May 30, 2011 • 27 mins
After covering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Deblina and Sarah return to the topic of disastrous fires in history. Listen in as they recount some of history's most famous fires, comparing and contrasting the factors leading to these catastrophes. Including the Peshtigo Fire, the Great Fire of London, the Great Fire of Meireki, and the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'm to blame a chok reboarding and I'm fair outing.
And we recently covered the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, which
at the time was one of the deadliest workplace disasters
(00:23):
New York and perhaps the entire country had ever seen.
It was a tough one. It was tough to research
and tough to talk about. It was tough to research
because it was such a sad topic, but it is
easy to see why listeners requested so much, because it
was fascinating to learn about. We were really fascinated by
all the little vignettes from survivors, rescuers, witnesses. Some of
(00:46):
the points that really struck us the most were how
quickly the fire started and spread, how split second decisions
people made seemed to make a difference, and how it
really influenced the lives of the people who were involved
and legislation for years to come. So because of that episode,
we decided we wanted to take a look at some
other famous fires and just look at some of the
(01:06):
parallels between them, look at some of those little split
second decisions and how that might be the same in
one fire that takes place in the sixteen hundreds, and
then one take one that takes place in the eight hundreds,
and then just see how they're different too, exactly. And
we're also going to take a look at the pre
fire environment some parallels there. I mean, we saw in
a Triangle factory how it was really set up for
(01:29):
a disaster in a lot of ways, with the cotton
scraps lying around, and the really crowded environment and people
just generally ignoring signs of danger that we're there to
begin with. So the first fire on our list that
we're gonna take a look at is the Great Fire
of London, a very famous one, and like the Triangle
Factory fire, the situation here was really just right for disaster.
(01:50):
Fires weren't unusual in London in the first place in
the sixteen hundreds, since timber construction and narrow streets were
really the norm at the time. So by September of
sixty sixty six, a long, hot summer had made matters
even worse. It was dried out both the city and
its water reserves, and according to the BBC, some people
had actually seen this coming. Some people had warned of
(02:12):
the possibility of a major fire in London even before
it got to this point, but most citizens at the
time had something else on their minds right Sarah plague. Yes,
plague at that time had killed about sixty eight thousand
people in the years leading up to sixteen sixty six,
so they were worried about it. Understandable that that would
be your top concern at the time. So when the
Great Fire did start on September two, sixteen sixty six,
(02:36):
started in Putting Lane near London Bridge, and it was
in the home of the King's baker, Thomas Farrenore and
a workman had smelled smoke around two in the morning
and told the baker's family, and they had all managed
to escape by fleeing over the roofs, and their maid
was too scared to leave, and so she became the
first casualty and this fire, even though you're gonna probably
(02:57):
be surprised to learn that very few people die in
this fire, considering how disastrous it was, she was too
scared to get out of the house. Though. Yes, the
house was quickly engulfed in flames, and from there the
fire spread through the narrow streets of London. But the mayor,
Sir Thomas Bloodworth, for some reason, really wasn't a concerned
at first. He was woken up about an hour after
(03:18):
it started, and after being awoken he said a woman
might piss it out of the fire. That was the
colorful statement he makes. So it kept spreading from there
and London Bridge was burning by dawn. So just to
give you a little understanding of how they fought fires
in this time, or one of the ways they fought fires,
they would build fire breaks or create firebreaks by destroying
(03:41):
buildings in a fire's path so that it didn't have
anything to spread to. It would just be brought to
a sudden halt. And the strategy had been used in
a fire in sixteen thirty two on London Bridge and
it created this open space that ended up saving the
bridge in sixteen sixty six, so that the fire was
confined to one part of the city. It couldn't jump
(04:02):
the river, but it continued to just get worse and
worth on the westward side of the city and it
was fanned by the wind, and the mayor kept on
hesitating though about the fire break. So even though they
were tested, it seemed to work. He wasn't willing to
order a bunch of buildings blown up. Yeah. I think
what that came down to is just the cost of it.
(04:22):
It was going to cost so much to rebuild those buildings,
and that's why he was so hesitant about it. But
King Charles the second fields a little differently. He did
want those fire breaks, but by the time that he
ordered the mayor to destroy as many buildings as possible
to make that happen, the fire was already too out
of control for that strategy to really work. They would
destroy houses too late, or the wind would just help
(04:43):
the fire jump over the gaps that they made. And
if you destroy the houses too late, you're just creating
tinder essentially. Yeah, because it was all right if they
didn't have time to clear it out before the fire
got to it, they were actually kind of helping it along.
So the fire raged on for three days. By Wednesday
it finally started to die down own, and then by
Thursday it was extinguished. Flames did spring up again briefly
(05:04):
at Temple Church, but the Duke of York made kind
of a quick, split second decision there to blow up
several buildings at once with gunpowder and create a firebreak
right away, so they were able to squelch that, so
the fire was out by that point. But the damage
to London was really significant. A large part of the
city had been destroyed, including a lot of the civic
buildings old St Paul's Cathedral. I think we mentioned that
(05:26):
in an earlier episode on St Paul's that one of
many times it burned down. Eight seven parish churches had
burned in about thirteen thousand, two hundred houses and according
to the BBC, though only four official deaths were reported,
but some people think that the actual death toll might
have been a lot higher than that. But regardless of
(05:46):
the number of people that died, it affected thousands of citizens,
somewhere around one sixth of London's population, and they had
to flee to places like Hampstead and Highgate and more Fields,
which was that last one was the chief refuge. I
think within days they started putting together plans to rebuild
the city, and Christopher Wren of all people, got involved
(06:07):
with this rebuilding plan and presented plans to sort of
remake the city, regularized the streets and um even though
they stuck to old lines in most cases, they didn't
just change the map of the city entirely. They broadened
a lot of the streets and built houses out of
brick instead of these sort of rough and tumble wooden
(06:29):
houses that caught fire so easily. Yeah, but it didn't
stop there. Like the Triangle shirtwaist factory incident, everyone was
looking for someone to blame after this. It wasn't just
a simple rebuilding. They wanted somebody to take the blame.
So a parliamentary committee investigated the incident, but they couldn't
find that it was anything other than a quote act
of God. Even though a French watchmaker confessed to the
(06:53):
crime and was executed for it, nobody really believed he
did it, so people were still kind of always coming
up with theories of what could have happened, especially since
this was a time of political and religious upheaval. People
pointed a finger at foreigners a lot and to Catholics
for years. In fact, a monument that commemorated the fire
born inscription blaming quote to the treachery and the malice
(07:15):
of the Popish faction until eighteen thirty one, when we
can presume somebody sort of chiseled it off discreetly or something.
But um, it seems a little strange that there would
even be a blame game if the fire starts in
a bakery. I mean, it seems like a place where
a fire accident could easily happen. Yeah, I agree, and
(07:36):
I think most people accept that it was probably just
the result of carelessness on the part of the baker
or has made someone in the household, and we can
rely on that at this point. All right, So our
next fire might also be the result of carelessness, but
no one's entirely sure. It is a fire that happened
in Japan in sixteen fifty seven, the may Reiki Fire
(07:58):
or the Great Fire of mary Ki in Japan's of
course been in the news a lot lately, and a
lot of people have probably heard of the Great Canto
earthquake of nineteen twenty three, And it was a noon earthquake,
which meant lots of cooking fires were going and so
a big fire started across Tokyo and killed and estimated
one thousand people. But before Tokyo was even Tokyo, back
(08:20):
when it was still a Doh, this fire took place,
and it was the center of power for the Tokugawa
Shogunate and the fire was just as deadly. Way back
in sixteen fifty seven, a hundred thousand people were killed yea.
And considering how many people were killed in that fire,
it might be especially surprising to learn that Edo had
actually been a little fishing village just a few generations earlier.
(08:43):
In the late sixteenth century, the showgun Tokugawa Ayasu had
moved to Pan's capital to Edo and started a series
of developments there, and over the years the city just
got bigger and bigger. Mountains were cut down to fill
in the bay. Edo Castle was rebuilt, and by sixteen
thirty seven the city was operating under something called alternate attendance. Yeah,
(09:04):
the alternative attendant system. And if you're trying to to
think of what this is, it's kind of like a protoversih.
Almost all the daimio or lords had to live in
the capital part time, and when they weren't there, when
they were back on their own estates, they had to
leave some of their family behind as collateral, sort of like,
don't get up to any trouble off in your own estates,
(09:25):
because we have all you care about here. So there
was this versioning elite living in Edo and and buying
lots of things and in need of lots of services.
So that meant a lot of regular folks were moving
to town to provide those services, merchants and entertainers and
the like. So because of all the crowding, the narrow
streets and alleys set up in this Kyoto grid style,
(09:49):
and of course built and lined with houses made of
wood and paper, we're sort of at risk for fires.
And fires consequently did happen a lot, similar to the
situation shan in London that we just discussed, But in
Japan they even called these little fires the flowers of edge.
Oh yeah, just blooming across the city from time to time.
But the fire that hit in sixteen fifty seven was
(10:12):
the worst, and it started in a temple. Legend has
monks burning an unlucky long sleeve kimono. Um, you'll see
different accounts. Sometimes the kimono belonged to several young girls
who died before they could wear it. Sometimes there were
a couple kimonos, each having belonged to a girl who died.
But anyway, this gives us the fire's other name, which
(10:33):
was the flurisode fire or long sleeves fire. You might
hear it referred to that way, so strong winds from
there carried the fire across moats and canals, and then
the wind shifted and the fire burned the shops along
the Sumida River. Supposedly an unattended cooking fire in a
Samurai household helped feed it further too, so it just
kind of grew. Sixty of the city was destroyed, and
(10:56):
most of Edo Castle was destroyed. Yeah, and again, like
lone in, the whole thing made the feudal government really
reconsider how they were going to rebuild and whether there
were improvements that could be made before you set up
a similar situation again. And especially because by sixteen ninety three,
so just a few decades after this fire, the population
(11:17):
was larger than that of London or Paris, so you
had a lot of buildings to consider. This time they
mapped out the city and spread the buildings out more.
There were, still, of course, later fires. They didn't totally
eliminate that threat, but according to a book called an
Introduction to Japanese Architecture, this was a fairly successful attempt,
(11:38):
early attempt at city planning in a real turning point
for the city. Yeah, and even laws that were made
afterwards suggest fire consciousness. While commoners weren't allowed the extravagance
of building a third floor in their homes, they were
encouraged to use super expensive tile roofs and kura or
fireproof storehouses. So both of those things kind of became
(11:59):
status symbols. Yeah, so you have sump Stuary code sort
of just avoiding one avenue if it, if it helps
make the city more fire safe, go for it, even
if even if you look impressive doing it. It became
cool to be safe. So the first two fires we
talked about are pretty well known, but the third fire
(12:20):
on our list is one that got overshadowed a bit
by another fire that occurred at the same time. And
we're talking about the Pestigo Fire, which occurred in eighteen
seventy one, sometimes called the Great Peshtigo Fire. Took place
obviously in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and it has the distinction of
being the deadliest fire in US history. But the reason
it's not as well known as some other incidents is
(12:40):
because it occurred on the same night as the Great
Chicago Fire October eight, eight seventy one. Some people think
maybe even the same hour, right, Yeah, same hour but
a bit of a more mythical beginning, I guess, which
is one reason that it might have overshadowed Pestico a
little bit. We actually have a podcast on the legendary
origins of the Great Chicago Fire, and a lot of
(13:02):
people think it was started by miss O'Leary's cow. So
if you want to learn a little bit more about
that and how true it is, you can go back
and listen to that podcast. Part of the reason why
it was overshadowed, though, is because Chicago is a bigger
city and news was going to get out faster about
a huge fire in Chicago that leaves a lot of
people dead. Yeah, Pechico was a railroad and lumbering town,
(13:24):
probably not as exciting as a big urban area like Chicago.
There were about eight hundred men who were employed by
a local would wear wooden't wear factory sorry, and to sawmills,
and the town had about one thousand, seven hundred residents total.
Once again, the conditions here were just right for a
big fire. After harvesting trees, lumberjacks would leave piles of sawdust,
(13:45):
brush and limbs known as slash, all over the forest floor.
To add to this, men who cleared the land for
railroads and farmers who needed to clear the land to
plant in would torch trees, stumps, buildings, basically anything in
their path. So small fire. As we're burning around this
area all the time, and no one really thought anything
of it. We're cool with it pretty much. But to
make matters worse, there hadn't been that much rain during
(14:09):
the summer in the early fall, so the area was
especially dry, and by the first week of October, even
the air in Peshtigo along the north shore of Green
Bay was so thick with smoke from all of these
little fires from the farmers and the lumberjacks and all
of that that ships on Lake Michigan had to navigate
by compass and harbor masters you fog horns to guide
(14:30):
them ashore, so it couldn't even see where you were going. Yeah,
the environment, I guess just really set the stage for
something eerie to happen. But no one knows exactly what
started the big fire October eighth. A recent article in
History magazine, I think in the March issue, actually discussed
a couple of possibilities about that very thing. Lightning was
apparently ruled out, but because of the conditions. Some people
(14:51):
speculate there may have been instances of spontaneous combustion on
the forest floor. Always makes a story more interesting. Absolutely, meteors,
that's another. That's another one that helps make things interesting.
Meteor showers are actually pretty common in the Upper Great
Lakes region in the fall, So it's possible that chunks
of a meteor could have landed in the Wisconsin woods
(15:14):
and set all that tinder on fire. Yeah, and then
strong winds that night would have added to the situation,
fanning fires, causing them to combine and spread. So wind
is a major character and all of these fires that
we're talking about, and chances are even if it wasn't meteors,
even if it wasn't spontaneous combustion, just all these little
fires that had been set throughout the area, once the
(15:37):
wind came through, it kind of combined and helped them
spread all over the place. But regardless of what caused
the fire, around nine that night, there was an eerie
roaring sound and then the fire just seemed to kind
of fall out of the sky. Yeah, And and the
wind really fed the flames, kept on feeding them, so
it seemed like the air itself was on fire. People
tried to outrun it, but they couldn't and somewhere burned
(15:59):
in the streets. And the really strange thing here is
it would seem like they were far away from anything
that was combustible. They weren't standing near the burning building
or the burning tree or something like that. They just
would suddenly ignite. Yeah, I mean, it's like the witnesses said,
the fire was almost in the air, and that's what's
so scary about this one. Some sought refuge lying flattened
(16:20):
clearings or in the water of rivers or in Green Bay,
so they would actually get in the river and kind
of hold their breath and only come up for air
to try to avoid catching on fire. Other people hid
in cellars, which wasn't a good idea because they suffocated.
Some people hid in wells and in ponds as well.
So the flames just kept on spreading. They traveled over marshland,
and you might think that that would put it out
(16:42):
because there's lots of water in marshy areas, but instead
it would just ignite rising gases, and from there the
flames were able to cross the Peshtigo River and jump
the waters of Green Bay and Lake Michigan. So from
there the fire spread into other Wisconsin communities, including the
Door and Key Auntie Counties. It also spread into Michigan.
(17:03):
It destroyed at least seventeen communities total, and Pestigo itself
was obliterated in just an hour. And we saw that
in I think the Triangle Factory fire to how quickly
things seemed to happen. Yeah, so the fire just kept
on basically until it had nothing left to burn. I
think again, the winds have so much power. The winds
changed and kind of turned the fire back on itself.
(17:24):
But by that time it had already killed somewhere between
one thousand, two hundred and two thousand, five hundred people
eight hundred and Pestigo alone and destroyed about one point
three million acres of forest land. So that's an area
about twice the size of Rhode Islands. And by contrast,
three people were killed in the Chicago fire, so way
those numbers together. But by the time the word of
(17:46):
all of this reached Madison, it took two days to
do so. The governor and the state representatives had all
gone to help out with the Chicago crisis, because of
course that news had broken long before and everybody knew
about it. And sequently, the Peshtigo fire didn't really get
as much notoriety as Chicago, but it did lead to
some new forest management programs and lumber harvesting techniques, again
(18:10):
a few sort of social reforms or fire safety reforms
coming out of a big disaster. The last fire on
our list is one that listeners will probably be most
familiar with, at least from a visual standpoint, because it's
the most recent one, and that's the Great San Francisco
earthquake and fire. And to talk about this one, we've
of course got to talk about the earthquake a little bit,
I think definitely. So at five twelve am on April eighteenth,
(18:34):
nineteen o six, a four shock shook the people of
San Francisco awake in their beds, and about twenty seconds
later the shaking started again, except it was a lot
harder this time, and it drove people out into the
streets if they could get out of their houses. It
lasted for nearly a minute, which seems like such a
long time to be just waiting for your house to
(18:56):
fall down or not around you. The famous tenor and
Enrico Caruso for exam but was in town. He had
just performed a big show the night before, and he
described it like being on a boat at sea. If
you can imagine how shaky that is. I'm sure some
of you have probably been an earthquake, so you can't
imagine it. But while the seven point nine magnitude earthquake
(19:16):
could be felt as far away as central Nevada and
southern Los Angeles, it was San Francisco that really got
hit the hardest. Yeah, buildings collapsed. Weak masonry on the
sides of homes kind of flopped off in sheets into
the street, exposing dollhouse like apartments. Chimneys fell in on
otherwise dirty wooden houses. Structures and formally marshy areas were
(19:40):
just swallowed up in sinkholes. Yeah, there's a famous four
story hotel that was swallowed up to the fourth floor
and it just looks collapsed like a slinky sitting next
to other buildings that are still their full height. Um
and probably most importantly for our story, gas lines broke.
But within half an hour the city's fire department had
been They had responded to fifty two fire alarms, and
(20:03):
they seemed to be keeping pace. They seemed to be
putting out these little fires, keeping things under control. But
the fires just grew and they merged, and they spread
by dry wind from two main origin points, and one
was the south of Market neighborhood and the other was
north of Market Street near the waterfront. But because the
water mains had been broken during the earthquake, the department
(20:26):
didn't have that much to work with. They could put
out these tiny fires, but when they were faced with
these these growing walls of flame, there wasn't much they
could do about it. Yeah, I think they only had
eight fifty thousand gallons of water to use. So the
alternate options they had were what they had to turn to,
but those weren't really great. One of the alternate options
(20:47):
was that they could tap old cisterns, and now those
didn't have much water, so that was why that wasn't
a great option. And the second option that they had
was to have navy ships pump water in from the bay,
and that was kind of slow. So yeah, both these
were oh, and they didn't really get them that much
water either. So to make matters worse, Fire Chief Dennis
Sullivan had been mortally wounded during the earthquake. He had
(21:09):
had a master plan for a fire in San Francisco,
and his replacement didn't. Yeah, so they didn't have some
sort of operating idea of what to do, and things
got more and more desperate, and the department's next move,
after tapping the cisterns and pumping in the water, was
to use dynamite to create fire breaks. And we've learned
the danger of fire breaks already in this episode, but
(21:33):
this is kind of an even worse situation. The Army
base sent the wrong kind of explosive, flammable black gunpowder,
and the explosives really just made things worse. So exploding
buildings would shoot off debris everywhere, which would ignite at
ruptured gas lines, and then the other thing that would
happen is sturdy walls that really might have helped actually
(21:55):
service fire breaks were destroyed and brought to brought to
the ground in rubble. So later that day other blazes
joined the wall of the main fire. They were judged
at one point to be nearly twenty floors high and
two thousand degrees. One started in Hayes Valley from a
damaged chimney, and another one started at the restaurant Delmonicoes
(22:17):
from a soldiers camp fire, and at that point the
mayor ordered martial law. Yeah, and you can you can
look at the order the proclamation, and it came out
not long after after the earthquakes. Of course, people are
still totally in a state of shock, and there's some
practical advice like don't use your damage chimney, but way
at the top it says will shoot to kill all looters,
(22:40):
and I think people were a little disturbed by that,
and it was something that got a lot of criticism
after the fact. But by Friday night, the fires finally
started to die down and it was over by Saturday.
But by that point four point seven square miles of
San Francisco had been burned, five hundred eight city blocks,
(23:00):
and with so much destruction, you would think that maybe
the large death toll three thousand to five thousand people
were the result of the fire as well as the earthquake.
But most of the deaths did occur during the earthquake
because there's not much you can do when when something
strikes and you're at home in bed, Whereas the fire
people could see it coming and they had time to
(23:22):
grab what they could and and get out, whether by
ferry or or just going to other parts of the city. Yeah,
some people had to relocate a multiple times. Chinese refugees,
for example, who stayed in the city were forced to
relocate over and over. Yeah, so they faced some persecution there,
although not the ones who had fled to Oakland. Interestingly,
but um, just if there's so much out there on
(23:45):
this fire, if you want to learn a little bit
more about it, or look at pictures. You mentioned when
we first started talking about it that it's a very
visual earthquake and fire. There's a great Smithsonian story with
color photos. Actually it was a year before color photography
was commercially available. It's kind of strange to look at
a color pictures from nineteen o six. There's another interesting
(24:07):
Smithsonian story about the men who stayed behind to defend
the San Francisco meant and protect three hundred million dollars
that was kept inside it, which is the equivalent of
six billion dollars today and had would have had a
pretty tremendous effect on the economy potentially if that had
all been lost. But they stayed right in the path
of the fire and used well water i think, to
(24:29):
defend the building and it was stood the fire and
became sort of a a memorial to the fire for
the city of San Francisco because it was one of
the few buildings that had survived. And today it's even
in the process of becoming the Museum of the City
of San Francisco. So you can potentially go visit this
hallowed site of the fire at some point, and you
(24:51):
can check out their website now too. That's where I
found the Crusoe quote. They have all sorts of survivors accounts. So,
like we said earlier in the podcast, it's definitely something
sad to reflect on, but there are a lot of
lessons to be learned, I think, especially if you're someone
living in these areas that we've talked about well. And
(25:12):
and you know, we live in Atlanta too, so we're
a city where our official symbol is the phoenix. We've
been burned down twice. Yeah, so I guess it would
be appropriate for us to cover that time sometime too, maybe.
But first we're going to move on to some slightly
happier beat. Miss listener mail. So this email is from Michael,
(25:35):
and I've got to read the subject line. Your podcast
got me a date that definitely hot our attention, but
he wrote in to say, I thought I would share
a little story with you. I was traveling with a
group of friends when someone decided to play twenty questions
to pass the time. Instead of playing the normal, boring
all game, we decided to play using historical figures. I
couldn't believe how helpful your podcast came. I knew literally
(25:59):
every single person them that came up, Mata Harri, Lizzie Borden,
the Lindbergh Baby, Harry Uddini two comes basically anyone you
had covered recently in the podcast. As someone who had
never really taken an interest in history before, I was
amazed to see how much I learned in only a
few short months. As silly as it might seem, a
topic of history started a conversation with one of the
(26:20):
girls we were traveling with, and we found we shared
a lot of the same interests. We're now planning a
trip to see some of the amazing historical artifacts at
the Royal Ontario Museum. Thank you so much for bringing
history alive. So thank you for writing in, Michael, Congratulations.
We're glad we helped out a little bit. Yeah, hopefully
(26:40):
we can help others in that department too. I've never
thought of that as a goal of the podcast. The
good thing to bond over though, like shared love of history. Yeah,
mutual interests. That's always something that brings people together. So
if you have any more cool stories like that about
friends you've made, people you've met through history, specifically our podcast,
we would love to hear them. You can write us
(27:02):
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com or
hit a step on Facebook or on Twitter at Nston History.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
about how to stop a fire once one gets going,
we have an article can you really Fight fire with Fire?
And it's by Robert Lam. You can find it on
our homepage by searching for fight fire with Fire at
(27:24):
www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'm to blame a chok reboarding and I'm fair outing.
And we recently covered the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, which
at the time was one of the deadliest workplace disasters
(00:23):
New York and perhaps the entire country had ever seen.
It was a tough one. It was tough to research
and tough to talk about. It was tough to research
because it was such a sad topic, but it is
easy to see why listeners requested so much, because it
was fascinating to learn about. We were really fascinated by
all the little vignettes from survivors, rescuers, witnesses. Some of
(00:46):
the points that really struck us the most were how
quickly the fire started and spread, how split second decisions
people made seemed to make a difference, and how it
really influenced the lives of the people who were involved
and legislation for years to come. So because of that episode,
we decided we wanted to take a look at some
other famous fires and just look at some of the
(01:06):
parallels between them, look at some of those little split
second decisions and how that might be the same in
one fire that takes place in the sixteen hundreds, and
then one take one that takes place in the eight hundreds,
and then just see how they're different too, exactly. And
we're also going to take a look at the pre
fire environment some parallels there. I mean, we saw in
a Triangle factory how it was really set up for
(01:29):
a disaster in a lot of ways, with the cotton
scraps lying around, and the really crowded environment and people
just generally ignoring signs of danger that we're there to
begin with. So the first fire on our list that
we're gonna take a look at is the Great Fire
of London, a very famous one, and like the Triangle
Factory fire, the situation here was really just right for disaster.
(01:50):
Fires weren't unusual in London in the first place in
the sixteen hundreds, since timber construction and narrow streets were
really the norm at the time. So by September of
sixty sixty six, a long, hot summer had made matters
even worse. It was dried out both the city and
its water reserves, and according to the BBC, some people
had actually seen this coming. Some people had warned of
(02:12):
the possibility of a major fire in London even before
it got to this point, but most citizens at the
time had something else on their minds right Sarah plague. Yes,
plague at that time had killed about sixty eight thousand
people in the years leading up to sixteen sixty six,
so they were worried about it. Understandable that that would
be your top concern at the time. So when the
Great Fire did start on September two, sixteen sixty six,
(02:36):
started in Putting Lane near London Bridge, and it was
in the home of the King's baker, Thomas Farrenore and
a workman had smelled smoke around two in the morning
and told the baker's family, and they had all managed
to escape by fleeing over the roofs, and their maid
was too scared to leave, and so she became the
first casualty and this fire, even though you're gonna probably
(02:57):
be surprised to learn that very few people die in
this fire, considering how disastrous it was, she was too
scared to get out of the house. Though. Yes, the
house was quickly engulfed in flames, and from there the
fire spread through the narrow streets of London. But the mayor,
Sir Thomas Bloodworth, for some reason, really wasn't a concerned
at first. He was woken up about an hour after
(03:18):
it started, and after being awoken he said a woman
might piss it out of the fire. That was the
colorful statement he makes. So it kept spreading from there
and London Bridge was burning by dawn. So just to
give you a little understanding of how they fought fires
in this time, or one of the ways they fought fires,
they would build fire breaks or create firebreaks by destroying
(03:41):
buildings in a fire's path so that it didn't have
anything to spread to. It would just be brought to
a sudden halt. And the strategy had been used in
a fire in sixteen thirty two on London Bridge and
it created this open space that ended up saving the
bridge in sixteen sixty six, so that the fire was
confined to one part of the city. It couldn't jump
(04:02):
the river, but it continued to just get worse and
worth on the westward side of the city and it
was fanned by the wind, and the mayor kept on
hesitating though about the fire break. So even though they
were tested, it seemed to work. He wasn't willing to
order a bunch of buildings blown up. Yeah. I think
what that came down to is just the cost of it.
(04:22):
It was going to cost so much to rebuild those buildings,
and that's why he was so hesitant about it. But
King Charles the second fields a little differently. He did
want those fire breaks, but by the time that he
ordered the mayor to destroy as many buildings as possible
to make that happen, the fire was already too out
of control for that strategy to really work. They would
destroy houses too late, or the wind would just help
(04:43):
the fire jump over the gaps that they made. And
if you destroy the houses too late, you're just creating
tinder essentially. Yeah, because it was all right if they
didn't have time to clear it out before the fire
got to it, they were actually kind of helping it along.
So the fire raged on for three days. By Wednesday
it finally started to die down own, and then by
Thursday it was extinguished. Flames did spring up again briefly
(05:04):
at Temple Church, but the Duke of York made kind
of a quick, split second decision there to blow up
several buildings at once with gunpowder and create a firebreak
right away, so they were able to squelch that, so
the fire was out by that point. But the damage
to London was really significant. A large part of the
city had been destroyed, including a lot of the civic
buildings old St Paul's Cathedral. I think we mentioned that
(05:26):
in an earlier episode on St Paul's that one of
many times it burned down. Eight seven parish churches had
burned in about thirteen thousand, two hundred houses and according
to the BBC, though only four official deaths were reported,
but some people think that the actual death toll might
have been a lot higher than that. But regardless of
(05:46):
the number of people that died, it affected thousands of citizens,
somewhere around one sixth of London's population, and they had
to flee to places like Hampstead and Highgate and more Fields,
which was that last one was the chief refuge. I
think within days they started putting together plans to rebuild
the city, and Christopher Wren of all people, got involved
(06:07):
with this rebuilding plan and presented plans to sort of
remake the city, regularized the streets and um even though
they stuck to old lines in most cases, they didn't
just change the map of the city entirely. They broadened
a lot of the streets and built houses out of
brick instead of these sort of rough and tumble wooden
(06:29):
houses that caught fire so easily. Yeah, but it didn't
stop there. Like the Triangle shirtwaist factory incident, everyone was
looking for someone to blame after this. It wasn't just
a simple rebuilding. They wanted somebody to take the blame.
So a parliamentary committee investigated the incident, but they couldn't
find that it was anything other than a quote act
of God. Even though a French watchmaker confessed to the
(06:53):
crime and was executed for it, nobody really believed he
did it, so people were still kind of always coming
up with theories of what could have happened, especially since
this was a time of political and religious upheaval. People
pointed a finger at foreigners a lot and to Catholics
for years. In fact, a monument that commemorated the fire
born inscription blaming quote to the treachery and the malice
(07:15):
of the Popish faction until eighteen thirty one, when we
can presume somebody sort of chiseled it off discreetly or something.
But um, it seems a little strange that there would
even be a blame game if the fire starts in
a bakery. I mean, it seems like a place where
a fire accident could easily happen. Yeah, I agree, and
(07:36):
I think most people accept that it was probably just
the result of carelessness on the part of the baker
or has made someone in the household, and we can
rely on that at this point. All right, So our
next fire might also be the result of carelessness, but
no one's entirely sure. It is a fire that happened
in Japan in sixteen fifty seven, the may Reiki Fire
(07:58):
or the Great Fire of mary Ki in Japan's of
course been in the news a lot lately, and a
lot of people have probably heard of the Great Canto
earthquake of nineteen twenty three, And it was a noon earthquake,
which meant lots of cooking fires were going and so
a big fire started across Tokyo and killed and estimated
one thousand people. But before Tokyo was even Tokyo, back
(08:20):
when it was still a Doh, this fire took place,
and it was the center of power for the Tokugawa
Shogunate and the fire was just as deadly. Way back
in sixteen fifty seven, a hundred thousand people were killed yea.
And considering how many people were killed in that fire,
it might be especially surprising to learn that Edo had
actually been a little fishing village just a few generations earlier.
(08:43):
In the late sixteenth century, the showgun Tokugawa Ayasu had
moved to Pan's capital to Edo and started a series
of developments there, and over the years the city just
got bigger and bigger. Mountains were cut down to fill
in the bay. Edo Castle was rebuilt, and by sixteen
thirty seven the city was operating under something called alternate attendance. Yeah,
(09:04):
the alternative attendant system. And if you're trying to to
think of what this is, it's kind of like a protoversih.
Almost all the daimio or lords had to live in
the capital part time, and when they weren't there, when
they were back on their own estates, they had to
leave some of their family behind as collateral, sort of like,
don't get up to any trouble off in your own estates,
(09:25):
because we have all you care about here. So there
was this versioning elite living in Edo and and buying
lots of things and in need of lots of services.
So that meant a lot of regular folks were moving
to town to provide those services, merchants and entertainers and
the like. So because of all the crowding, the narrow
streets and alleys set up in this Kyoto grid style,
(09:49):
and of course built and lined with houses made of
wood and paper, we're sort of at risk for fires.
And fires consequently did happen a lot, similar to the
situation shan in London that we just discussed, But in
Japan they even called these little fires the flowers of edge.
Oh yeah, just blooming across the city from time to time.
But the fire that hit in sixteen fifty seven was
(10:12):
the worst, and it started in a temple. Legend has
monks burning an unlucky long sleeve kimono. Um, you'll see
different accounts. Sometimes the kimono belonged to several young girls
who died before they could wear it. Sometimes there were
a couple kimonos, each having belonged to a girl who died.
But anyway, this gives us the fire's other name, which
(10:33):
was the flurisode fire or long sleeves fire. You might
hear it referred to that way, so strong winds from
there carried the fire across moats and canals, and then
the wind shifted and the fire burned the shops along
the Sumida River. Supposedly an unattended cooking fire in a
Samurai household helped feed it further too, so it just
kind of grew. Sixty of the city was destroyed, and
(10:56):
most of Edo Castle was destroyed. Yeah, and again, like
lone in, the whole thing made the feudal government really
reconsider how they were going to rebuild and whether there
were improvements that could be made before you set up
a similar situation again. And especially because by sixteen ninety three,
so just a few decades after this fire, the population
(11:17):
was larger than that of London or Paris, so you
had a lot of buildings to consider. This time they
mapped out the city and spread the buildings out more.
There were, still, of course, later fires. They didn't totally
eliminate that threat, but according to a book called an
Introduction to Japanese Architecture, this was a fairly successful attempt,
(11:38):
early attempt at city planning in a real turning point
for the city. Yeah, and even laws that were made
afterwards suggest fire consciousness. While commoners weren't allowed the extravagance
of building a third floor in their homes, they were
encouraged to use super expensive tile roofs and kura or
fireproof storehouses. So both of those things kind of became
(11:59):
status symbols. Yeah, so you have sump Stuary code sort
of just avoiding one avenue if it, if it helps
make the city more fire safe, go for it, even
if even if you look impressive doing it. It became
cool to be safe. So the first two fires we
talked about are pretty well known, but the third fire
(12:20):
on our list is one that got overshadowed a bit
by another fire that occurred at the same time. And
we're talking about the Pestigo Fire, which occurred in eighteen
seventy one, sometimes called the Great Peshtigo Fire. Took place
obviously in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and it has the distinction of
being the deadliest fire in US history. But the reason
it's not as well known as some other incidents is
(12:40):
because it occurred on the same night as the Great
Chicago Fire October eight, eight seventy one. Some people think
maybe even the same hour, right, Yeah, same hour but
a bit of a more mythical beginning, I guess, which
is one reason that it might have overshadowed Pestico a
little bit. We actually have a podcast on the legendary
origins of the Great Chicago Fire, and a lot of
(13:02):
people think it was started by miss O'Leary's cow. So
if you want to learn a little bit more about
that and how true it is, you can go back
and listen to that podcast. Part of the reason why
it was overshadowed, though, is because Chicago is a bigger
city and news was going to get out faster about
a huge fire in Chicago that leaves a lot of
people dead. Yeah, Pechico was a railroad and lumbering town,
(13:24):
probably not as exciting as a big urban area like Chicago.
There were about eight hundred men who were employed by
a local would wear wooden't wear factory sorry, and to sawmills,
and the town had about one thousand, seven hundred residents total.
Once again, the conditions here were just right for a
big fire. After harvesting trees, lumberjacks would leave piles of sawdust,
(13:45):
brush and limbs known as slash, all over the forest floor.
To add to this, men who cleared the land for
railroads and farmers who needed to clear the land to
plant in would torch trees, stumps, buildings, basically anything in
their path. So small fire. As we're burning around this
area all the time, and no one really thought anything
of it. We're cool with it pretty much. But to
make matters worse, there hadn't been that much rain during
(14:09):
the summer in the early fall, so the area was
especially dry, and by the first week of October, even
the air in Peshtigo along the north shore of Green
Bay was so thick with smoke from all of these
little fires from the farmers and the lumberjacks and all
of that that ships on Lake Michigan had to navigate
by compass and harbor masters you fog horns to guide
(14:30):
them ashore, so it couldn't even see where you were going. Yeah,
the environment, I guess just really set the stage for
something eerie to happen. But no one knows exactly what
started the big fire October eighth. A recent article in
History magazine, I think in the March issue, actually discussed
a couple of possibilities about that very thing. Lightning was
apparently ruled out, but because of the conditions. Some people
(14:51):
speculate there may have been instances of spontaneous combustion on
the forest floor. Always makes a story more interesting. Absolutely, meteors,
that's another. That's another one that helps make things interesting.
Meteor showers are actually pretty common in the Upper Great
Lakes region in the fall, So it's possible that chunks
of a meteor could have landed in the Wisconsin woods
(15:14):
and set all that tinder on fire. Yeah, and then
strong winds that night would have added to the situation,
fanning fires, causing them to combine and spread. So wind
is a major character and all of these fires that
we're talking about, and chances are even if it wasn't meteors,
even if it wasn't spontaneous combustion, just all these little
fires that had been set throughout the area, once the
(15:37):
wind came through, it kind of combined and helped them
spread all over the place. But regardless of what caused
the fire, around nine that night, there was an eerie
roaring sound and then the fire just seemed to kind
of fall out of the sky. Yeah, And and the
wind really fed the flames, kept on feeding them, so
it seemed like the air itself was on fire. People
tried to outrun it, but they couldn't and somewhere burned
(15:59):
in the streets. And the really strange thing here is
it would seem like they were far away from anything
that was combustible. They weren't standing near the burning building
or the burning tree or something like that. They just
would suddenly ignite. Yeah, I mean, it's like the witnesses said,
the fire was almost in the air, and that's what's
so scary about this one. Some sought refuge lying flattened
(16:20):
clearings or in the water of rivers or in Green Bay,
so they would actually get in the river and kind
of hold their breath and only come up for air
to try to avoid catching on fire. Other people hid
in cellars, which wasn't a good idea because they suffocated.
Some people hid in wells and in ponds as well.
So the flames just kept on spreading. They traveled over marshland,
and you might think that that would put it out
(16:42):
because there's lots of water in marshy areas, but instead
it would just ignite rising gases, and from there the
flames were able to cross the Peshtigo River and jump
the waters of Green Bay and Lake Michigan. So from
there the fire spread into other Wisconsin communities, including the
Door and Key Auntie Counties. It also spread into Michigan.
(17:03):
It destroyed at least seventeen communities total, and Pestigo itself
was obliterated in just an hour. And we saw that
in I think the Triangle Factory fire to how quickly
things seemed to happen. Yeah, so the fire just kept
on basically until it had nothing left to burn. I
think again, the winds have so much power. The winds
changed and kind of turned the fire back on itself.
(17:24):
But by that time it had already killed somewhere between
one thousand, two hundred and two thousand, five hundred people
eight hundred and Pestigo alone and destroyed about one point
three million acres of forest land. So that's an area
about twice the size of Rhode Islands. And by contrast,
three people were killed in the Chicago fire, so way
those numbers together. But by the time the word of
(17:46):
all of this reached Madison, it took two days to
do so. The governor and the state representatives had all
gone to help out with the Chicago crisis, because of
course that news had broken long before and everybody knew
about it. And sequently, the Peshtigo fire didn't really get
as much notoriety as Chicago, but it did lead to
some new forest management programs and lumber harvesting techniques, again
(18:10):
a few sort of social reforms or fire safety reforms
coming out of a big disaster. The last fire on
our list is one that listeners will probably be most
familiar with, at least from a visual standpoint, because it's
the most recent one, and that's the Great San Francisco
earthquake and fire. And to talk about this one, we've
of course got to talk about the earthquake a little bit,
I think definitely. So at five twelve am on April eighteenth,
(18:34):
nineteen o six, a four shock shook the people of
San Francisco awake in their beds, and about twenty seconds
later the shaking started again, except it was a lot
harder this time, and it drove people out into the
streets if they could get out of their houses. It
lasted for nearly a minute, which seems like such a
long time to be just waiting for your house to
(18:56):
fall down or not around you. The famous tenor and
Enrico Caruso for exam but was in town. He had
just performed a big show the night before, and he
described it like being on a boat at sea. If
you can imagine how shaky that is. I'm sure some
of you have probably been an earthquake, so you can't
imagine it. But while the seven point nine magnitude earthquake
(19:16):
could be felt as far away as central Nevada and
southern Los Angeles, it was San Francisco that really got
hit the hardest. Yeah, buildings collapsed. Weak masonry on the
sides of homes kind of flopped off in sheets into
the street, exposing dollhouse like apartments. Chimneys fell in on
otherwise dirty wooden houses. Structures and formally marshy areas were
(19:40):
just swallowed up in sinkholes. Yeah, there's a famous four
story hotel that was swallowed up to the fourth floor
and it just looks collapsed like a slinky sitting next
to other buildings that are still their full height. Um
and probably most importantly for our story, gas lines broke.
But within half an hour the city's fire department had
been They had responded to fifty two fire alarms, and
(20:03):
they seemed to be keeping pace. They seemed to be
putting out these little fires, keeping things under control. But
the fires just grew and they merged, and they spread
by dry wind from two main origin points, and one
was the south of Market neighborhood and the other was
north of Market Street near the waterfront. But because the
water mains had been broken during the earthquake, the department
(20:26):
didn't have that much to work with. They could put
out these tiny fires, but when they were faced with
these these growing walls of flame, there wasn't much they
could do about it. Yeah, I think they only had
eight fifty thousand gallons of water to use. So the
alternate options they had were what they had to turn to,
but those weren't really great. One of the alternate options
(20:47):
was that they could tap old cisterns, and now those
didn't have much water, so that was why that wasn't
a great option. And the second option that they had
was to have navy ships pump water in from the bay,
and that was kind of slow. So yeah, both these
were oh, and they didn't really get them that much
water either. So to make matters worse, Fire Chief Dennis
Sullivan had been mortally wounded during the earthquake. He had
(21:09):
had a master plan for a fire in San Francisco,
and his replacement didn't. Yeah, so they didn't have some
sort of operating idea of what to do, and things
got more and more desperate, and the department's next move,
after tapping the cisterns and pumping in the water, was
to use dynamite to create fire breaks. And we've learned
the danger of fire breaks already in this episode, but
(21:33):
this is kind of an even worse situation. The Army
base sent the wrong kind of explosive, flammable black gunpowder,
and the explosives really just made things worse. So exploding
buildings would shoot off debris everywhere, which would ignite at
ruptured gas lines, and then the other thing that would
happen is sturdy walls that really might have helped actually
(21:55):
service fire breaks were destroyed and brought to brought to
the ground in rubble. So later that day other blazes
joined the wall of the main fire. They were judged
at one point to be nearly twenty floors high and
two thousand degrees. One started in Hayes Valley from a
damaged chimney, and another one started at the restaurant Delmonicoes
(22:17):
from a soldiers camp fire, and at that point the
mayor ordered martial law. Yeah, and you can you can
look at the order the proclamation, and it came out
not long after after the earthquakes. Of course, people are
still totally in a state of shock, and there's some
practical advice like don't use your damage chimney, but way
at the top it says will shoot to kill all looters,
(22:40):
and I think people were a little disturbed by that,
and it was something that got a lot of criticism
after the fact. But by Friday night, the fires finally
started to die down and it was over by Saturday.
But by that point four point seven square miles of
San Francisco had been burned, five hundred eight city blocks,
(23:00):
and with so much destruction, you would think that maybe
the large death toll three thousand to five thousand people
were the result of the fire as well as the earthquake.
But most of the deaths did occur during the earthquake
because there's not much you can do when when something
strikes and you're at home in bed, Whereas the fire
people could see it coming and they had time to
(23:22):
grab what they could and and get out, whether by
ferry or or just going to other parts of the city. Yeah,
some people had to relocate a multiple times. Chinese refugees,
for example, who stayed in the city were forced to
relocate over and over. Yeah, so they faced some persecution there,
although not the ones who had fled to Oakland. Interestingly,
but um, just if there's so much out there on
(23:45):
this fire, if you want to learn a little bit
more about it, or look at pictures. You mentioned when
we first started talking about it that it's a very
visual earthquake and fire. There's a great Smithsonian story with
color photos. Actually it was a year before color photography
was commercially available. It's kind of strange to look at
a color pictures from nineteen o six. There's another interesting
(24:07):
Smithsonian story about the men who stayed behind to defend
the San Francisco meant and protect three hundred million dollars
that was kept inside it, which is the equivalent of
six billion dollars today and had would have had a
pretty tremendous effect on the economy potentially if that had
all been lost. But they stayed right in the path
of the fire and used well water i think, to
(24:29):
defend the building and it was stood the fire and
became sort of a a memorial to the fire for
the city of San Francisco because it was one of
the few buildings that had survived. And today it's even
in the process of becoming the Museum of the City
of San Francisco. So you can potentially go visit this
hallowed site of the fire at some point, and you
(24:51):
can check out their website now too. That's where I
found the Crusoe quote. They have all sorts of survivors accounts. So,
like we said earlier in the podcast, it's definitely something
sad to reflect on, but there are a lot of
lessons to be learned, I think, especially if you're someone
living in these areas that we've talked about well. And
(25:12):
and you know, we live in Atlanta too, so we're
a city where our official symbol is the phoenix. We've
been burned down twice. Yeah, so I guess it would
be appropriate for us to cover that time sometime too, maybe.
But first we're going to move on to some slightly
happier beat. Miss listener mail. So this email is from Michael,
(25:35):
and I've got to read the subject line. Your podcast
got me a date that definitely hot our attention, but
he wrote in to say, I thought I would share
a little story with you. I was traveling with a
group of friends when someone decided to play twenty questions
to pass the time. Instead of playing the normal, boring
all game, we decided to play using historical figures. I
couldn't believe how helpful your podcast came. I knew literally
(25:59):
every single person them that came up, Mata Harri, Lizzie Borden,
the Lindbergh Baby, Harry Uddini two comes basically anyone you
had covered recently in the podcast. As someone who had
never really taken an interest in history before, I was
amazed to see how much I learned in only a
few short months. As silly as it might seem, a
topic of history started a conversation with one of the
(26:20):
girls we were traveling with, and we found we shared
a lot of the same interests. We're now planning a
trip to see some of the amazing historical artifacts at
the Royal Ontario Museum. Thank you so much for bringing
history alive. So thank you for writing in, Michael, Congratulations.
We're glad we helped out a little bit. Yeah, hopefully
(26:40):
we can help others in that department too. I've never
thought of that as a goal of the podcast. The
good thing to bond over though, like shared love of history. Yeah,
mutual interests. That's always something that brings people together. So
if you have any more cool stories like that about
friends you've made, people you've met through history, specifically our podcast,
we would love to hear them. You can write us
(27:02):
at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com or
hit a step on Facebook or on Twitter at Nston History.
And if you want to learn a little bit more
about how to stop a fire once one gets going,
we have an article can you really Fight fire with Fire?
And it's by Robert Lam. You can find it on
our homepage by searching for fight fire with Fire at
(27:24):
www dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure to
check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
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