ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Fighting Fire, Fighting Fraud: Home Fire Protection Equipment and the Market

• In Event: Domesticating Technologies in the 20th Century

English Abstract

From the 1950s to 1970s, safety-conscious Americans worried about losing their property and their lives to house fires started to buy home fire protection equipment including portable fire extinguishers, alarm systems, and sprinklers. Although these devices had been integrated into factories and theaters for decades, U.S. families were slower to accept the importance of this technology for home safety. According to the well-known magazine Consumer Reports, fewer than 2% of U.S. homes had fire extinguishers during the early 1950s. As businesses pushed to sell citizen-consumers on domestic fire protection equipment, however, some companies took advantage of this new market. Exploiting buyers who did not have the expertise to assess the effectiveness of this equipment, predatory companies sold goods ranging from fire “grenades” too small to put out a fire to multi-unit warning systems that were sold door-to-door at prices ten times higher than the cost of their components.

Drawing on material from popular magazines, the National Safety Council serial Family Safety, and the National Fire Protection Association, this presentation examines how experts tried to protect the public from fraudulent fire safety devices. Unlike many other examples of false and misleading marketing, the sale of unusable fire extinguishers and alarms posed serious risks to their customers. This project brings together the literatures on contaminated food, toxic drugs, and hazardous appliances and on fraud to explain how professionals and the public responded to unfair business practices related to physical safety as well as economic security.

Author

• Alexander Ian Parry, University of Rochester Medical Center