Hope you had a good weekend! — Dan

Fighting Fires, For a Fee

Throughout most of the United States and, for that matter, much of the world, emergency services are just a phone call away. If your home catches on fire, you can call 9-1-1 and, within minutes, firefighters will come to your address and do whatever they can to extinguish the flames. And in most cases, it won’t cost you a dime. In many places, our taxes fund fire stations and the like, and in many others, donations pick up the tab and volunteer firefighters help out.

But it wasn’t always that way. In ancient Rome, one man not only made money off other people’s misfortune, he became one of the richest men of his era.

The first modern firefighting force, at least in the way we think of them now, dates back to 6 CE. Fires were a common problem in Rome at the time and there were many loosely organized efforts to fight those blazes, many of which leveraged water-pumping technology first developed by the Egyptians. But those efforts failed to provide the coverage needed to address the volume of building fires Rome was facing. So that year, Roman Emperor Augustus established the first municipal firefighting service, called Vigiles. This initial fire brigade was slave-driven in every respect of the term — the firemen were slaves and their equipment and the like were funded by a 4% levy on the sale of slaves — but within a few decades, freemen became firefighters as well.

But Augustus’ fire brigade had a predecessor — one that, by modern standards, would be immediately denounced as corrupt. It was the brainchild of Marcus Licinius Crassus, a Roman general and statesman who lived from 115 BCE to 53 BCE.

Crassus built his fortune as a land speculator; he bought property and leveraged it to become the modern version of a developer and landlord. He became a trusted advisor and, perhaps more importantly, a financial backer of Julius Caesar in the latter’s rise to power. Along the way, Crassus developed a way to increase his land holdings through the power of the pump — the water pump. The New Yorker explains:

This effort became central to Crassus’ wealth gathering but also to his reputation, and not in a good way. Years later, Caesar named Crassus as the Roman governor of Syria, and Crassus used that power to invade the Parthian Empire. In June 53 CE, Crassus led 30,000 Roman legionnaires and 10,000 others against the Parthian forces at the Battle of Carrhea in modern-day Turkey, and despite outnumbering his foes four-to-one, lost badly — and died in the process. As Wikipedia’s editors note, “A story later emerged that, after Crassus' death, the Parthians poured molten gold into his mouth to mock his thirst for wealth.”

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More About Fighting Fires

Today’s Bonus fact: In 1906, the city of San Francisco was struck by an earthquake that claimed hundreds if not thousands of lives. Much of the damage done — and many of the lives lost — were due to the fires that broke out after the tectonic event, as most of the city’s firefighting infrastructure was destroyed by the quake. But one hydrant, located near the corner of 20th and Church Streets, remained functional. (Here’s a map.) It’s unclear how many lives were saved because the hydrant didn’t fail, but its importance was widely regarded — the city painted it gold shortly after the fires were extinguished. Now known as “the Golden Fire Hydrant” and "the Little Giant,”

From the Archives: How Horses Created Firehouse Poles: Want to know why fire stations have poles? It’s because of the horses.

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And thanks! — Dan