The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-03-07

world, and that the efficiency of the American fire departments has developed from necessity. The first thing the aver age foreigner does after landing in this
 country is to look around for a fire. He
 has read so much at home about the prevalence of coniagrations in our great cities and the wonderful deeds of our fire men that he wants to see them at close range. He Is rarely disappointed and is willing to admit that the feats perform
 ed by American fire department teams at the Paris fire congress some years ago were nothing exceptional from the Amer ican point of view At that time Kansas City, Mo. company won the world prize by hitching up, driving quarter of a mile to the scene of a theo- retical fire, making hose connection, seal ing the walls of a building and rescuing three persons from the sixth and seventh stories all within the space of three minutes and 42 seconds. The fastest for egn crew in the competition required ten minutes to execute the same maneuvers. while a Turkish fremen's team was awarded the booby prize. These Turks personally carried antiquated hose and other apparatus, and are said to have finished the required programme after the official timekeeper had retired from the scene.
 The fire demon is not always fought
 
 big cities. The fighters seize upon the weapons that lie nearest and sometimes
 win against terrible odds Everybody is familiar with the old method of blowing
 wide furrows in the path of prairie
 fire, or of burning an area in its path
 to check it's advance, but not all know the heroic measures of the isolated forest
 ranger when he fights fire on the gov
 ernment reservations. In the Texas oil
 fields steam has been found to- be the
 best agent In putting out fire in an oil
 well or tank. It remains, however, for
 a California wine maker to hold the record for the most expensive extnguish
 ing agency. When a forest fire threat
 ened his plant. he took a hose and played
 400J gallons of wine on the encroaching
 flames The wine was worth 50 cents
 gallon, but it saved the clever manufact-
 urer many thousands of dollars.
 To attempt a recital of the heroic
 deeds of firemen would be to give a his
 tory of the fire departments of most American cities and add to these the rec ords of few private citi ems. Every ire department has one or more members en- titled to place in the hall of fame and a Carnegie hero medal. The recent he- roic sacrifice of Deputy Chief Kruger of l, New York Is uppermost in the minds Of hero loving America Still fresh is the recollection of the thrilling rescues of the Windsor Hotel fire in New York in 1S99 One man carried three women, one by one, along a narrow ledge along the wall from one seventh story window to another. Another, though i'll, took the last three women alive from the hotel. Another fire captain of the New York department swung himself out over the edge of a high roof. and while two of | his men held his feet caught the wrists | of a POOL pound man, who jumped across | the eight foot alley from the roof above. | Bremen of the fire boat New Yorker | boarded one after another of the three l burning German vessels at New York wharf a few years ago, and saved all but the engineers, who refused to leave | their posts
 | The pages of history might be full of 1 such as these-if they had only been l written down. But to the average fire l man the fact that he is regarded as a l hero is of small importance. Duty Is | his watchword, and even If his life be 1 asked as a sacrifice in the fulillment, it | is all right with him. He has lived up l to the full extent of his obligations, and l has enriched the world with another ex- ample of courage and devotion to a 1 cause.