How it began
Jan van der Heyden was a painter of detailed city views who was also an inventor; he had already designed Amsterdam's street lamps and directed the city's lighting. With his brother Nicolaas, a hydraulic engineer, he developed a new kind of fire engine. In November 1672 the city council decided to refit half of its existing engines with the brothers' suction and pressure hoses. Soon afterward the brothers were appointed supervisors of the city's fire engines and equipment.
Before it existed
In the 1660s Amsterdam bought dozens of large pumping engines from Hans Hautsch of Nuremberg. Each was dragged by a horse and had a cistern, filled by bucket, from which water was pumped by hand through a rigid metal pipe with a nozzle. By 1670 the city had about 60 of them, with more than 28,000 leather buckets. The streams reached only the outside and lower levels of a building. A fire in February 1672 destroyed Joan Blaeu's printing office, at a loss of 382,000 guilders.
How it works
The new engine had three key elements. A leather suction hose let it draw water from a canal at a distance, giving a steadier supply than a line of buckets. A long, flexible leather hose, called a snake, replaced the rigid spout, so firefighters could carry the stream deep inside a building and aim it at the seat of the fire. An air chamber evened out the strokes of the pump, so that water came out in a continuous flow under pressure.
Who pushed back
At a harbor fire on January 12, in buildings storing military supplies, the single new engine arrived late and found the scene crowded with old engines. Van der Heyden wrote that the firefighters did not think it the time to try new and unproven things. His crew was left to work on adjacent sheds, which it saved, and then cleared a path to the main blaze. He held up the episode as proof of the difference between the engines.
What changed first
In 1681 the mayors ordered the brothers to build enough light new engines for each of the city's sixty districts and to draw up regulations. Each district company had 36 residents under two fire masters, with rewards for the first companies to arrive and fines for failing to raise the alarm. From 1682 to 1687 Amsterdam had 41 fires with total losses of 18,353 guilders, less than one percent of the losses of 1670 to 1681, by Van der Heyden's own figures.
What lasted
In 1690 Jan van der Heyden published an illustrated account of the city's fires and the new engines, written with his son, which was translated into English in 1996. The translator, Lettie Stibbe Multhauf, called his approach one of the earliest instances of what is now called systems analysis. An exhibition on his inventions has presented the fire hose as his best-known contribution alongside the improved pump.
