Kurtze Nachricht von einer Neuerfundenen kleinen, aber dabey sehr dauerhafften Feuer-Spritze, welche, bey entstandener Feuers-Gefahr ….
8vo [20.2 x 16.3 cm], (1) f. title page, 1-4 pp., (1) f. single-sided full-page engraving, 5-8 pp., woodcut headpieces, initials and tailpiece, 1full-page copper engraving & 1 half-page woodcut illustration in text. Bound in modern brown stiff paper boards. Externally and internally clean, with some leaves retaining deckle edges.
Very rare 1719 tract announcing a new “small but very durable fire extinguisher (Feuer-Spritze)” able to be operated by “but a few people, in the tightest of spaces, where just one person can stand.” The invention of the mathematician and engineer Jacob Leopold (1674-1727), it is explained here and illustrated with a woodcut diagram and with a full-page engraving depicting the machine in action. Leopold was “the last artist engineer of the Renaissance who developed a more modern view of mechanical engineering combining theory with practice and thus opened the door to the pre-industrial age” (Kerle and Mauersberger, p. 171) He is principally renowned for his 10-volume Theatrum Machinarum (1724-39), the first systematic treatise on mechanical engineering.
Leupold saw a market for his single-piston pump not among the city fire brigades, but among smaller communities and neighborhoods unable to afford trained professionals or costly engines. The modest size of the Feuer-Spritze – essentially a large metal reservoir fitted with a pump handle, metal tube, and metal nozzle – was its principal strength, with the device being able be fit into the narrowest alleyways. Weighing less than 20 pounds, the machine could be operated by just one or two people, and was able to direct a concentrated, uninterrupted stream of water some 40 feet in the air, a range sufficient for protecting most residential buildings. (In Strasbourg, in 1725, Leupold is reported to have demonstrated his invention to suitably impressed colleagues [see Young, p. 79]). Made of copper, brass, or iron, the Feuer-Spritze was both sturdy and cost effective. Leupold’s new emphasis on a consumer market has led Rebecca Saskia Knapp to see him as the primary transitional figure between the technical manuals of early firefighting and a broader literature of public fire-safety awareness (pp. 150-51).
Leopold’s Kurtze Nachricht is part of a growing literature on firefighting published in the decades around 1700, the most notable works being those of Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712) (Beschryving der nieuwlyks uitgevonden en geoctrojeerde slang-brand-spuiten en haare wyze van brand-blussen [Description of the Newly Discovered and Patented Hose Fire Engine and Its Way of Extinguishing Fires], 1690 and 1735) and of Vicenzo Coronelli (1650-1718) (Effetti naturali delle acque, 1718 and 1728). This surge in publication went hand-in-hand with the establishment of public fire departments (e.g., the Parisian Compagnie des Gardes-Pompes, est. 1716) in response to the devastating fires of London (1666), Rostock (1677), Uppsala (1702), Reutlingen (1726), and Copenhagen (1728).
OCLC and KVK locate no copies of this text outside of German institutions.
* Collated against the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek copy (OCLC 165765727); Rebecca Saskia Knapp, Eine Wissengeschichte der Feuersicherheit: Kommunikation über Brandbekämpfung zwischen 1600 und 1800, Ph.D. diss. (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 2013), pp. 150-61; Charles F. T. Young, Fires, Fire Engines, and Fire Brigades: With a History of Manual and Steam Fire Engines, (London: Lockwood & Co., 1866), p. 79; H. Kerle and K. Mauersberger, “From Archimedean Spirals to Screw Mechanisms – A Short Historical Overview,” in The Genius of Archimedes – 23 Centuries of Influence, S. A. Paipetis and M. Ceccerelli, eds., (Dordrecht: A. Springer, 2010), pp. 163-76.
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