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The Fireproof Building: Technology and Public Safety in the Nineteenth Century American City SARA E. WERMIEL, 2000 Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press viii + 301pp. illus. £31.00 ISBN 0-8018-6311-2
The reader of this book has two for the price of one - in addition to the story of development of fireproof construction in America, Sara Wermiel also covers the introduction of the rolled iron and steel joist, in which America was a late starter, but rapidly overtook England and the Continent.
The story is all about conflagration, defined as a fire involving groups of buildings that destroyed property valued at the time at $1 million or more. In the nineteenth century, this meant whole towns and cities, a problem from which we in Britain were spared, having had our conflagrations in London in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as well as in 1666 and elsewhere up to the eighteenth century. These events resulted in legislation to prevent the spread of fire, principally with masonry party walls, which was not carried across the Atlantic, where rapidly expanding and new towns and cities were generally of timber construction.
The first chapter describes the extent of the problem and sets the scene for the first fireproof buildings, up to 1840, when brick or stone vaults spanned on to masonry walls. This form of construction was used for prisons and other federal buildings, and also for banks. The use of structural iron crossed the Atlantic in the 1840's, with the introduction of iron and brick floors, as they are generally termed, mostly for federal buildings. The American iron and brick floors usually took the form of fairly short span half brick arches on tertiary iron beams at close centres. In England, brick arch floors were generally restricted to mill type buildings mostly...