Stop 45 – The Fire Sprinkler System: Your Personal Firefighter

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Fire sprinklers were invented by an American, Henry S. Parmalee, in eighteen seventy-four, to protect his piano factory.

Until the nineteen-forties, sprinklers were mostly put in factories and warehouses, because they saved on insurance. Then a series of deadly fires, at the Coconut Grove nightclub in Boston, the La Salle Hotel in Chicago, and the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta, got fire officials looking for better ways to protect people. They found that buildings with sprinklers had an amazingly good safety record.

Today, building codes call for sprinklers in more and more places, and some towns even require them in new homes.

In the case, you can see sprinkler heads from eighteen ninety to nineteen sixty-four, along with two water pressure gauges from nineteen-oh-eight. The rules for installing sprinklers come from the National Fire Protection Association, which wrote its sprinkler standard back in eighteen ninety-six.