This article is a history of inventions only. It is not safety guidance; for questions about fire safety, follow local rules and the advice of qualified fire authorities.
Fighting fire before the extinguisher
For most of history, a fire was fought with whatever could be carried: buckets of water passed along a line of neighbors, wet cloths, and tools for pulling burning thatch away from a building. Cities later organized fire brigades with hand-pumped engines, which could throw a stream of water at a distance but needed a crew, a nearby water supply and a good deal of time. A small fire could grow into a large one before any of that arrived. The idea of a portable device that could be used by anyone at the start of a fire is, historically, a fairly late one.
Godfrey’s barrel, 1723
The earliest widely cited device is usually credited to Ambrose Godfrey, a German-born chemist working in London, who received a patent in 1723. His design was a wooden cask filled with a fire-quenching liquid, with a chamber of black powder in the middle. A fuse led to the powder. When it was lit, the explosion burst the cask and scattered the liquid over the flames. It was intended to be placed in a room where a fire might start and to go off on its own or be triggered by hand.
The details of the liquid are not well documented, and accounts of how well it worked are mixed. Contemporary newspapers reported demonstrations, and Godfrey is said to have been successful in selling his barrels, though the evidence for how widely they were used is thin. It was a clever idea but also an unwieldy one, and it did not lead directly to a modern extinguisher.
Manby’s Extincteur, 1813
A more direct ancestor appeared in the early nineteenth century. Captain George William Manby, an English army officer and inventor, is generally credited with the Extincteur, which he is reported to have demonstrated in 1816 after developing the idea following a fire he witnessed in Edinburgh in 1813. Manby’s name is also attached to the Manby mortar, a device that fired a line to ships in distress, so he was known for rescue equipment.
The Extincteur was a copper vessel of roughly three gallons capacity. It held a solution of potash, or potassium carbonate, and the remaining space was filled with compressed air. When a valve was opened, the pressure pushed the liquid out as a jet. The significant ideas here were portability and stored pressure: the user did not need a pump or a bucket line, only the vessel itself.
The solution was thought to help smother or quench flames more effectively than plain water, though how much it differed from water is not clear. In any case the Extincteur was a limited success. It was heavy and relatively costly, and the technology of the time could not easily hold pressure in a vessel for very long.
Chemical extinguishers
Later in the century the chemistry changed. In 1866, a French inventor named François Carlier is credited with a soda-acid extinguisher, and an American, Almon Granger, is linked with a similar design patented in the early 1880s. These were usually dated by patent, though inventors worked in parallel and the line of credit is not neat.
The soda-acid design relied on a reaction. A vessel held a solution of sodium bicarbonate, and a bottle of sulfuric acid sat inside. Turning the device over, or breaking the bottle, mixed the two. The reaction released carbon dioxide gas, which built pressure and forced the liquid out of a nozzle. The result was still mostly water, but it was now available at the push of a handle. Because the chemistry produced its own pressure, the vessel did not need to be charged with compressed air in advance.
Early twentieth century designs added more variety:
- Foam extinguishers, in which two solutions combined to make a thick foam that floated on burning liquids. A Russian engineer named Aleksandr Loran is often credited with early foam work around 1904.
- Carbon tetrachloride extinguishers, which used a liquid that evaporated into a heavy vapor. They were popular for a time, but the substance is toxic and later fell out of favor.
- Carbon dioxide extinguishers, which discharge a gas that displaces air near the fire and leaves no liquid residue. They developed around the early 1900s and became associated with electrical and laboratory fires.
- Dry chemical powders, which appeared in the mid-twentieth century and became common on many types of fires.
The same era brought a better understanding of why some fires needed different treatments. A grease fire, an electrical fire and a wood fire do not respond to the same agent in the same way, and that lesson, learned partly through accidents, led to labeling and classification systems that still exist in various forms. The growth of petroleum refining and wider use of flammable liquids in industry made specialized extinguishers more important.
Why the credit is unclear
The history is a chain rather than a single moment. Godfrey’s barrel was an explosive container of liquid. Manby’s device was a pressurized vessel. The soda-acid design generated pressure chemically. Later designs changed the agent. Different writers choose different links in the chain as “the first fire extinguisher,” depending on whether they emphasize the idea of a self-contained device, the use of stored pressure, or a hand-held design that looks like today’s. A careful statement is that Godfrey’s 1723 patent is the earliest widely cited ancestor, and that Manby’s 1813 to 1816 work is the earliest recognizable portable extinguisher.
The result
The modern extinguisher is a sturdy, pressurized, labeled and standardized product, and it carries traces of every earlier step. Its history also reflects wider changes in chemistry and manufacturing, since reliable metal vessels, valves and seals were as important as the chemical agent inside. Older designs were gradually replaced as industrial chemistry offered better agents, and as regulations and testing made it easier to say what an extinguisher could and could not handle.