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 motorized fire engines, came to revolutionize firefighting, offering fa...