Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America, 1800–1950

3. Statistics, Maps, and Morals: Making Fire Risk Objective, 1850–1875

c h a p t e r t h r e e Statistics, Maps, and Morals Making Fire Risk Objective, 1850–1875 In April 1852, prominent Philadelphia lawyer Horace Binney excoriated the fire insurance industry at an odd moment. In the keynote address of a gala event celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the Philadelphia Contributionship for Loss from Fire, he censured fire underwriters for what he characterized as a haphazard approach to their business. Binney contrasted fire underwriters’ uncertain rating methods with the sounder practices of life underwriters, which were based in actuarial method. He ridiculed the industry for not having created a “mortality table” of fire loss, and described the industry’s business as unscientific. Binney urged insurers to intensify their program of observing the landscape and to form organizations that advanced the industry’s common interests, arguing that such activities and associations would help fire insurers to organize their industry rationally and to understand the problem of fire. He also suggested a wholesale reconsideration of public fire defenses. Amazingly, it is unlikely that his remarks offended the audience. By 1850 many fire insurers realized the limitations of their approach. Even leading firms, such as Aetna, recognized that they could predict neither the frequency and extent of fires nor their financial costs with an acceptable degree of certainty.1 Binney’s remarks heralded a transition in how underwriters confronted the problem of fire. Shortly afterward, underwriters introduced fire insurance mapping into the lexicon of their tools, continued to make business transactions more standard, formal, and regular, and established trade associations to facilitate intercompany cooperation. Most importantly, perhaps, they began to develop and to apply statistical reasoning to their business, especially to their efforts to categorize and to evaluate danger. As Binney had expected, using statistics transformed the way that fire underwriters produced knowledge in regard to fire risk. Developing actuarial tables marked an important qualitative and quantitative departure for the industry, especially because it occurred in conjunction with the expansion of other information-management technologies. Insurers represented urban fire risk in statistical ratios, objectified fire danger in city maps, and forged new institutional relationships . Within two decades of Binney’s critique, fire insurers had altered their routines substantially. As the industry remade itself, it also remade its approach to the problem of fire and helped to shape the urbanization of North America. In particular, the introduction of two representational technologies almost simultaneously in the 1850s— maps and statistics—reworked how underwriters perceived fire risk, and hence the problem of fire. As insurers studied figures and atlases, they objectified the risk of fire; they turned an incalculable societal threat into something to be scientifically studied, controlled, and managed. Moreover, these tools gave insurers the ability to attend to the minutest details of the built landscape. They could study a wider and more diverse geographic area, and divide and subdivide their classifications into more analytical categories. With its new management technologies, the industry re-envisioned the built landscape as an accumulation of fire hazards, and visualized risk using representational technologies made it conceivable to manipulate the built landscape. As a result, changes in insurance practice were felt beyond the boardrooms or balance sheets of insurance company. As the industry made its administrative procedures more rational, expanded its surveillance, and struggled to create an objective record of fire loss, it helped to reshape American cities. The fire insurance industry’s effort to control the problem of fire helped to reorganize all aspects of urbanizing America—from the provision of municipal services to the structure of city landscapes. At the same time that they quantified the dangers of fire, underwriters offered a scathing critique of the system of fire protection as it had been organized in the first half of the century. They argued that urban communities should not direct fire protection; rather, it should be managed according to the precepts of industrial capitalism, including a new division of firefighting labor that involved paying wages. Strikingly, insurers’ new business practices and sudden critique of 90 Fire Making Fire Risk Objective 91 firefighting coincided with similar efforts by middle-class reformers. In Philadelphia , for instance, a morality novelist offered a stinging evaluation of communitysponsored firefighting. Such moral commentaries became inseparable from underwriters ’ attempt to rationalize their industry, fire risk, and urban space. Insurers were not alone in their advocacy for paying specialists...