Some Fire Service History

I've been horribly negligent about writing in this blog. There are many topics I could be writing about, and I'm going to make an effort to do so more regularly. So I will start by sharing some information that I probably wouldn't normally share. Hopefully this will provide some value to anyone reading it, and also get me into the habit of posting more often.

Recently our station watched an inspirational key note speech from the annual FDIC conference. It was presented by Seattle Chief Mike Gagliano. The speech was about the spirit of the fire service, and how everyone should be proud of being involved, and to understand the history of how we got to where we are.

This was particularly relevant to my station. I have been talking a lot lately with my fellow firefighters and officers about how our station seems to have lost some of our team edge and cohesiveness. The video did a great job of reinforcing some of the concepts behind that, and hopefully it will start to motivate our firefighters to take some more pride in themselves and our station.

As part of that speech, he recommended getting to know the history of the fire service. Why we do some of the things we do, and we take for granted. To understand the history and take some pride in some of our rituals.

He mentioned things like the maltese cross, why we have bugles on our collars for officers, etc. I didn't know the answers to these questions. So I have taken upon myself to do a little research and share this.

Fire officers in dress uniform are traditionally indicated by bugles on their collars. The more bugles, the higher the rank. So how did this tradition get started?

Communication is vital to anything involving more than 1 human being. That's obviously true of firefighting as well. Communicating orders on the fire ground allows the incident command to maintain control and to assign actions to control the scene.

Today our method of communication on the fire ground is by two way radio. We have established protocols about who should communicate and how. Of course, radios have not always been available to the fire service. Many decades ago, there was no such thing as radio communication. And even once radios were invented, it was quite a while before portable radios were available and affordable enough to be used by the fire service.

So how did the officers in charge communicate and relay their orders? They would use big old megaphones. Just like the big cones you might see cheerleaders use. They would shout their orders through the megaphones to the firefighters. Only officers were allowed to use them. Because of course the firefighters couldn't carry them to communicate back. So the officers in charge would setup their command post (although they probably didn't call it that back then), and use the megaphones to shout their orders.

Since the megaphones were identified strictly with the officers, it was natural to use them as a symbol of the officer's rank. So bugles were used as insignia on the collars of the officers.

That's just a little bit of information that I thought I would share regarding the brass we adorn ourselves with.