Some Types of Old Time Fire Engines.
From the little double force pump used in Egypt two hundred years before Christ, the earliest fire extinguishing apparatus of which we have any record, to the large and powerful steam fire engines of to-day, what a jump! Yet we learn from the description given by Heron of Alexandria in his Spiritalia, that the latter is but the development of the Egyptian device, and that it is to the men of 2000 years ago that we owe the fundamental principle upon which our modern apparatus is constructed.
As with so many others of the inventions of the ancients which have since been resurrected, the use of force pumps for fire extinguishment was lost sight of, and for centuries the inhabitants of the continent of Europe were forced to rely for protection upon buckets and hand syringes.
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