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.

For most of the years since Thomas Edison successfully patented the carbon-filament light bulb in 1889, lighting technology has changed very little. Of course, there have been improvements of the art, but at the heart, most lighting technology has relied on one key: an electrical current passing through a thin filament creating the light. This has been particularly true for automotive lighting such as those found on emergency vehicles. With the exception of strobe lighting, the state-of-the-art in vehicle lighting for most of those years relied on the same basic concept demonstrated by Edison’s patent.

Not anymore.
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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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