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

摘要

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.