🚒The Greats

Shaw was such a celebrity that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote him into Iolanthe: at the 1882 premiere at the Savoy Theatre, the Fairy Queen sang 'Oh, Captain Shaw! Type of true love kept under!' directly at Shaw, who was sitting in the stalls as the audience roared. A fire chief had become a figure of West End opera — a measure of how completely the Victorian city had fallen for its firemen.

Ōoka's insight was to recruit the tobi — the steeplejacks and construction workers who built Edo's roofs — because in a city of paper and timber, firefighting meant demolition: tearing down houses ahead of the flames faster than the fire could reach them. Each company planted its matoi standard on a roof at the fire's edge, its bearer holding position in the smoke as a claim of honor, while the crews stripped the buildings below him. The system fought Edo's fires for a century and a half.

During the blizzard of 1818, with influenza laying up most of Oceanus No. 11's male volunteers, Williams answered a call, took her place on the drag ropes, and hauled the heavy pumper through deep snow to the fire — reportedly in a calico dress and checked apron. The company men said she was as good a fire laddie as any of them; the story survived precisely because everything about her doing it was supposed to be impossible.

Croker stood in the street at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire on 25 March 1911 while his ladders, which reached only the sixth floor, stood short of workers trapped above the eighth. Within weeks he resigned one of the most powerful jobs in American firefighting to campaign full time for sprinklers, fire drills and factory codes — telling audiences that the dead had been killed not by fire but by buildings that had been allowed to be built.

In 1962 Adair extinguished the 'Devil's Cigarette Lighter,' a Saharan gas well at Gassi Touil, Algeria, that had burned for months with a flame hundreds of feet high — bright enough that John Glenn reported seeing it from orbit. Adair's crew snuffed it with a precisely placed explosive charge that consumed the fire's oxygen. Nearly thirty years later, aged 75, he was in Kuwait after the Gulf War, where his company capped 117 of the hundreds of wells Iraqi forces had set alight.

Telyatnikov was on leave the night Reactor 4 exploded; he came in anyway and directed roughly two dozen firefighters in the first, decisive hours, climbing to survey roofs where fragments of the reactor core itself lay burning around the men's boots. The crews had no meaningful protection against radiation and mostly understood the danger only as heat and smoke. He absorbed a near-lethal dose, was treated in Moscow, returned to fire service, rose to general — and died of cancer in 2004, at 53.

After the federal court ruled in Berkman v. City of New York that FDNY's physical test was discriminatory and not job-related, Berkman joined the job she had sued her way into — and colleagues drained her air tank, slashed her tires and sent death threats. She stayed, co-founded the United Women Firefighters, made officer rank, and on 11 September 2001, though off duty, went to the World Trade Center and spent weeks in the rescue and recovery effort.