Where's the Fire - Part I

Friday, July 5, 2013

Where's the Fire - Part I

Some History

  Fire sadly has been in the new lately.  An elite firefighting team, fighting a huge fire, in Yarnell, Arizona,  died on June 30, 2013.19 of the 20 men perished when flames on the mountainside entrapped them. In Montreal,Quebec, where I live, another tragic event occurred. On January 9, 1927, a discard cigarette under the floorboards of a movie theatre created a smouldering fire. Sadly there was a massive stampede to rush out of the cinema and 78 people died - mostly young children. The laws of the province were changed and anyone under 16 years of age would not be allowed into a movie theatre until 1961.

  Before the invention of the automobile and eventually the truck, the horse was the horse and wagon were the main mode of transportation (aside from trains). Consequently, horse-drawn wagons were used to fight fires.  The wagons of  course were very long in order to carry the long ladders needed to fight fires.  And there were no water systems yet either, or pumps on the wagons, so fires were fought with men and axes to try and put out the fire. Sometimes long lines of men would pass buckets in order to try and put the fire out. Eventually the fire pump and hoses would be used.

Fire Wagons

   Fire "wagons", an appropriately-name term were used to fight fires in the 1800's - early 1900's and into the 1910's. When the automobile was invented and produced on a mass scale, eventually the truck would also be invented or created.  In time, the fire "engine" or fire "truck" would eventually replace the "wagon".

 I'll only be writing about American toys, as I realized in the next post (part II), that writing this 3-part series is much bigger than I realized!  

   What I like about early toys, and I've mentioned this before, is that all the major companies and the smaller ones produced toys that were actually quite similar, and nobody "sued" each other for making similar toys. Last year Apple used Samsung for copyright infringement on their IPhone, and buried in the huge pile of paper litigation was an infringement over Samsung using "round corners" on their cellphone that resembled too closely those of the IPhone! Apple won the lawsuit in the USA (they also sued in Europe), and I wonder if they won on the "rounded corners issue"?

   I also like the graphic design of these fire "wagons".  These "wagons" and horses" present themselves beautifully on a white foundation and background, and subtle differences show when you start to compare one company to another. Also, the colour themes were subtle from one company to another.

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    What's interesting to note is that all of the toys don't have their original reins (cords) that had the wagon driver control the horses. I once purchased a reproduction of one of these toys on E-Bay. I purchased it at a low price, but shipping was expensive. Sadly the toy was poorly packaged and arrived broken. These toys were no "lightweights", and weigh anywhere from 2-6 pounds! I would also think that these were "pull toys", allowing a child to pull them with a cord and a wood ball in hand. As far as collectors go, you certainly need a lot of mantle space to place one of these there!

   I'm going to continue this topic in 2 more instalments - the early fire trucks,and of course the latter ones up to the early 1940's. I thought it would be interesting just to present the changes and evolution of fire wagon to fire trucks as time went on.

Thanks for visiting,

and have a great part of the day,

wherever you may be.

Stacey