The topic of the fires of the late 19th century is immense in principle. Of these, there are so many separate topics that only a listing of the main ones will make a separate note. Each of them is worthy of its detailed elaboration, from which, naturally, further stories with branchy continuation horns will emerge.
It is impossible to end each line with the murder of the hero or his happy wedding, as art writers do, and if you do not finish, you will perish yourself, under the weight of a blossoming historical crown and a billion living, but very heavy Chinese. Here I even got confused in the description of the description!
Everyone, I hope, read "Cat's House" as a child? Who has not read, relax, all the same there at the end everything burned out. To the ground. However, the cat itself survived. There is a loss of property and the formation of a new unit in need ready to work for food. We will return to this nuance later.
A fairy tale, as they say, a lie, but there is a hint in it! On multiple fires of the past years.
Do you know how many there were? Not? And nobody knows! In all available lists, only the "Great" ones are mentioned. This is when the whole city burned down in fig! Big city, like a capital. Smaller fires, where not very central cities or large settlements burned down, but not completely, it seems, no one considered at all.
For example, what was counted on one American site. This list is never complete, even for American settlements, of which there are the majority in the place of birth of the list. It does not matter. There is no purpose to compile an encyclopedia, there is a desire to show the scale.
1 of 3. No need to read. This is just one example of many lists. Very local, by the way. Outside the United States, the nose is not particularly protruding.
Promotional video:
What can be taken from this list: there were a lot of fires, they lasted a very long time and all over the globe. I am glad that at least they did not set fire to each other in a chain reaction.
The scale of the destruction suggests that all the buildings before the catastrophe were apparently not just doused with gasoline, kerosene, which is a substitute, but were also built in advance, from wood impregnated with a combustible composition, or better immediately, explosive materials.
Since the main work on the study of "great" fires was carried out by American enthusiasts, the examples will be overseas. In fact, there is no difference, take any city - everything is a carbon copy.
Great Boston Fire of 1872
The Great Boston Fire of 1872 was the largest fire in Boston and is still considered one of the most costly, in terms of property lost, in American history. The fire began at 7:20 pm on November 9, 1872 in the basement of a trading warehouse at Summer Street 83-87. The fire was localized after 12 hours. Prior to that, he managed to destroy about 65 acres (26 hectares - 2600 acres - 260,000 m) of the center of Boston, 776 buildings and most of the financial district. The damage was $ 3.5 million. Despite this devastation, only thirteen people died in hell
Those who survived the cataclysm are in pessimism … (c) Popularly beloved minstrel, however, about another case.
The swept American Mamai, if we operate with allegories.
P..ts, and Africa is on fire, they said in my childhood.
We will not draw any conclusions yet, let's look at other outstanding results.
The great Chicago fire of 1871
The Great Chicago Fire burned from Sunday, October 8, to early Tuesday, October 10, 1871. The fire killed around 300 people, destroyed about 3.3 square miles (9 km2) of Chicago, Illinois itself, and left over 100,000 residents homeless
The Great Seattle Fire of 1889
The Great Seattle Fire was a fire that destroyed the entire Central Business District of Seattle, Washington on June 6, 1889. The fire worked tirelessly for hours, destroying 25 neighborhoods and causing $ 20 million in damage ($ 527 million in today's dollars). Not a single person died in the fire. The fire raised streets in Seattle's Pioneer Square area 22 feet (6.7 m) above street level before the fire. At the same time, wooden buildings were banned and a single city water supply was installed
Well, like, the same thing.
Let's now take at least one non-American city, so that there is no feeling of geographic selectivity.
And then, ops, it turns out that after the invention of photography, it burned exclusively in the New World. No, for the company, of course, burned a little bit in the British Empire. But very weakly - indestructible.
There were also a couple of good torches in China and Japan, but firstly, it is almost the same as America, in our case, and secondly, there, before burning, it often shook, and this smears the authenticity of the experiment.
To powerfully and with a spark, one can only recall Smyrna in 1922, but there the fire looks so man-made from all sides that one cannot rely on the results, as on those produced, only by fire, without the intervention of other human forces.
The question is, what prevented Europe from burning with such a massive pyrotechnic race in another part of the world? Was the construction technology different? Fire safety? No, on the contrary. Historians say - everything ancient is worth it. For five hundred years or more. For hardwood floors and oak finishes, it's time to get some air in the sun and indulge in the blue flame. If someone got wet in the flood, it would seem that it should have already dried up for a demonstration fire and burn no worse than an American remake. In reality - a blazing world and unemployment among firefighters in Europe. In Russia, which, as they say, was through and through bast shoes and wood, and then no one is on fire. One Syzran at the beginning of the century. And the one in question.
Anyway. Let there be selective fire. Probably the wind rose just blew in that direction.
What else is interesting to note about these fires?
The first and, probably, the main thing is the incredible destruction of brick, concrete and other stone buildings. Fire, fire, but the cobblestones where all fell?
Pay attention to the "architectural excesses" of burnt buildings. Again "Ancient Rome" is being destroyed.
Nice photo. The fire not only burned all the wooden floors, but also took apart the masonry brick by brick. It would be great if I still folded it straight, for export or there, for later use.
Not so long ago, we already discussed something similar, only there it was attributed to an earthquake and the people were laid down significantly more. Here, apparently, there was no such goal, or the results were well disguised.
Remove the pieces of wood and it will be very similar.
So, we have a magical fire that consumes and destroys stones with bricks. Fortunately, this is not its only unique property. In order not to get bored, during the genocide of buildings, he amused himself by sometimes diligently bypassing trees, in some cases even leaving foliage.
1 of 4. A tree with a crown in the middle of a building scattered on stones.
In general, howls about wooden houses could have been more modest. It's worth looking at the plan for Chicago, which depicts the city before the fire.
Maybe I'm not a world-famous architect, but I can't see wooden houses here.
Now about the ashes themselves. Houses, even badly burnt, look like this today:
Black soot on the walls from smoke. The walls themselves, which is important. And even if everything burned, like at the Burning Men festival, the stone-brick-cement base does not disappear into oblivion, falling apart into pieces.
What should burn and how so that the following remains of the whole city:
1 of 3. Diagonally destroyed walls, crumbling brick, but little soot is visible.
Strange, some kind of fires. What could burn there if nothing was left of the buildings? Although there is! There is an example from our time! Have you guessed? Right! Twin towers and phenomenon number 7!
A little fire and in the trash.
And it is possible without fire. Why arrange a circus!
Yes, but mining every city in this way at the end of the 19th century is too dreary and unnecessary, therefore it is better to compare it with something less noble and manageable. For example with Dresden World War II:
1 of 3. If it is close, it is almost similar, and if from a distance, then Dresden suffered less.
And if it is absolutely certain, then with Hiroshima and Nagasaki it will be closer.
The only difference is - then the trees were removed.
I do not insist at all that in the 19th century they staged a permanent nuclear apocalypse in different places in America, but I am interested to know what could have burned and exploded like that? How did it happen that with such large-scale destruction in the annals we see the wildest ridiculous numbers of the dead …
All this together makes us think about the unreality of what was happening or, even worse, about our complete ignorance of the causes, means and executors of the "fires". I hope it is already possible to put this word in quotation marks, since the man-madeness of these events is hardly in doubt even among skeptics.
But the oddities don't end there. American enthusiasts noticed a few more interesting features that were repeated from time to time in every city.
After the incident, instead of mourners killing over the lost belongings, or at worst crowds of firefighters who fought the fire day and night, we see people posing on the ruins. There is no sadness or anxiety on their faces, just a business inspection, work done and a memorable photo, like with the carcass of a killed elephant.
Purely pioneers with a pile of scrap metal!
Well, okay, maybe that's how it was. Or, as historians would say, fashionable. We took pictures on the remains, it's time to get down to business. Probably, they took it, but for some reason they did not want to record the garbage collection on the camera. Nowhere, in any city, the process of raking and removal of the remaining parts of buildings is not captured. That is, thousands and thousands of man-hours, end-hours, cabal-hours, and possibly ostrich-hours, were not even accidentally caught by any photographer.
At the same time, before taking away all the photographic equipment in the area, they take pictures of future buildings, for which places have already been assigned on the ruins. Is it too fast for a new layout?
Thank you for not placing the layouts.
Well, the final one, no less funny. After the fire, they began to build the city. Very fast. Incredibly fast. Overtaking all possible production capacities of materials from which they were built.
For example, in Seattle, 5, 525 buildings were built in 18 months. This is not counting the dismantled rubble and such trifles as 40-something miles of railroad tracks.
Easy mental calculation, it gives us 10 buildings a day, without sleep or rest.
And you know what? There was no panel construction at that time and they were not building barracks for the victims of the fire.
Then were they all Stakhanovists? When did we manage to grind like this?
There was also about funny reasons for each of the devastating fires
A cow lying down on a kerosene stove and the aftermath of her dance.
All this, of course, is interesting and entertaining. The number of fires and the speed of recovery, the burning out of solid brick-stone buildings in the firebox and trees untouched nearby. If we focus on admiring these oddities, then the kaleidoscope of amazing historical facts will remain an amusing, but not very useful booth, if you do not combine everything into a single picture. But there already, it may not be funny at all.