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By Root 1995 0

The most famous urban fire in history is almost certainly the Great Fire of London of 1666, which began as a small fire in a bakery near London Bridge but quickly spread until it was half a mile across. As far away as Oxford, people could see the smoke and hear the fire as a small, eerie whisper. Altogether, it consumed 13,200 houses and 140 churches. But the fire of 1666 was actually the second Great Fire of London. A fire in 1212 was far more devastating. Though smaller in extent than the one of 1666, it was swifter and more frenzied, and leaped from street to street with such dreadful rapidity that many fleeing citizens were overtaken or left without escape routes. It was also more deadly, claiming twelve thousand lives (versus five people killed in the 1666 fire, as far as is known). For 454 years, the fire of 1212 was known as the Great Fire of London. It really still ought to be.

Most cities suffered devastating fires from time to time; some had them repeatedly. Boston had them in 1653, 1676, 1679, 1711, and 1761. Then it had a lull until the winter of 1834, when a fire in the night burned down seven hundred buildings—most of the downtown—and grew so fierce that it spread to ships in the harbor. But all city fires pale when compared with the fire that swept through Chicago on a windy night in October 1871, when a cow owned by a Mrs. Patrick O’Leary reputedly kicked over a kerosene lantern in a milking shed on DeKoven Street, and all kinds of dreadful mayhem swiftly followed. The fire destroyed 18,000 buildings and made 150,000 people homeless. Damages topped $200 million and put fifty-one insurance companies out of business. The following year, Boston had another big fire, which destroyed nearly 800 buildings and left 60 acres of smoldering waste.

Where houses were packed close together, as in European cities, there wasn’t a great deal anyone could do, though housebuilders did come up with one useful remedy. Originally, the joists in English terraced houses ran from side to side and sat on the partition walls between houses. This essentially created a linear run of joists along a block, heightening the risk of fires spreading from house to house. So from the Georgian period, joists were run front to back in houses, turning the partition walls into firebreaks. However, having joists run from the front of the house to the back meant they needed supporting walls, which dictated room sizes, which in turn determined how rooms were used and houses lived in.

One natural phenomenon promised to eliminate all the foregoing dangers and shortcomings: electricity. Electricity was exciting stuff, but it was hard to devise practical applications for it. Using the legs of frogs and electricity from simple batteries, the eighteenth-century Italian physician and physicist Luigi Galvani showed how electricity could make muscles twitch. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, realizing that money could be made from this, devised a stage show in which he applied electricity to animate the bodies of recently executed murderers and the heads of guillotine victims, causing their eyes to open and their mouths to make noiseless shapes. The logical assumption was that if electricity could stir the dead, imagine how it might help the living. In small doses (at least we may hope they were small), it was used for all kinds of maladies, from treating constipation to stopping young men having illicit erections (or at least enjoying them). Charles Darwin, driven to desperation by a mysterious lifelong malady that left him chronically lethargic, routinely draped himself with electrified zinc chains, doused his body with vinegar, and glumly underwent hours of pointless tingling in the hope that it would effect some improvement. It never did.

The real need was for a practical electric light. In 1846, rather out of the blue, a man named Frederick Hale Holmes patented an electric arc lamp. Holmes’s light was made by generating a strong electric current and forcing it to jump between two carbon rods—a trick that the British chemist Sir Humphry Davy had demonstrated