"I Did Not Know. . .Any Danger Was Attached": Safety Consciousness in the Early American Ice and Refrigeration Industries

On the afternoon of 10 July 1893, Captain James Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Fire Department received a call to put out a fire in the ice plant at the World's Columbian Exposition. Fitzpatrick had gone to fight small blazes in the same building twice before, both caused by a design defect in the plant's smokestack. To obscure the stack from the view of fairgoers, the architect had encased it in a 225-foot wooden tower that stood five feet taller than the stack itself. The architect's plan had called for an iron "thimble" to be installed atop the smokestack to prevent particles and debris from igniting the tower. But the Hercules Iron Works of Aurora, Illinois, the company that constructed the fair's ice-making machinery and the building that contained it, never installed the thimble. The fire of 10 July started when flames from soft, greasy-burning coal used to fire the boiler below ignited soot in the upper reaches of the smokestack.¹

When Fitzpatrick arrived at the scene, he assumed that the conflagration resembled the ones he had faced earlier. As he had done on these other occasions, he ordered his men to use their ladders to climb the outside of the tower and fight the fire where it had started. "We'll put this blaze out in a minute," he said at the time.² But this time the fire had already spread from the top of the smokestack to the building below. Fitzpatrick and his men alighted onto a balcony approximately fifteen feet below the flames. Shortly thereafter, there was an explosion in the building below them, sealing off their escape path. According to one eyewitness:

[I]mmediate confusion followed among those on the balcony. Two men at once jumped into open space, two were lost on the west side of the tower, and the balance of the frightened human beings rushed to the north side of the tower and huddled together, all-fearful of the oncoming flames and apparently realizing that they were now between two deaths—that of being burned or crushed. Desperation probably caused them to seek the latter, and out into the air in rapid succession shot a half-dozen human beings, whirling and circling over and over. When these poor men struck the flat roof eight feet below they bounded back into the air and fell back again to struggle with death. At last but two men were left surrounded within five feet on all sides with fierce flames. It either was to jump quick or death from fire. One grabbed a rope, started slowly down, passed through two sheets, and then the rope burned in two and the hanging men fell to the roof, bounded into the air a confused mass of arms and legs, and again fell back. As the next man took hold of the rope the four walls separated like melting crust and he was whirled into the burning tower, while the east wall, covered with fire, fell on the man who jumped before him.

The sight fascinated while it sickened, and the situation was made more awful from the fact that thousands of Fair visitors were looking on, and as each person tumbled to a horrible death a simultaneous murmur of horror escaped from throats for fully a half mile in every direction.³

The blaze killed seventeen people, including Captain Fitzpatrick and eight other firemen (fig. 1). It left nineteen people, including five firemen, seriously injured.

The ensuing investigation focused on the smokestack. Ultimate responsibility for this fatal flaw was never determined.⁴ However, the investigation