Fire hoses

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From the course by EIT Digital

Standardisation & Technology

1 rating

EIT Digital

Standardisation & Technology

1 rating

Have you ever experienced that your printer got stuck at a piece of paper? What if that happened every time you print? This course explains the importance of technical norms to which engineers abide to, so your printer works smoothly. Imagine that there were no standards. That is not easy, even if you try. The reason is that a lot of standards are very common to us and are with us for ages. But there are also new standards, new technical agreements, that are created rapidly every day. Did you ever ask yourself how under the hood of your mobile phone, messages are sent to other phones? Society would not be like it is today, if there were no technical agreements and or protocols on how things are working. This course explains how these technical specifications come into being and thus help you and but also society at large.

From the lesson

History

Meet the Instructors

Jan Smits
Full Professor, LL.M.
Innovation Engineering and Information Systems

Welcome to this lecture on fire hoses and the story of Baltimore in 1904.

It's this lecture that we'll deal with what the importances

of making emergency service standardize their equipment.

But before that, let's go back to the goals we are trying to achieve with this course and

this story of the fire of Baltimore in 1904

is about how and why standards came into being.

First, 1904, February, high winds,

freezing water, minus, it was really,

really freezing and cold.

At that time, most cities in the United States,

most buildings were wooden structures.

So, when wood is being exposed to freezing water,

then it becomes very dry and so,

it becomes very easy lightable in the sense that it might catch fire.

So, when this happens,

then the fire might spread also very fast when the whole city is of wooden structures.

So on a Saturday morning,

the fire started and quite soon already,

it was clear that they needed help.

So from all sides of the East Coast, Philadelphia,

Washington, even from New York,

fire departments came to Baltimore to help them.

But when they got there,

they could not help because their fire hose couplings could not be

fitted together so that meant that the equipment could not be used to stop the fire.

At that moment, it also appeared that

about 600 different fire hose couplings were in use all over the United States.

That rapidly changed after the Baltimore fire and

because the fact that there was

no standardized equipment made that fire really spread fast.

So, you can see on a map,

a bit in the left corner,

there is where the fire started and already within a few hours,

a large part of the city was burning and then it's

slowly but inevitably spread in two days

into burning about 1,500 buildings and about 47 acres of city were burned down.

When you look afterwards,

the freezing weather took care of the fact that it was icy all over the place.

So, it was not only very difficult to put out the fire,

it was also even very difficult to move around because of the freezing winter.

This was the story of Baltimore and the lack of standardization of the couplings made

that the advent that

standards were needed even in emergency situations became very clear.

Next lecture will be on paper sizes and weights.

For now, thank you for watching this lecture.

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