Brooklyn’s New Headquarters.

Brooklyn’s New Headquarters.

The handsome building on Jay street, which is soon to be the headquarters of the Brooklyn Fire Department, is fast nearing completion, and before the cold weather comes round again the officials, who are now crowded in the temporary quarters in Lawrence street, will have established themselves in their new home. That will be the beginning of the third chapter in the history of the department. The first chapter embodied the story of the old volunteer department, ils formation, its active work and the fun the public derived from witnessing its faction fights for supremacy. The second chapter opened in 1869 with a requiem for the old fire fighters and the organization of the paid department. The struggles of the commissioners to make the department efficient from the first, and the close scrutiny of the old " red shirts ” to see if the paid men would make a better showing than they had done, are still unforgotten. The appearance of steam fire engines drawn by horses on the streets, and a conseqent reduction in the number of disastrous fires, were all included. The new system has been twenty-three years in operation, during which time the department has placed itself in a position as meritorious as that of any fire department in the world.

The third epoch will be marked by the entry of the executive officers into the new building, and the introduction of modern electrical devices which will facilitate the work and tend to place the department in such a position that it would seem almost impossible for any hitch to occur, so far as the prompt appearance of firemen on the scene of a fire is concerned. Not that the department is now in any way unreliable, far from it, but the means of communication between it and the public are always liable to be found wanting. A break may occur in any of the thousands of fire alarm wires at some unknown spot, and when it is discovered, not always very promptly, for want of a better system, the telegraph linemen have to do some pretty tall hustling to locate the break, and during that time there is danger ahead. This difficulty has always been a source of worriment to the heads of the fire departments all over the country, and now, with the inception of new apparatus and original ideas, Prescott l.. Watson, superintendent of the fire alarm telegraph of the Brooklyn Department, is about to add a comparatively new invention which, he says, will answer the purpose in every particular. His aim has always been, since he assumed the role of superintendent, to arm his department with every improvement which would add to its efficiency, and in gaining his knowledge he has carefully followed the workings of other departments and tried to improve on them. Some time ago he made a tour of the principal cities in the Union for the purpose of discovering something which bore directly upon the management and care of fire alarm wires, and in Buffalo he found-the object of his search—a faithful facsimile of a grandfather's clock. So far the Buffalo Department has been the only one wide awake enough to use it, but in the near future it will have the Brooklyn Department for a companion. It will occupy a corner in the operating room in the new building on Jay street. As before stated, it is in appearance like an old fashioned eight-day clock, but it will hold considerably more than did the old timepieces. It will stand seven and a half feet high and will contain a clock which will register Washington time. Underneath will be a delicate piece of mechanism with an alarm bell attached. To this will be connected the seventy circuits of fire alarm telegraph wires. Each circuit is numbered from 1 to 70. When the slightest accident happens to one of these wires, which practically help to protect public property, whether the offending wire be broken, grounded or fouled by a telephone or private wire, the bell in the clock will ring out the number of the circuit in which the break has occurred and a pencil attached to the machine will mark on a sheet of paper underneath the location of the break. The advantage of such a machine is obvious. At present the wires have to be tested many times each day by the operators, and unless that is done a break would not be discovered until some one had occasion to send in an alarm ot fire on it. The new apparatus will accomplish that exacting work automatically every fifteen minutes, and the operators may rest easy in the knowledge that all the wires are in good condition. Some idea of the amount of work and care necessary to keep that • portion of the department in perfect order may be gleaned from the fact that there are 373 miles of aerial fire alarm wires running over 248 streets throughout the city, and that during the last year the linemen have had to climb telegraph poles in all kinds of inclement weather and straighten out the wires in 1593 cases where they had fouled with other wires. Over forty grounded wires have been strung up again and 1193 “ open " and broken wires have been connected.