Firefighter History: From Rome's Vigiles to 9/11

Organized firefighting is as old as the dense wooden city, because that is what made fire a collective catastrophe rather than a private one. Rome, Edo, London and every other great pre-modern capital burned repeatedly — Edo's Great Meireki fire of 1657 killed on the order of a hundred thousand people — and each disaster forced the same question: whose job is it to stand between a burning building and the rest of the city?

The answers form the history of the trade. Slaves and freedmen, insurance employees who protected only paying customers, roofers and scaffolders, military battalions, municipal professionals and unpaid neighbors have all held the line at different times. The direction of travel has been consistent: from private and mercenary toward public and universal, and from beating out flames toward preventing them.

Where it began

c. 70 BCE – 6 CERome

Rome tried the private market first. Marcus Licinius Crassus ran a brigade of some 500 slaves in the first century BCE that, Plutarch records, would arrive at a burning house and negotiate to buy it cheap before putting the fire out — one foundation of his enormous fortune. After the aedile Egnatius Rufus won dangerous popularity with his own free firefighting slaves, the emperor Augustus made the service public: in 6 CE he founded the Vigiles, seven cohorts of freedmen — thousands strong — equipped with buckets, pumps and hooks, patrolling the city by night as both fire brigade and watch.

Timeline

c. 70 BCECrassus's fire brigade for profit

Marcus Licinius Crassus operates a private brigade of around 500 slaves in Rome that races to burning buildings — and then haggles to buy the property, and often its threatened neighbors, at collapse prices before extinguishing anything. Plutarch names the scheme as a source of one of Rome's greatest fortunes, and it remains history's warning about firefighting as a business.

6 CEAugustus founds the Vigiles

After another destructive fire, Augustus creates the Vigiles Urbani: seven cohorts of freedmen, eventually thousands of men, funded partly by a tax on the sale of slaves. Organized along military lines with buckets, hand pumps, hooks and blankets, they patrol Rome at night as combined fire brigade and watch — the first large public firefighting force in the Western record.

1666The Great Fire of London creates fire insurance

The September 1666 fire destroys more than 13,000 houses and 87 churches. Within a year, Nicholas Barbon founds the first fire insurance business, and insurers soon field their own brigades that protect buildings displaying their company's metal fire mark. For a century and a half, much of London's firefighting is done by competing private companies with paying customers.

1720Edo organizes the machibikeshi

Magistrate Ōoka Tadasuke organizes Edo's townsmen into 47 iroha-named fire companies, the machibikeshi, recruited largely from tobi — the agile construction workers and steeplejacks who could tear down buildings to cut firebreaks. Each company's matoi standard, held aloft on a roof beside the fire, marked its ground; the hikeshi became celebrated, tattooed folk heroes of the city.

1811Napoleon militarizes the Paris pompiers

After a fire at the Austrian embassy's ball in July 1810 kills guests celebrating Napoleon's marriage while the city's firefighting collapses in confusion, Napoleon signs an 1811 decree creating the sapeurs-pompiers de Paris as a military unit under army discipline. The Paris fire brigade remains a French Army formation today, and Marseille's is a unit of the Navy.

1824Edinburgh appoints James Braidwood

Edinburgh establishes what is often called the world's first municipal fire brigade and puts 24-year-old James Braidwood in charge. Weeks later the Great Fire of Edinburgh tests it. Braidwood drills his men at night, insists on entering buildings to attack a fire's seat rather than spraying from the street, and in 1830 publishes the first modern firefighting manual.

1853Cincinnati pays firefighters and adopts steam

After brawls between rival volunteer companies scandalize the city, Cincinnati establishes the first fully paid professional fire department in the United States and puts the horse-drawn steam fire engine into service. Steam pumpers need far fewer men than hand engines, breaking the volunteer gangs' grip and setting the template of the salaried, apparatus-centered city department.

1911The Triangle Shirtwaist fire forces prevention

A fire in a New York garment factory kills 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women; FDNY ladders reach only the sixth floor while the fire burns on the eighth to tenth. The disaster ignites the modern fire-prevention movement — sprinkler laws, exit codes, factory inspections — and FDNY chief Edward Croker resigns weeks later to campaign for prevention full time.

1940The first smokejumpers

On 12 July 1940, Rufus Robinson and Earl Cooley of the US Forest Service parachute onto the Marten Creek fire in Idaho's Nez Perce National Forest — the first operational smokejump. Airborne crews make it possible to attack remote wildfires while they are still small, and wildland firefighting develops into its own profession with its own tools, science and dangers.

2001343 at the World Trade Center

On 11 September 2001, 343 members of the New York City Fire Department are killed when the World Trade Center towers collapse — the largest single-incident loss of firefighters in history. The date reshapes the trade worldwide: urban search-and-rescue capacity, incident command discipline and public reverence for the job all rise in its aftermath.

The eras

Antiquity – 1600

Bucket chains and the night watch

For most of urban history, firefighting meant neighbors, buckets and demolition hooks, stiffened in a few great cities by organized patrols. Rome's Vigiles combined fire duty with night policing for centuries; medieval European towns rang curfew — couvre-feu, 'cover fire' — ordering hearths banked for the night, and made citizens keep buckets and ladders by law. When those measures failed, the only real tactic was pulling down houses ahead of the flames to starve them of fuel.

Painting of the Great Fire of London in 1666, which led to fire insurance and insurance brigades. — Unknown artist Unknown artist · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

1666–1824

Insurance brigades and hand-pumped engines

London's 1666 catastrophe produced fire insurance, and insurance produced brigades: uniformed company men who protected buildings bearing their employer's fire mark. Technology moved with the money — Richard Newsham's London-built engines of the 1720s used an air vessel to throw a continuous stream, and cities from Philadelphia to New York imported them. Benjamin Franklin's 1736 Union Fire Company helped spread the volunteer model across America, making the fire company a social institution as much as a service.

Portrait of James Braidwood, founder of the Edinburgh fire brigade and first head of London's firefighting force. — Unknown Illustrator; book by James Braidwood · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

1824–1918

The municipal professional brigade

Edinburgh's 1824 brigade under James Braidwood set the pattern the modern world copied: a disciplined, trained, city-paid force attacking fires at their seat. Braidwood moved to London in 1833 to lead the insurers' combined brigade and died at the Tooley Street fire of 1861; his successor Eyre Massey Shaw handed a fully public Metropolitan Fire Brigade to London in 1866. Steam pumpers, telegraph alarm boxes and horse-drawn apparatus professionalized the work, and in 1918 US and Canadian firefighters founded their union, the IAFF.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which killed 146 workers and transformed fire codes. — Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

1918–1980

Motors, codes and breathing apparatus

Internal combustion retired the fire horse within a generation, and the lessons of disasters like Triangle Shirtwaist hardened into enforced codes, sprinklers and inspection duties that made prevention half the profession. Self-contained breathing apparatus — adapted for the fire service from aviation oxygen equipment in 1945 — finally let crews work inside smoke rather than gulping it at the door. From the 1970s, departments began absorbing emergency medical services, quietly beginning the job's transformation into an all-hazards rescue trade.

A wildfire burning at night, the fastest-growing front of modern firefighting. — Mike McMillan/USFS · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons

1980–present

All-hazards service in a warming world

In rich countries the modern firefighter answers far more medical calls than fires, works hazmat spills, road crashes and floods, and trains for building collapse and terrorism — a shift sealed by 9/11. Meanwhile climate change has turned wildland firefighting from a seasonal sideline into a year-round crisis employing tens of thousands, from California to Australia's Black Summer. The trade's newest reckoning is internal: the 2022 IARC classification of firefighting as carcinogenic is forcing a culture of decontamination onto a profession that once wore soot as a badge.

What this job replaced

Neighbouring trades that no longer exist — absorbed, automated or regulated away.

Insurance brigade fireman

1667–1866

For two centuries after the Great Fire of London, much of British firefighting was a private subscription service: insurers' uniformed brigades protected buildings displaying their company's lead fire mark, and tales — partly embellished — tell of crews standing down at uninsured houses. The system's inefficiency became indefensible; the companies merged their brigades under James Braidwood in 1833, and the Metropolitan Fire Brigade Act finally made London's firefighting a public service in 1866.

Turncock

c. 1600–1900s

London's early water mains were wooden pipes buried under the streets, and getting water at a fire meant finding and opening them. The turncock was the water company's man who knew where every main and fire plug lay and was paid a reward for arriving fast and turning the water on. Cast-iron mains and pressurized hydrants — and eventually municipal waterworks — dissolved the trade into the modern water utility.

Fire lookout

c. 1905–2000s

For most of the twentieth century, wildfires were spotted by people living alone in towers on mountaintops; the US built thousands of lookout towers, many by Depression-era CCC crews, and writers from Jack Kerouac to Norman Maclean served or wrote in them. Aircraft patrols, satellites and AI-monitored camera networks have replaced nearly all of them, though a few hundred staffed towers still watch the ridgelines each summer.

Trades that vanished →

The through-line of this history is the slow victory of prevention over heroics. Codes, sprinklers, safer materials and public water systems have done more to reduce fire deaths than any tactic invented on the fireground, which is why fires are now a small fraction of the modern firefighter's calls.

Yet every era's endpoint is the same figure the Romans organized twenty centuries ago: someone standing on the line between a burning structure and the people who cannot get out of it. The tools, the employer and the uniform keep changing; the direction that person walks has not.

🚒Origins & Evolution

Where it began

Timeline