Fire hose

A fire hose (or firehose) is a high-pressure hose that carries water or other fire retardant (such as foam) to a fire to extinguish it. Outdoors, it attaches either to a fire engine or a fire hydrant. Indoors, it can permanently attach to a building's standpipe or plumbing system.

The usual working pressure of a firehose can vary between 8 and 20 bar (800 and 2,000 kPa; 116 and 290 psi) while its bursting pressure can be up to 83 bar (8,300 kPa; 1,204 psi).

After use, a fire hose is usually hung to dry, because standing water that remains in a hose for a long time can deteriorate the material and render it unreliable or unusable. Therefore, the typical fire station often has a high structure to accommodate the length of a hose for such preventative maintenance.

On occasion, fire hoses are used for crowd control (see also water cannon), including most notably by Bull Connor in Alabama against civil rights protestors in 1963.

Until the mid-19th century, most fires were fought by water transported to the scene in buckets. Original hand pumpers discharged their water through a small pipe or monitor attached to the top of the pump tub. It was not until the late 1860s that hoses became widely available to convey water more easily from the hand pumps, and later steam pumpers, to the fire.

In Amsterdam in the Dutch Republic, the Superintendent of the Fire Brigade, Jan van der Heyden, and his son Nicholaas took firefighting to its next step with the fashioning of the first fire hose in 1673. These 50-foot (15 m) lengths of leather were sewn together like a boot leg. Even with the limitations of pressure, the attachment of the hose to the gooseneck nozzle allowed closer approaches and more accurate water application. Van der Heyden was also credited with an early version of a suction hose using wire to keep it rigid. In the United States, the fire hose was introduced in Philadelphia in 1794. This canvas hose proved insufficiently durable, and sewn leather hose was then used. The sewn leather hose tended to burst, so a hose fabricated of leather fastened together with copper rivets and washers was invented by members of Philadelphia's Humane Hose Company.

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