Quick
answers:
1. What were these devices commonly called?
A: Hand
grenades, or hand grenade fire extinguishers.
2. What problematic fluid were
they often filled with?
A: Some were filled with salt water (salt added
to prevent freezing);
but most were filled with carbon tetrachloride, which is
very poisonous
and can be transformed into phosgene gas in the presence of high
heat…
...which frequently happens in fires.
3. Can you find the original
patent for this device?
A:
US11781 – Samuel Johnson, Aug 8, 1871 (filled with carbonic acid or
chlorine gas!)
Soon after, John J. Harden, US282981, Aug 14, 1883
(filled with carbonic acid
or sodium bicarbonate). This version became most popular in the US.
Background: In the 19th century, fires were a big
deal. They were much more common than
now, with buildings and interiors being made mostly of flammable substances and
fire-fighting technology being much less capable than it is today.
Inventors started building any number of clever,
and occasionally Rube Goldberg-ian fire-fighting devices, of which the fragile,
fluid-filled globes known as “hand grenades” were possibly the most common at
the time.
I first ran across this notion when I was
reading through an old address directory for 1895 and found an ad for “hand
grenades.” That surprised me a bit, so I
started looking into the topic. What I
found was this amazing bit of tech from the 1800’s.
Fire grenades were sold as essential household
items, and the advertisements played up their ease-of-use (especially by women
in peril, a common thread at the time).
If you look up the patents, you’ll find an
amazing technology battle as inventors tried to create ever better grenades,
sometimes with remarkably bad idea. For
instance, Van Houten patented a fascinating device (US366901) that uses a
burnable string causing the bottle to pivot and spill the fire extinguishing
agent out on the fire below. BUT if the
stopper gets stuck, it also has a small glass bottle of gunpowder to be set
afire by another burning string and that will shatter the bottle.
My search process:
[ fire fighting shatter 1800..1900 ] to
find: They’re called fire fighting
grenades. Since I knew they existing in
the 19th century, I used the number operator (1800..1900) to find dates
associated with the web pages from that era.
[ fire fighting grenades fluid ] to find: That they were often filled with carbon tetrachloride. Okay, got that. Why is it problematic? Is there some hazard associated with carbon
tet?
[ carbon tetrachloride hazard ] to find: That carbon tet, when breathed, can damage the lungs and
kidneys. What’s more, it’s easily
converted in the presence of heat to phosgene gas, a major chemical weapon
used in World War I. Obviously not
something you’d want to use in an enclosed space, such as a fire in the
home.
Search
lessons: Let’s
look at some of what people did as their first queries… There were a few natural buckets of initial
queries. I've grouped the initial queries by their most prominent features. (And note that one person used the intext: operator!)
Globe:
fire globe home fire extinguisher
fire extinguisher 19th century intext:globe
fire fight globe glass
glass globe fire extinguisher
fire globes nineteenth century
glass globe fight fire history
antique fire extinguisher globe
19th
century:
19th century glass globes home to fight fires
19th century fire prevention home
19th century fire-fighting devices glass globe
19th century fire extinguisher
19th Century Glass fire fighting
19th century fire-fighting devices
19th century Fight fire home devices
fire extinguisher 19th century intext:globe
Historical:
Fire Extinguisher history
"fire extinguisher" home globe
1800..1900
antique liquid filled glass balls
Unusual:
glass vial to extinguish fire
home fire-fighting glass shatter base of fire
Didn’t
work as initial queries:
19th century fire globe
19th century fire-fighting devices
fire bomb glass ball
There were three
different approaches to this challenge.
1. Globe: 7 of the initial queries had the word “globe”
in the query. You picked this up from
the language I used in the challenge (which is fine)… but note that it’s a
fairly uncommon word. If I were devious,
I might have used that word to throw you off the path. As it was, I planned it as a hint.
2. 19th
century: 8 of the initial queries
had “19th century” in the query. That’s
not a bad way to build the query, but if it hadn’t worked, you’d be right to
take it out of your query and try it without that specifier. A time period can be overly limiting your
query. For example, suppose these things
had been popular in the 17th century as well… then nobody would have written
about them in conjunction with the phrase “19th century” and you would have
wasted a lot of time.
3. Historical: 3 people had initial queries that were fairly
broad, looking for the history of firefighting or antiques. That’s not a bad approach (and the person who
used the number range operator, 1800..1900, echoed what I did myself).
Finally, it’s
interesting to see the 3 initial queries that did NOT work well for their
searchers. Everyone was able to do the
challenge, but compare these unsuccessful initial queries with those that worked. As you can see, the difference is often just
adding a word or two. Since it’s so fast
to iterate, these searchers were right to extend their queries to include the
missing word or two that got them to fire grenades.
For extra credit,
many searchers found truly wonderful images, many of which I have linked in
here below. (I especially like the French
advertisement for the Harden hand grenade.
Beautiful.)
Search on. (But safely!)
From: Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News volume 2, September 1885
