Fire engine

Near-synonyms: fire truck (usually synonymous in current usage); fire appliance; water engine (formerly synonymous)

Heading home from a party, two hipsters, completely stoned, pause to snuggle on a park bench. A fire engine roars by, bells clanging, sirens screaming. The boy flips. “Solid, doll,” he murmurs, “they’re playing our song!”

A fire aboard TfW 175007, working a Holyhead-Cardiff Central service on February 8, closed the A483 road while five fire engines from Wrexham, Deeside, and Cheshire attended the scene.

A plan somewhat similar to this was adopted by Smeaton in the boiler of his portable fire engine.

In the same year a very compact arrangement for a stationary fire engine was described by Mr. Wm. Baddeley, in which he proposed it should be worked like a capstan by means of handspikes, and it could be bolted down to a ship's deck, or fastened wherever wanted.

This discovery gave a great impulse to mechanical ingenuity, and many schemes were contrived to make this new agent available as a motive power; but the first of these projects that appears to have been of any avail was the fire engine of Captain Tomas Savery, who produced a vacuum by condensing steam in close vessels, and then applied the vacuum so obtained to the elevation of water.