Fire Engines

More complex and imposing than any other vehicle in the British emergency services, the fire engine has a long and interesting history.

The earliest water pumps had been developed by the eighteenth century – basic manual pumps that had to be hauled around by people or horses, and were often only used on fire-insured premises. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries horse-drawn, steam-powered fire engines, and eventually motorised fire engines, came to revolutionise firefighting, offering f...