A firefighting apparatus North American English [ 1 ] or firefighting appliance UK English [ 2 ] describes any vehicle that has been customized for use during firefighting operations. These vehicles are highly customized depending on their needs and the duty they will be performing. These duties can include firefighting, technical rescue , and emergency medical services.
An early device used to squirt water onto a fire is a squirt or fire syringe. Hand squirts and hand pumps are noted before Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the first fire pump circa the 2nd century B. The fire pump was reinvented in Europe during the 16th century, reportedly used in Augsburg in and Nuremberg in A book of inventions mentions a steam engine called a fire engine pump used to "raise a column of water 40 feet [ Colonial laws in America required each house to have a bucket of water on the front stoop during fires at night.
These buckets were intended for use by the initial bucket brigade that would supply the water at fires. Philadelphia obtained a hand-pumped fire engine in , years after Lynn 's model appeared there, made by Joseph Jencks , but before New York's two engines arrived from London.
By , Richard Newsham , in London, had made successful fire engines; the first used in New York City in were of his make six years before formation of the NYC volunteer fire department. The amount of manpower and skill necessary for firefighting prompted the institution of an organized fire company by Benjamin Franklin in Thomas Lote built the first fire engine made in America in These earliest engines are called hand tubs because they are manually hand powered and the water was supplied by bucket brigade dumped into a tub cistern where the pump had a permanent intake pipe.
An important advancement around was the invention of an engine which could draft water from a water source doing away with the bucket brigade. Philadelphia fire engine manufacturers Sellers and Pennock model the Hydraulion is said to be the first suction engine produced in The earliest engines were small and were carried by four men or mounted on skids and dragged to a fire. The earliest four-wheel carriage mounted engines were pulled to the fire by hand.
