Fireproof Buildings.
Anyone who has ever witnessed the rapid spread of a great fire may well doubt the resistance of a steel building guarded only with a thin veneer of non-heat conducting material. In the great Boston fire, says Edward Atkinson, I witnessed the spread of the flames to windward across a street iso feet wide in such a manner as would utterly forbid me from ever granting a policy upon a tall office building constructed in the manner described, which might be exposed to the heat generated by the combustion of a warehouse of ordinary construction in close proximity to it. The instances of the complete destruction of so-called fireproof factories, storehouses, wheat elevators and other buildings composed mainly of iron and brick are so numerous as to have given underwriters a profound distrust of iron and steel, unless so thickly encased with non-heat conducting material as not to be liable to be heated to the point of dangerous expansion.
I once computed the heat units in the many cords of pine wood partition, sheathing, etc., in what purported to be a slow burning workhouse of heavy mill construction and I found that it would have sufficed to supply charcoal enough to melt a large charge of pig iron in a puddling furnace.
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