George Washington was a volunteer firefighter at age 18 in Alexandria, VA. In 1774 he was made an honorary member of the Friendship Fire Company and helped them acquire their first engine.

HID bulbs in the form of mercury vapor or high pressure sodium lamps have been used in outdoor lighting on neighborhood streets, in parking lots, in sports facilities and stadiums for years.

Fire engines of the early 1700’s were pulled to the scene of a fire by the firefighters, they would then man the seesaw hand pump. Some of these required up to forty men to pump. Most did not have a suction hose, the pump had to be filled by water buckets.

The history of the modern Fire Service is well documented, but did you know that the fire pump is actually a *re-invention* of an idea from ancient times?

The first force-pump mentioned in recorded history is a pump designed by Ctesibius of Alexandria who died in 222BC. Unfortunately, all of this great inventor’s work was destroyed when the great library of Alexandria burned (there’s an irony for you) and we only know about Ctesibius through the surviving works of Vitruvius, Athenaeus, and Philo of Byzantium.
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Air pollution is not a new problem for many large cities. At the turn of the nineteenth century over 100,000 horses lived in New York city at any given time. The normal city horse produced about twenty-five pounds of manure a day. The manure was everywhere, along the roadway, heaped in piles, or dried and blown about by the wind. The horse was creating the very same problems that today are attributed to the automobile: air contaminants harmful to health, noxious odors, and noise.