too here is the time is of the essence because
Speaker 1: you are in freezing water. Yes, and that's why it
Speaker 1: also had a grappling iron to snag the clothing of
Speaker 1: people who were unconscious or unable to climb out themselves.
Speaker 1: But what about where the ice is too thin for
Speaker 1: a floating ladder to work there? Man Be also invented
Speaker 1: a quote wicker sledge boat to be propelled by a
Speaker 1: spiked pole. So imagine it's a lightweight land to water
Speaker 1: rescue vehicle. So if you're needing to go over the ice,
Speaker 1: you can push it out over the ice like a
Speaker 1: sledge and then if the ice breaks, if the ice
Speaker 1: is too thin, it will float and function as a boat. Uh.
Speaker 1: Yeah again again a perfect, perfect invention to navigate that
Speaker 1: that tricky zone where you're not on like solid ice
Speaker 1: yet and you're also not in open water right and
Speaker 1: bar rights quote. His inventions were amazingly successful. In one
Speaker 1: period of three days, they saved the lives of sixteen
Speaker 1: people who had fallen through the ice on the lake
Speaker 1: at St. James Park while walking or skating. And this
Speaker 1: brings us up to the eighteen tens. So in the
Speaker 1: year eighteen fourteen, Manby's first wife, Jane, who he was
Speaker 1: technically still married to at this time. I don't think
Speaker 1: they were I don't think they had a functional marriage,
Speaker 1: but I think, like a lot of people at the
Speaker 1: time probably like maybe may have considered divorce untenable socially
Speaker 1: or something, so they were still technically married. Uh. And
Speaker 1: she passed away in eighteen fourteen, and this apparently freedman
Speaker 1: By to to say, oh, now I can get married again.
Speaker 1: This time he married a woman named Sophia Gooch. I
Speaker 1: guess say, my all time favorite last name. Not the
Speaker 1: first time I've encountered it, because I've been to North
Speaker 1: Georgia and there's a bunch of Gooch stuff. They're Gooch highways,
Speaker 1: and uh, I don't know if Sophia is related to
Speaker 1: the founder of the Gooch Freeway or the Gooch Bypass
Speaker 1: or whatever it's called. Uh, just spite all of the
Speaker 1: the admirable qualities that that man Be is now manifesting.
Speaker 1: It does seem, at least according to his letters and
Speaker 1: notes from the time, and he doesn't seem like he
Speaker 1: was a great husband. It seems like he was, uh
Speaker 1: sort of not really, They're like very neglectful of him, right,
Speaker 1: And that was before he suffered the injury as well.
Speaker 1: I mean there was already evidence of that. And then
Speaker 1: the the the gunshot wound to the back of his head, uh,
Speaker 1: like he said, seemed to have made him even more
Speaker 1: difficult to be around. Yeah, he engaged in obsessive behavior
Speaker 1: with his inventions and stuff. Does not seem like he
Speaker 1: was a very attentive family member. But to get to
Speaker 1: his next invention, here is where we finally get to
Speaker 1: the actual fire extinguisher, the first invention of the type
Speaker 1: of fire extinguisher we would recognize today that you know,
Speaker 1: the pressurized tank. So man Be started thinking about another
Speaker 1: common way to die. I guess he's just sitting around
Speaker 1: the all day thinking about ways that people die. And
Speaker 1: this way was accidental fires bar rights that in early
Speaker 1: nineteenth century Britain quote firefighting was almost entirely in the
Speaker 1: hands of large insurance companies who were interested solely in
Speaker 1: protecting the property of their clients. So this would have been,
Speaker 1: you know, not quite as bad as cross us in
Speaker 1: the Roman Republic, but still not the kind of firefighting
Speaker 1: ethos of public service that we've come to expect today.
Speaker 1: This would be a you know, a private for profit
Speaker 1: firefighting service, kind of an inverse crossis like, instead of
Speaker 1: him buying your home for a pittance while it's on
Speaker 1: fire and then putting it out, you pay premiums to
Speaker 1: a company to protect the value of your home, and
Speaker 1: then they're liable if your home burns down, so they
Speaker 1: put it out if it catches on fire. Interesting, it's
Speaker 1: hard to really equate that, at least to like individual
Speaker 1: experience with insurance. It would it be like if you
Speaker 1: had car insurance and the insurance company was like, we
Speaker 1: really don't want to pay off on this policy, so
Speaker 1: we're gonna have somebody ride with you at all times. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you ever had to argue with an
Speaker 1: insurance company and they didn't want to pay a claim,
Speaker 1: imagine that's happening while your house is on fire. Now. Also,
Speaker 1: as we discussed in the last episode. The bigger a
Speaker 1: fire gets, the harder it is to put out, right,
Speaker 1: Like a lot of times you'd have urban fires where
Speaker 1: even as late as the nineteenth century, your your main
Speaker 1: recourse was just to create fire breaks, like you'd have
Speaker 1: to pull down houses and stuff to prevent the fire
Speaker 1: from spreading. So those crucial early seconds and minutes what
Speaker 1: what man Be would come to call incipient fires, Those
Speaker 1: can be your window into containing a fire that would
Speaker 1: otherwise get out of control. Speed is everything. So man
Speaker 1: Be proposed a better solution. He was like, you know,
Speaker 1: we should have full time public fire patrols to wander
Speaker 1: the cities, putting out fires as early as possible, with
Speaker 1: the right kind of technology to allow them to do that.
Speaker 1: And this, of course is very Roman solution. This brings
Speaker 1: to mind, uh, you know our last episode. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: now the the ideas that these fire patrols would be
Speaker 1: equipped with technology that the vige lace of ancient Rome
Speaker 1: didn't have. And now, again, of course you'd run into
Speaker 1: difficulties here like how do you get enough fire snuffing
Speaker 1: potential into a small enough package that it's fully portable. Again,
Speaker 1: you know, imagine a firefighters wandering the street, they hear
Speaker 1: somebody screaming that the fire has broken out in their kitchen,
Speaker 1: and then they have to start running buckets from a
Speaker 1: pump or a water source to you know, one at
Speaker 1: a time. Or they could try to raise the alarm
Speaker 1: to form a bucket line get more people involved. But
Speaker 1: this takes time to come together, and by the time
Speaker 1: it happens, the fire might be twenty times bigger. So
Speaker 1: what you need is an invention to increase the density
Speaker 1: and portability of fire extinguishing power, like a lot of
Speaker 1: fire extinguishing power in a small package that you can
Speaker 1: move around. And it was in this spirit that man
Speaker 1: Be invented a portable fire extinguisher. UH. If you want
Speaker 1: to read about it at length, I found a book
Speaker 1: that Manby wrote with illustrations. It was published in eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty eight. UH. He describes his inventions in detail. It
Speaker 1: has a one of those like titles that's impossibly long
Speaker 1: that just begins an address to the British public if
Speaker 1: you want to look it up and read it. But
Speaker 1: Manby's invention consisted of a large tank containing a pressurized
Speaker 1: solution of fire suppressing chemicals, or as he calls them
Speaker 1: antiphlogistic fluid. I think he's buying into the now discredited
Speaker 1: Flagistan theory. Now, in reality, this antiflogistic fluid was primarily
Speaker 1: potassium carbonate, or as he calls it, pearl ash, and
Speaker 1: this would be dissolved in water. Uh. The tank originally
Speaker 1: had a capacity of either three or four gallons. I've
Speaker 1: seen both. Some sources like Britannica say three bars has four,
Speaker 1: But either way, this would be a cylindrical tank of
Speaker 1: pressurized solution that could be wheeled around the city on
Speaker 1: a hand cart. And then whenever you wanted to spray
Speaker 1: it onto a fire, you would aim the nozzle and
Speaker 1: release the valve, and the release of pressurized air would
Speaker 1: cause a spray of the mixture out in a powerful
Speaker 1: at and Bar writes that Manby's invention was tremendously useful
Speaker 1: and effective, but that man Bey did not take out
Speaker 1: a patent on it. Instead, man Be sort of expected
Speaker 1: to be rewarded for his inventions with public recognition by
Speaker 1: the crown, probably in the form of a knighthood. But
Speaker 1: it did not work out for a strangely seed and
Speaker 1: petty reason. So I'm just going to read from Bar
Speaker 1: here explaining why he did not get his knighthood. Quote.
Speaker 1: In eighteen oh six, his brother Thomas had been named
Speaker 1: as one of Princess Caroline's lovers at the Commission of
Speaker 1: Inquiry convened by the government into her morals otherwise known
Speaker 1: as the quote delicate investigation that sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 1: When Thomas vehemently denied any philandering with the princess despite
Speaker 1: an alleged bribe of forty thou pounds offered by the
Speaker 1: Prince region later King George the Fourth, he and by
Speaker 1: association his brother George, incurred the p It's regions eternal enmity.
Speaker 1: Thus a knighthood for Mandy was never in the cards.
Speaker 1: Oh man, So yeah that that time it wasn't even
Speaker 1: manby himself that managed to mess things up. It was
Speaker 1: his brother Thomas, I mean allegedly allegedly yes. Um. Thomas,
Speaker 1: by the way, was a career military man Um who
Speaker 1: would later die of an opium overdose some twenty years
Speaker 1: prior to to Mandy's own death. This was the age
Speaker 1: of of opium in England, and I mean I think
Speaker 1: it would have been not long before this that Erasmus
Speaker 1: Darwin is hanging handing out handing out opium prescriptions to
Speaker 1: whoever needs has a problem. But yeah, there's a kind
Speaker 1: of like horrible ironic tragedy here. Like it combines a
Speaker 1: couple of different themes we've seen from invention history, both
Speaker 1: noble and otherwise. Like, so Manby declines to pursue intellectual
Speaker 1: property rights on life saving inventions. Uh, giving these inventions
Speaker 1: as a kind of free gift for the public good
Speaker 1: would And there are a number of inventors we've discussed
Speaker 1: who went this route, right, Wilhelm Rundkin and the x ray. Right,
Speaker 1: you know, he said, I'm not going to try to
Speaker 1: make money off this. You know, this is a gift
Speaker 1: to the world. It will save lives. We saw the
Speaker 1: same with fleming and penicillin salk in, the polio vaccine.
Speaker 1: You know, it happens a decent amount. And of course
Speaker 1: that part of it is that inevitably other people if
Speaker 1: you do this, other people will make money off of it.
Speaker 1: You know, they're gonna be a fire extinguishing companies that
Speaker 1: that that that come online. There were X ray companies
Speaker 1: that came online and profited from this. Right, but you
Speaker 1: you renounce your you know, you renounced and he claimed
Speaker 1: to say, no, you owe me a cut of that. Um.
Speaker 1: But also it expects this kind of gift back from
Speaker 1: the state, right, the gift in recognition of his achievements
Speaker 1: for the for national pride or for the people. Uh
Speaker 1: think of the pension that Louis de Gere got from
Speaker 1: the French government for his gift of the Daguero type
Speaker 1: to the French people. But yeah, apparently for some reasons
Speaker 1: related to family grudges, this did not work out for
Speaker 1: man By Um. So in addition to the man be mortar,
Speaker 1: he actually also worked on whaling harpoons. Yeah. I was
Speaker 1: reading a little bit about this and William Barr's article
Speaker 1: as well. He had some innovations in mind for the
Speaker 1: whaling harpoon, which which makes sense because the man be
Speaker 1: mortar had a lot in common with with whaling harpoon technology. Sure.
Speaker 1: But but then apparently on an expedition in which he
Speaker 1: was going to try it out. Uh, it sounds like
Speaker 1: he managed to tick off the crew enough that they
Speaker 1: sabotaged his invention. Yes, so he began getting really interested
Speaker 1: in whaling harpoons around the year eighteen nineteen. He had
Speaker 1: ideas for hand harpoons and for harpoon guns. And then
Speaker 1: it was in the year eighteen twenty one that Manby
Speaker 1: went on an Arctic expedition to Greenland with the Captain
Speaker 1: William Scoresby Jr. Um Again, it was mostly with the
Speaker 1: intention to try his new inventions in the field. Uh
Speaker 1: though it sounds like a miserable experience. Bar in in
Speaker 1: several places quotes from uh They's journals, and one of
Speaker 1: the quotes he actually begins his article with it. And
Speaker 1: I just had to share this. So Manby is writing
Speaker 1: about what it's like to sleep on this boat going
Speaker 1: to the Arctic. He says, in the night, I felt
Speaker 1: the inconvenience of a tight ship for the wind blowing
Speaker 1: hard agitated the bilge water, and only aginous matter left
Speaker 1: last voyage to the production of a gas of so
Speaker 1: extremely pungent and nature as to render respiration difficult and
Speaker 1: almost to produce suffocation. So the bilge water. I wonder
Speaker 1: what this only aginous material is. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: it's just like whatever kind of junk on the boat
Speaker 1: drains down into the bilge traps just comes back up
Speaker 1: as a foul odor and gas. Uh Yeah, And the
Speaker 1: crew they were not fans of man By, They did
Speaker 1: not cooperate with him, they were not helpful. However, this
Speaker 1: voyage had a profound effect on man By anyway, and
Speaker 1: afterwards he it seems like he spent the rest of
Speaker 1: his life totally pre occupied with weird ideas about Greenland. Yeah,
Speaker 1: again coming back to just the obsessive nature of his personality,
Speaker 1: and um, yeah, so there were it was kind of threefold.
Speaker 1: I believe One of his obsessions was that that that
Speaker 1: England needs to acquire at least a large portion of Greenland,
Speaker 1: and then that they need to use that acquired land
Speaker 1: as a penal colony. They must, Yes, But then this
Speaker 1: other area that was this quite interesting, Uh, it was.
Speaker 1: It was Manby's obsession with the idea of a lost
Speaker 1: Norse settlement in Greenland and the possibility of not only
Speaker 1: finding the remnants of such a settlement, but finding the
Speaker 1: living descendants of like modern norsemen of a sort that's
Speaker 1: they're still living in Greenland somewhere. So he's basically like
Speaker 1: the you know, somewhere in Greenland there's a city of
Speaker 1: the descendants of the Vikings, and they're still there and
Speaker 1: nobody knows, and we need to set out on an
Speaker 1: expedition to find it. Um So I was reading a
Speaker 1: bit about this in uh in Bars article. So first
Speaker 1: of all, here here's the main deal, like the facts
Speaker 1: about Greenland occupation, Greenland new human travelers and settlers as
Speaker 1: far back as um b C. It was known to
Speaker 1: early Paleo Eskimo cultures Innuit Greenlanders, who's descended still live
Speaker 1: there today. They arrived roughly dred C. But the land
Speaker 1: was unknown really to Europeans until roughly the tenth century,
Speaker 1: when it is recorded to have been spotted by gun
Speaker 1: Born Olson, and then in nine and then in the
Speaker 1: year two, Eric the Red was exiled there for a
Speaker 1: number of years for a murder. And so while he's
Speaker 1: there he explores a bit, and then when he comes back,
Speaker 1: he says, let's get some settlers together. Let's go to
Speaker 1: Greenland and set up some settlements. Let's let's make some money.
Speaker 1: Let's let's settle some land. Uh, you know, Viking style
Speaker 1: and uh. And so that's what happened. Norse settlements in
Speaker 1: Greenland lasted for some four hundred and fifty to five
Speaker 1: hundred years, so from roughly CE two somewhere between fourteen
Speaker 1: fifty and the year fifteen hundred. Now, various factors seem
Speaker 1: to have contributed to the ultimate demise of Norse influence there,
Speaker 1: and you know, a lot has been been written about this.
Speaker 1: So some of the potential reasons uh include climate change,
Speaker 1: environmental damage, conflict with Inuit tribes UH, the opening of
Speaker 1: regions elsewhere due to plague depopulation that were more attractive
Speaker 1: than Greenland. UH. It's also thought that the trade in
Speaker 1: walrus ivory might have played a role here. You might
Speaker 1: have had, to say, an influx of ivory from other
Speaker 1: markets that affected the value of the ivory that they
Speaker 1: could acquire there. And then also possibly playing into this
Speaker 1: would have been the over hunting of Greenland walruses, which
Speaker 1: which then would have made it even harder to hold
Speaker 1: onto these settlements. Okay, so the evidence we have today
Speaker 1: indicates that whatever descendants of Norse settlers had been on
Speaker 1: on Greenland had probably been gone for over three hundred
Speaker 1: years by the time Manby gets interested in this. So
Speaker 1: what what gets man Be and Scoresby and these people
Speaker 1: going on the idea of a lost Norse settlement. Well
Speaker 1: Bar writes that man Be's obsession is probably due to
Speaker 1: a misunderstanding um, he writes, quote, the concept of the
Speaker 1: lost colony or lost settlement arose from a misunderstanding. The
Speaker 1: old Norse settlement in Greenland had consisted of two main areas,
Speaker 1: known as Ulster Baggot or East Settlement and vist Bigot
Speaker 1: or West Settlement. The former was the area of the
Speaker 1: present settlement of Quaker Talk, and the later lay farther
Speaker 1: to the northwest, in the area of the present capital
Speaker 1: uh Nook. Both settlements thus lay on the southwest coast
Speaker 1: of Greenland, west of Cap Farville. So Be and man
Speaker 1: Be assumed that the East Settlement lay on the southeast
Speaker 1: coast of Greenland, that is, northeast of Cap Farville, an
Speaker 1: area that had not been examined for centuries, and hence
Speaker 1: they had hopes the descendants of the North settlers might
Speaker 1: still survive there. So there was geographic confusion, geographic confusion
Speaker 1: combined with like just less knowledge of that area, you know,
Speaker 1: because that's the way it is today with a lot
Speaker 1: of things, right, we don't we don't really know this
Speaker 1: wilderness all that well, maybe there's a Sasquatch there, maybe
Speaker 1: there is a low civilization there, you know. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this plays into other ideas of lost settlements and lost
Speaker 1: civilizations and you know, throughout throughout the world. Uh so, yeah,
Speaker 1: he became rather obsessed with this notion. Of course, there's actually,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, there is there was no last settlement.
Speaker 1: They were wrong, they were wrong. There's no evidence to
Speaker 1: support this idea. That certainly that I've come across. But
Speaker 1: that didn't despite not finding that civilization, it didn't prevent
Speaker 1: him from pursuing his other ideas again, being that like
Speaker 1: he was obsessed with the idea that Britain had to
Speaker 1: claim an area of East Greenland north of the area
Speaker 1: claimed by Denmark and say okay, this is England now,
Speaker 1: and also that it had to be a penal colony.
Speaker 1: Got to make it a penal colony. Yeah, it seems
Speaker 1: like it's kind of implied that it's it's sort of
Speaker 1: like the journey there was his his previous journeys were
Speaker 1: so miserable that he kind of like had it out
Speaker 1: for the region. Uh. But yeah, again, he's he was.
Speaker 1: His obsession was such that in cases where he was
Speaker 1: onto something like he was able to really follow through
Speaker 1: and develop some life saving technologies. But in these cases
Speaker 1: there was just no meat there, but he still chewed
Speaker 1: the heck out of it for a number of years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And ultimately Manby died in his home in Yarmouth in
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty four. What a strange arc of a life.
Speaker 1: So he goes from kind of like artillery school dropout,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of a screw up dandy too, very
Speaker 1: successful inventor creating very influential inventions that save people's lives,
Speaker 1: to crank obsessed with a with a disproven theory about greenland. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of a conspiracy theorist really in a sense. Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no telling what what he would be into, now,
Speaker 1: what ideas he would be obsessed with, given our own current,
Speaker 1: you know, a climate regarding sort of outsider theories and whatnot.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's certainly an interesting life and certainly more yeah,
Speaker 1: more more of an interesting life than one would you
Speaker 1: might have suspected from the fire extinguisher inventor. All right,
Speaker 1: on that note, let's take one more break. But when
Speaker 1: we come back, we'll talk about talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about fire extinguishers in use today. All right, we're back,
Speaker 1: so to talk about the kinds of fire extinguishers you
Speaker 1: will encounter today. Um, I think many or most of
Speaker 1: them could could be considered basically dire privative of Manby's
Speaker 1: original design, there's still some kind of tank with contents
Speaker 1: under pressure inside, and those contents are sprayed out of
Speaker 1: a nozzle to put out a fire. And I guess
Speaker 1: there are like three main types that we can focus on.
Speaker 1: So there are of course still extinguishers that are basically
Speaker 1: water tanks with spray nozzles. UH. These of course are
Speaker 1: mostly useful for small fires with fuel sources like wood
Speaker 1: or cloth. They would not be recommended for use on
Speaker 1: fires with a liquid fuel, so like kitchen fires, grease fires,
Speaker 1: or on electrical fires for all the reasons you might imagine.
Speaker 1: You know, you wouldn't want to spray a bunch of
Speaker 1: water on an electrical fire. Uh. Some fire extinguishers of
Speaker 1: today contain carbon dioxide and it's compressed liquid form which
Speaker 1: on operation is sprayed out as a kind of c
Speaker 1: O two gas snow to smother the fire into private
Speaker 1: of oxygen. And carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so
Speaker 1: it will tend to settle down on the fuel source
Speaker 1: and provide provide a layer of area between the fuel
Speaker 1: and the oxygen that it needs. But another common solution
Speaker 1: that's interesting is in pressurized fire extinguishers to use a
Speaker 1: dry chemical suppressant, which is a tank that sprays the
Speaker 1: type of powder or foam mixture based on sodium bicarbonate,
Speaker 1: also known as baking soda. Now under heat, baking soda
Speaker 1: quickly breaks down and releases c O two gas, which
Speaker 1: again helps to deprive the fire of oxygen and kind
Speaker 1: of smothers. It becomes like a gas blanket. And I'm
Speaker 1: really unsure what they were using on the blob, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm suspecting that the blob was the use of fire extinguishers,
Speaker 1: and the blob was perhaps based on the the rough
Speaker 1: idea that the blob does not like cold, and fire
Speaker 1: extinguishers are cold, and that's what they're doing. They're like
Speaker 1: freezing the blob with fire extinguishers. Uh yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, so those are like the main type skull
Speaker 1: I think you'll find today. You might find some other
Speaker 1: Maybe they were spraying them with old CTC fire still
Speaker 1: that had was a carbon tetrachloride. Yeah, the poison and
Speaker 1: stuff we talked about in the last episode, So it
Speaker 1: could be there, just like spraying it within you know,
Speaker 1: like a blob aside, yeah, or it was just cheap,
Speaker 1: right you just in terms of special effects, like you
Speaker 1: just grab some fire extinguishers and use them, and you know,
Speaker 1: it looks like you're doing stuff to the blob. It's
Speaker 1: impressive looking. I don't know. Maybe the blob needs to
Speaker 1: breathe air, and by spraying it with fire extinguishers, you're
Speaker 1: surrounding it with carbon dioxide, making it hard for it
Speaker 1: to breathe. That would makes sense, now, speaking of the
Speaker 1: blob an entity that science fiction comes from space, I
Speaker 1: was reading about actual fire extinguishers in space, and I
Speaker 1: found this rather interesting. I kept coming across articles really
Speaker 1: sort of revolving around UH, the year UH and and
Speaker 1: that seems to be because that at that time there
Speaker 1: were two different sorts of extinguishers that you would find
Speaker 1: on the International Space Station. There was there were Russian
Speaker 1: water foam extinguished years and then the U and those
Speaker 1: were used in the Russian sections, and then in the
Speaker 1: U S sections you had carbon dioxide extinguishers. And there
Speaker 1: was an effort at the time by NASA to develop
Speaker 1: a fine water missed portable fire extinguisher for use on
Speaker 1: board the I S S in those American sections. And
Speaker 1: this is because there were you know, obvious problems with
Speaker 1: using c O two extinguishers on board uh the I
Speaker 1: S S. So for starters, it would create an unsafe
Speaker 1: breathing environment exasperated by the I S S is uh
Speaker 1: emergency breathing equipment's inability to filter c O two. But
Speaker 1: then there was another interesting fact that I ran across,
Speaker 1: and that's giving the given the unique qualities of low
Speaker 1: G fire, gas based extinguishers, they work less well in
Speaker 1: space than they do on Earth, so they end up
Speaker 1: directing air and oxygen to the fire, providing additional fuel.
Speaker 1: Oh that's interesting because yeah, if you've seen fire in
Speaker 1: in microgravity environments, it tends to be circular, doesn't rise up,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. I was looking at some really weird
Speaker 1: like thermal imaging, like altered color thermal imaging of like
Speaker 1: what um like low G or zero G fire consists of.
Speaker 1: And it's it's crazy, it's it's it's a different basically
Speaker 1: spherical like yeah, but with this weird um like there's
Speaker 1: almost a sense of um a spherical but with this
Speaker 1: this uh, this it reminded me of like a an
Speaker 1: image of a of a young seed beginning to grow
Speaker 1: a plant. It was. It's it's quite interesting, but what
Speaker 1: does the fire kind of gather around the fuel source
Speaker 1: the way that like when you ring out a wet
Speaker 1: towel in in microgravity, the liquid just kind of pools
Speaker 1: around the fuel source. Maybe, so that I feel like,
Speaker 1: just from my brief research on it earlier, this is
Speaker 1: something we could probably do an episode of stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind on, like the nature of fire and
Speaker 1: outer space, like what we know, what we suspect because
Speaker 1: it is quite interesting and it is a danger. I
Speaker 1: mean it as uh has has posed a danger in
Speaker 1: the past. I think there was there was a major
Speaker 1: fire on the was the Russian Mirror space station at
Speaker 1: one point. So it's it's very much on on the
Speaker 1: on the minds of of of individuals that are working
Speaker 1: on these stations and planning for the safety of these
Speaker 1: stations and uh so. In fact, in after a total
Speaker 1: eighteen years of development, the water missed alternative was finally
Speaker 1: rolled out on the I S S. So apparently you
Speaker 1: will you will find that system on board today. This
Speaker 1: has been such a strange journey. Yeah, what a long,
Speaker 1: strange trip it's been. Robert, Yeah, it's been all the
Speaker 1: way from just stomping fire with your feet, um, pouring
Speaker 1: water on it too, going into space, and again using
Speaker 1: a misspray of water as the fire. Yeah. So yeah,
Speaker 1: this has been This has been a fun one and uh,
Speaker 1: certainly I feel like with just fire technology and fire
Speaker 1: prevention techno anology, we could easily keep going. We could
Speaker 1: choose some other angle of fire based technology and will
Speaker 1: inevitably come back to some version of fire based technology
Speaker 1: because you really cannot have technology as we we know
Speaker 1: it with without the flame. I mean, it is play.
Speaker 1: It plays such a central role in the in in
Speaker 1: the technological evolution of our species. We carry the fire
Speaker 1: and the fire carries us absolutely alright, So we're gonna
Speaker 1: go ahead and leave it there. But as always, we'd
Speaker 1: love to hear your thoughts. We'd love to hear your recommendations.
Speaker 1: What sorts of inventions, what sorts of technologies would you
Speaker 1: like to hear us explore on this show. If you
Speaker 1: want to check out other episodes of Invention, head on
Speaker 1: over to Invention pod dot com. Bat will shoot you
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Speaker 1: you can find this show wherever you get your podcasts
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Speaker 1: show continue to put out content. You're just banks as
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 topic
Speaker 1: for the future, just to say hello, you can email
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