How Amsterdam invented the fire department - Works in Progress Magazine

Two Dutch brothers invented a system that transformed a city previously ravaged by fires

In the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was likely the wealthiest city in the world. Global trade and local industry financed its artistic masterpieces and furnished the abundant foods and household goods that Dutch painters immortalized in still lifes and domestic scenes.<br>But material abundance and industrial activities also heightened an ancient danger: they added fuel to the flames of urban fires.

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‘People of all ranks owned more clothes and furnishings. Curtains became far more common: easily set alight by a carelessly positioned candle, they were the source of many fires that then spread to wooden furniture and walls’, writes historian David Garrioch.<br>If its homes were vulnerable, Amsterdam’s factories, workshops, and piers were in even greater peril. Maintaining all those ships required stores of highly combustible pitch, tar, turpentine, and hemp. Soap makers, bakeries, sail makers, saw mills, cloth printers, picture frame makers, and the occasional alchemist contributed their own fire hazards. So did the burgeoning industries of brewing, printing, resin making, and sugar refining.<br>Yet Amsterdam avoided the disastrous equivalent of London’s Great Fire of 1666. In the last three decades of the century, in fact, the toll from fires dropped dramatically. Behind this improvement lay a culture of inventiveness and, just as important, what we today might call state capacity.<br>In the 1660s, the city purchased dozens of large water-pumping engines from Hans Hautsch, an inventor in Nuremberg. Dragged to the scene by a horse, each engine had a cistern whose water was manually pumped into a metal pipe capped by a nozzle. By 1670, about 60 of these engines were distributed around the city, along with ladders, hooks, tarpaulins, and more than 28,000 leather buckets. Members of four guilds – inland sailors, peat carriers, beer carriers, and grain weighers – were charged with fighting fires in their districts.<br>Amsterdam’s fire-fighting system was the largest and best-equipped in Europe. Neither Paris nor London had anything similar. Amsterdam’s many canals also gave fire fighters convenient sources of water. But the system was still inadequate.<br>On a December night in 1669, a large, new sugar refinery on the Laurier Canal caught fire when its drying oven overheated. Fire fighters rushed to the scene, bringing Hautsch engines. While some men kept the cisterns filled with buckets of canal water, others aimed the nozzles at the flames. Despite the ready supply of water, their efforts proved futile. The refinery and the owner’s house burned to the ground.<br>The essential problem was that fire fighters couldn’t get enough water to the roof or deep into the building, thus making it impossible to quench the fire at its origin. The streams of water sprayed only the outside of the building and the lower levels.<br>The loss was enormous – an estimated 195,000 guilders (perhaps $20 million today), including 65,000 for the buildings and twice that, 130,000 guilders, for the sugar and other goods. By comparison, a skilled worker earned three or four hundred guilders a year. Fire insurance was still almost a century away, making the refinery owner’s loss total. Shattered by the catastrophe, he died a few days later.<br>Even more devastating was a 1672 fire, which broke out on a bitterly cold February night at one of the printing offices of Joan Blaeu, a famed cartographer. The building was far from the nearest canal, and freezing temperatures made the water pumps useless<br>Before this conflagration, Blaeu’s printing operation had been the largest in the world, with two well-equipped shops. The one that burned seems to have been where the maps in Blaeu’s multi-volume Atlas maior were printed. A commercial hit among the Dutch elite, an edition with colored maps and illustrations sold for 450 guilders (perhaps $45,000 today).<br>The fire's cost was huge: 27,000 guilders for buildings and another 355,000 guilders for the plates, tools, and other goods in the printing office and woodworkers’ building, for a total of 382,000 guilders. Blaeu’s once-thriving business never fully recovered, and he died the following year.<br>‘This great printing office, with all its contents, was so completely destroyed that even copper plates, standing in the outer corners, melted like lead’, wrote Jan van der Heyden in a 1690 chronicle of the city’s fires.<br>Van der Heyden was a painter famous for his meticulously detailed city scenes – he has been called the Dutch Canaletto – and seems an unlikely fire historian. But painting was only one of his occupations. He was also an inventor with a knack for designing and managing systems.<br>In 1669, he proposed a plan to light Amsterdam’s streets with 1,800 oil...