False Alarms

IN 1736, IN PHILADELPHIA , Benjamin Franklin founded the American colonies’ first volunteer fire company. Before then, in Philadelphia and most other cities, whoever happened to be nearby when a fire broke out would be drafted into a bucket brigade, sometimes under the direction of a local fire warden. These impromptu firefighters used whatever water was available to extinguish the flames. Residents were required to keep buckets and other firefighting equipment in their houses for use in an emergency.

Franklin’s system improved on this haphazard arrangement by establishing companies of 30 to 40 men who bought their own equipment and trained to work efficiently together. These companies relied on alert civilians or (especially at night) organized patrols to report fires. They were usually summoned with church bells.

By the early 1880s, most cities in the United States had volunteer fire companies. There was plenty of work for their members, because large numbers of men were needed to haul the hand-operated pumpers to the fire, operate them, and supply them with water. In mid-century steam-powered pumping engines drawn by two or three horses began to replace hand pumpers. These required fewer but better-trained men to operate them. As a result, bigger cities began switching to professional fire departments, beginning in 1853 in Cincinnati, where Moses and Alexander B. Latta had recently built the first practical steam fire engine.

One vital element of firefighting was still in its formative years, however: a way to report the location of a fire promptly and precisely. Early detection is a firefighter’s best weapon, and even a few minutes can be critical in keeping a fire from spreading. Around 1750, some communities started building tall towers from which sharp-eyed watchmen could survey a large area for smoke and flames. Even so, by the time the watchmen saw the smoke and sounded the alarm, it was often too late to prevent extensive damage.

With the development of the telegraph, it became possible to transmit alarms instantly from the immediate vicinity of a fire. Firealarm boxes were placed at various points around a city, each with a hand-turned crank (and later a spring-driven motor) that sent an electrical signal to a central station when the alarm was activated. Each box had its own characteristic signal consisting of a sequence of bells, a system that in some places continues, with modifications, to this day.

The signal was encoded in a toothed wheel inside the mechanism, with the number and spacing of the teeth creating the pattern that told the dispatcher which box had been pulled. At first dispatchers kept a set of cards, filed by signal code, that listed the address of every alarm box in the city. In later years a chief dispatcher memorized the location and nearest cross streets for each box; still later, computers took over the task.

America’s first street-alarm system was developed by a pair of electrical inventors, Moses G. Farmer (who had previously built the first electric toy railroad) and William F. Charming (son of the clergyman William Ellery Channing, a cofounder of Unitarianism). It was introduced in Boston in 1852. Word of it quickly spread, and through the rest of the nineteenth century, cities across America installed their own networks of fire-alarm boxes.

Almost immediately, however, a serious problem arose: A significant proportion of the alarms came from individuals who liked watching fire engines race to nonexistent fires. Besides making life difficult for the firefighters, this practice made equipment unavailable for a real fire. Also, every time a fire engine rushed through a crowded street, there was the possibility of an accident causing serious injuries or deaths.

IN AN 1852 DESCRIPTION OF HIS and Farmer’s system, Channing foresaw the possibility of false alarms and explained how Boston’s setup was designed to prevent them:“Each Signal Station is in charge of a person or family in the immediate neighborhood, whose duty it is to open the Box [with a key] in case of an alarm and turn the Crank. The act is so simple that it might be performed by a child. Certain members of the Fire, Watch and Police Departments, are also provided with keys to the Signal Boxes. The object to be secured in this arrangement, is abundant access to the Signal Apparatus in case of a fire, and yet a sufficient guarantee against its abuse.”

To make sure no one could use the apparatus without a key, “The box and door consist each of a heavy casting. The hinges and lock are of the most substantial kind.” The outside of the box carried “a notice of the place where the key is to be found.” It wasn’t long before the inadequacies of this system became manifest. Someone wishing to report a fire had to scurry around to find a policeman or else (assuming he knew how to read) locate the house and ring the doorbell of a stranger who might not be home. In the meantime, a building could burn to the ground.

For street alarms to be effective, citizens had to be able to report fires without delay. Yet with no way to verify the accuracy of such a report short of sending an engine, the problem of false alarms persisted. In response, America’s inventors came up with many ingenious, if impractical, ways to prevent the perpetrator of a false alarm from escaping punishment.

Entrapment. The first invention meant to counter false alarms was patented by John F. Kirby on March 24, 1874. Kirby’s idea was to attach a closet to the fire-alarm signal box. The operator would open the unlocked door of the closet, go inside, and push a long bolt. Pushing the bolt sent a fire-alarm signal and simultaneously locked the user in. The closet door would open after a predetermined time. A similar system, the Fire Alarm Hut, was patented on December 11, 1874, by Henri Trudel. In this device the operator stayed locked in a sort of shed until the firemen arrived with a key.

Besides being complicated to use and imprisoning citizens for acting in the public interest, these two inventions had the disadvantage of taking up a great deal of space on the sidewalk. To get around this problem, Edward Jungerman on June 16, 1885, patented a folded screen attached to a building next to the fire-alarm box. The key to the box was embedded in one edge of the screen and could not be removed. The operator had to wrap the screen around himself in order to insert the key in the box and send the alarm. The act of turning the key secured it in the lock in such a way that it could be released only from the outside. So the user was held inside, next to a building that might be on fire, until the firemen released him.

Handcuffs. The first fire-alarm handcuff patent was issued on October 31, 1899, to Thomas W. Yale. Pulling the alarm would cause a handcuff to fasten about the puller’s wrist. The handcuff could be removed from the box, so the user was free to walk away, but it remained on the user’s wrist until a fireman arrived and unlocked it.

A second handcuff patent was issued to John Hamer on November 4, 1902. This one actually grabbed hold of the user’s hand and required a fireman to release him. While perhaps less irksome than being locked in a tiny enclosure, this made a user look ridiculous and left him vulnerable to criminals, weather, and the mockery of small boys. Yet the idea did not go away, and decades later, on November 5, 1935, Robert B. Long patented yet another handcuff device. It, too, required a fireman to release the user’s hand.

Noise and bright lights. A different technique consisted of attracting the attention of people nearby when someone activated the alarm box. One example was patented on February 4, 1902, by Loudoun Campbell. It combined a compressed-air whistle with an explosive chemical charge that illuminated the area around the box when an alarm was sent. On May 15, 1906, the same Loudoun Campbell and his brother Frank G. Campbell patented a variation on this type of solution. In this version, a piece of glass had to be broken before the handle activating the alarm was pulled. A bell went off afterward. The sound of breaking glass would attract bystanders’ attention, while the bell would confirm that the alarm was being sent. This idea was adopted for fire-alarm boxes in schools.

Cameras. On December 20, 1932, Morris and Estelle Rothman patented the use of photographic apparatus in fire alarms. Sending an alarm also activated a camera, which took a picture of the user. This system was demonstrated in front of New York’s City Hall in 1930. Much later, in 1970, an improved version was tried out on the streets of New York. The cameras were immediately stolen.

Fingerprinting. Another idea was the use of a fingerprint pad inside the firealarm box. Before an alarm could be sent, the activator had to place his fingers into a slot where an inked pad took his fingerprints. This was tried in New York around 1980. The idea was that when firemen determined that they had responded to a false alarm, they would fingerprint any suspicious individuals they noticed hanging around the area and compare their prints with the ones recorded in the alarm box. The first week of use netted two nine-year-olds who had no families. Many other people objected, sometimes violently, to having their fingerprints taken, and the project was dropped.

Abandonment. Over the second half of the twentieth century, as the falsealarm problem persisted, other means of reporting fires, such as telephones and automatic on-premises alarms, increased in prominence. Some fire departments began to wonder if street alarm boxes caused more problems than they solved. In the 1970s, Boston, the pioneer in street fire alarms, began taking out boxes in areas where many false alarms were recorded. Other cities soon followed.

New York City began to introduce voice-operated fire and police alarm boxes in the 1970s. With these, citizens could describe a fire directly to a dispatcher, giving firefighters much more information than just the location of the alarm box. The question arose of whether the simple act of pulling the alarm, without sticking around to talk, was enough of a report to justify sending a fire engine. Some cities said no, requiring the user to make voice contact, but New York maintained a policy of responding to all alarms. Predictably, a large fraction of those made without voice contact turned out to be false.

Around this time the 911 system for telephones, in which a person could dial that number to report a fire or other emergency, came on the scene. Starting in the late 1980s, enhanced 911 service automatically gave the address of the user’s telephone. With these changes, many large cities abandoned their street alarm boxes and depended on home and public telephones. New York City tried to follow this trend and succeeded in closing some alarm boxes, but as usual there, a fierce political struggle followed. Would it be fair to take the boxes out in areas where some residents didn’t have telephones? Would alarm dispatchers simply lose their jobs? The resolution involved a number of compromises. Some boxes slated for removal were kept, and plans were made to replace others with solar-powered cellular phones. Street pay phones could also be used free (if they were not out of order) to dial 911.

Future possibilities. The most promising method under consideration for fighting false alarms today uses the old idea of photography but updates it with twenty-first-century technology. The idea is to use regular voice-alarm boxes with a modern video camera installed inside, of the type used to detect automobiles running red lights, store and bank robbers, street crime, and so on.

The camera would be turned on by the same button that activated the voice transmission. It would use a chargecoupled device of the type employed in small camcorders working with low levels of light. Using modern video compression, the image could be sent by telephone to the fire dispatcher. If the user wore a ski mask, the dispatcher would know it was a false alarm (except perhaps in very cold temperatures). If not, the fire dispatcher would transmit the video picture by radio to the fire engines on the way. A printer would give the firefighters an image of the person who sent in the alarm, and, in the case of a false alarm, the culprit could be apprehended.

While this suggestion would need a great deal of development and testing to determine its practicality—including a way to safeguard the security of the camera—it would fit in with the widespread modern use of video cameras to fight crime. Short of such a solution, fire departments will have to accept a certain percentage of false alarms, with all the annoyance and danger they create, as the price of their mission of protecting the public.