The Fireproof Building: Technology and Public Safety in the Nineteenth-Century American City (review)

Abstract

Raise your hand if you regularly examine the escape routes posted on the doors of hotel rooms. Probably not many hands went up. As Sara Wermiel concludes in her admirably researched book, the "infrastructure of safety" composed of laws and technology is now largely invisible. The horror of devastating factory fires and urban conflagrations is remote to most of us. But this distance from awful loss of life, heat-fused glass, twisted metal columns, and heaps that were once brick walls has not always been the case.