Side Quest: How To Find a Fire
Even if it burned out ninety-five years ago.
Everybody says that Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers’ quest for a fire-safe cigarette was inspired by a fatal cigarette-caused fire in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1929. As a result of her advocacy, the National Bureau of Standards invented a safer cigarette by 1932. But, alas, the safer cigarette wasn’t adopted by a single manufacturer until stricter legislation was adopted, state-by-state, starting about fifteen years ago.
Fires, and fire investigation, are an interest. Looking for a challenge, I thought it would be neat to find a picture of the fire that inspired Ms. Rogers.
Fires are usually easy to run down.
Large fires are well-investigated, and the larger the fire, the more parties, with more diverse interests, do the investigating. In my state, depending on the location, suspected cause, and year, a fire could be investigated by:
Three local agencies:
Police department;
Fire department;
Building department;
At least one state agency;
One or more federal agencies:
OSHA (workplace);
ATF (incendiary);
Consumer Product Safety Commission (product involved, injury reported)
In addition to public entities, each insurance carrier with an interest in the risk1 will conduct its own investigation, often while the scene is still hot.
Cool trick for finding out who these carriers are, by the way: Do a FOIA to an agency you know investigated the fire, and ask for all sign-in sheets for scene inspections. If the fire was large enough, the public investigation and private investigation might have been conducted at the same time, OR while the agency was still in control of the scene, and the sign-in sheet will reveal who was there, and on whose behalf.
I love anything investigated by multiple agencies, with different missions and motivations because what might be considered “exempt” from public records requests by one agency, governed by one records regime, might not be by another.
For example: ATF, if it is investigating, considers the matter criminal; its materials will likely be exempt for quite some time. But the local fire department is likely not investigating the fire as a “crime.”2 Its records should be available, and because fire departments are, on the whole, more standardized in records and investigation than police departments – will yield useful information. Like who else is investigating?
OSHA, if it investigated, might consider its investigative materials exempt forever; but if someone is cited, that citation is public, as is the code section they’re cited for violating.
All the local building commissioner usually wants to know is whether the fire scene remains a hazard, and whose responsibility it is to make it safe. Was a firewatch required afterward? Building department. Was there a fight between someone who wanted to preserve the scene, and someone who wanted to start demolition? Building department.
Police department? They might have the 911 calls. Who reported the fire? What did it look like? When? The police department shouldn’t hold these back. Not on a fire.
More than well-investigated, fires are and have always been, absurdly well-covered in news and popular media. Sheet music commemorates the Great Boston Fire of 18723, and photographs of the aftermath are abundant4. There are engravings depicting the Precious Blood Church Fire of 18755.
It seemed like it might be a neat trick, then, to find a picture of a sketchily described fire that, for all I knew, could well have been apocryphal. Ms. Rogers never gave details of the fire she found so inspirational. It’s not in the congressional record. She didn’t discuss it in the press, although she did talk about the fire-safe cigarette and match work done by the Bureau of Standards.
A slight problem, though:
Lowell, Massachusetts was, in the 1920s, a city built of wood and stuffed to the gills with lint and French Canadians. It burned on the regular, end-to-end.
A “when” would help narrow things down.
Everybody says the inspirational fire was in 1929.
Wikipedia says so6. Academics say so7. Legal academics say so8. ANSI says so9. Guys with websites with little flickery flame .GIFs say so10. Senator Miriam Delgado of the Philippines said so11.
But if press reports are to be believed, the “safer cigarette” was developed by the Bureau of Standards by August 31, 192912. A fire that results in government action, a completed study, and a prototype within a single calendar year? Balls. Or, to be on-brand, bullshit.
Press reports can be wrong. Or mis-recorded. Or even refer to work as complete when still in progress. So I went to the horse’s mouth.
The Bureau of Standards doesn’t exist anymore. However, federal agencies, when they close or reorganize, don’t get to just chuck their records in the shredder. There’s always a successor entity with responsibility for all the paper.
Here, it’s the National Institute of Standards. And they, helpfully, have more than a century of publications scanned on their website. Searchable. Vaguely.
A search for “cigarette” and “1929” yields “The National Bureau of Standards Yearbook for the Year 1929,” and the blurb below on page 118:
The description seems about right13 but the publication date was 1928. January of 1928.
Reading the article – having obtained the relevant issue of the NFPA Quarterly from Google Books – it seemed so. It contained a description of the proposed modified cigarette, with a “water glass” tip, consistent with press reports of the “safer cigarette” design.
If Ms. Rogers was inspired by a fire, it wasn’t in 1929, or 1928. 1927 or 1926 seemed likely.
The Lowell Fire Department Annual Report for 1926, part of the “Lowell City Records 1927,” from Archive.org, helpfully provides a listing of the cause of all fires in the city, that year:
Thirty-four cigarette-caused fires in 1926. Definite possibility. But were any notable? Inspiring? Maybe a whole bunch of fatalities? Maybe somewhere in Ms. Rogers’ neighbourhood?
No fatalities. Only three reported that year, none tied to cigarette-caused fires:
There was a notable fire, though:
A million-dollar fire. That’s twenty-five million in today’s money14.
And like all big fires, this received abundant coverage. Not just in the popular press – which is mostly paywalled, and I’m not made of money – but in insurance and fire-investigation circles.
But could the Pollard fire have been cigarette-caused? The National Fire Protection Association reported, based on information provided by the involved insurance carriers, that it very likely was.
“It appears very probable that the careless use of cigarettes or matches was the cause of the fire.”15
After double-checking adjacent years, there weren’t any other fires so notable and cigarette-associated that stood out, in Ms. Rogers’ district.
If Ms. Rogers was inspired by a fire in Lowell, it was this one.
But where’s my picture? My something scenic. My something special. I wasn’t satisfied with scanned copies of shrunk-down black-and-white nothing from the NFPA Quarterly.
But, Archive.org has a lovely collection of documents from the Lowell Historic Society, including photographs taken by the Lowell City Engineer, during the relevant period.
And that’s where I found my fire. Not the grainy scans from the NFPA Quarterly. Taken June 4, 1926, photographs of the wrecked and ruined Pollard’s Department Store and Masonic Temple.
Footnotes
“Risk” is insurance for the item insured. A building more often than not.
Usually.
https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=6461&pid=3
https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/2801pj731
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precious_Blood_Church_fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-safe_cigarette#:~:text=In%201929%2C%20a%20cigarette%2Dignited,cigarette%2C%20which%20NBS%20introduced%20in
McGuire, A, “How the Cigarette Industry Keeps the Home Fires Burning,” Tobacco Control, Vol. 8, Issue 1 (March 1, 1999), available at https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/8/1/67
McGuire A, Daynard RA. When cigarettes start fires: industry liability. Trial Magazine. 1992;28:44–49.
https://www.ansi.org/-/media/Files/ANSI/Education/Case%20Studies/ASTM%20E2187r2%20pdf.pdf
https://www.fire-extinguisher101.com/article0709-fire-safe-cigarettes.html
https://legacy.senate.gov.ph/lisdata/98498396!.pdf
Time Magazine, “Science: Fireproof Fire” August 31, 1929. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,752016,00.html
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-C13-46eaa415d8560d2d1444c628547ec537/pdf/GOVPUB-C13-46eaa415d8560d2d1444c628547ec537.pdf
Don’t trust me on this.
“Unknown” is a term of art, equivalent to the term “undetermined” as used from 1992-2020, during which time fire investigators recognized four categories of “causes:” “Undetermined,” “Accidental” “Incendiary” and “Natural.”
Accidental means that no intentional act contributed to the fire; incendiary means intentionally set; natural is, idk, lightning or volcanoes or moon powers or some shit, and “undetermined,” like “unknown” means that the fire cause hasn’t or can’t be proven to be one of the other three categories. It does not mean that the source of ignition and/or first materials ignited have not been determined.