Street fire alarm boxes

[spin_the_wheel 460]

Can someone list the Departments who had gamewell or similar street alarm boxes in service in their districts. Also are there any still in use in Westchester? (Mamoroneck village maybe? ) Thanks be safe.......

Edited October 8, 2006 by Ladder47

[res6cue 67]

Nyack still has them.

[spin_the_wheel 460]

Nyack still has them.

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Yes Rockland has a few...Haverstraw still has them as well. In Nyack when the box is pulled the horns and sirens sound in town.....at Empire I think the box # is sounded by the old bell still on top of the firehouse...is this correct??? The bell and tape punches in all the firehouses still...now thats old school !!!

[RWC130 594]

I've seen a few in Mount Kisco, NY and in Valhalla, NY on the

Westchester Medical Center campus.

Peekskill, NY had them until the mid 1990's

FYI:

I am a huge Gamewell Fire Alarm Box collector. I restore them.

I have 25 or so Gamewell Boxes from late 1800's on up to Present.

HISTORY OF THE GAMEWELL FIRE ALARM BOXES

INTRODUCTION

The death knell is sounding for the familiar red box on the corner!

All over America the old Gamewell fire alarm telegraph "break glass" boxes are coming down so fast, that within a few more years they will have all vanished.

These old alarm boxes, now obsolete, have done yeoman service in calling out the firemen in the cities and towns across America for nearly a century. Now, as the fade from the American scene, they are finding their way not only into the collections of fire buffs, but also collectors of America as well.

WHY THE FIRE ALARM TELEGRAPH BOXES ARE DISAPEARING?

Hundreds of communities, which installed fire alarm telegraph systems near the turn of the century, find themselves faced with an expense of perhaps one to two hundred thousand dollars or to renovate the system (including underground cables) to keep the fire insurance rate from rising.

Many of these communities are replacing the old telegraph systems with modern telephone boxes, or radio-transmitting boxes, which are usually leased rather than purchased. In some instances no replacement is made, with all the fire alarms reported by regular telephone.

Recent studies show that in many cities as many as eight out of ten alarms transmitted form the telegraph boxes are false. For this reason, also, many Fire Chief's favor retiring of the old fire alarm telegraph systems.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FIRE ALARM TELEGRAPH BOX IN AMERICA

In 1842 Samuel F.B. Morse, Jr. perfected the telegraph, a means of transmitting electrical impulses over the wires. Within a year an Englishman, Alexander Baine, and a Bostonian, Dr. William F. Channing, each working independently, proposed the use of a the new telegraph for transmitting fire alarms.

It was Dr. Channing who actually developed the first fire alarm telegraph system, which was installed in Boston in 1852. In 1855 Dr. Channing and his partner, Moses G. Farmer, obtained patents on the system, which they soon sold to John N. Gamewell, whose company and successive companies still bearing the Gamewell name have manufactured nearly all of the "familiar red boxes on the corner" in more than two thousand cities, towns, and villages across America.

After the first system in Boston in 1852 came Philadelphia in 1855, St. Louis in 1858, and New Orleans and Baltimore in 1860. New York City installed fire alarm telegraph boxes in 1869.

In the first boxes a notched code wheel was turned by a hand crank on the front of the box. This crude arrangement soon gave way to a spring-driven clockwork type mechanism to drive the code wheel when actuated by a lever to be pulled.

However, if the lever was pulled more than once, an incorrect alarm could result; hence the familiar instruction on the front of the old boxes a "non-interfering pull" mechanism was devised.

As the system expanded, another problem arose when two or more boxes on the same circuit were pulled, they interfered with each other's signals, causing a jumbled alarm. In 1875 a Gardiner non-interfering patent was issued, and in 1889 John Ruddich developed a "successive box movement" wherein the alarm form a box pulled on a circuit which already had another box transmitting an alarm would be delayed until the first box finished.

The mechanism was still further improved into one of the "three-fold" features, which sent the alarm over the circuit after twenty-four revolutions of the code wheel regardless of the condition of the circuit, to insure the alarm being transmitted before the mainspring ran down (usually 36 rounds)

In the early twentieth century, patents by C.E. Beach added an automatic grounding feature to the system, so that the alarm would still get through even in the event of a break in a fire alarm cable.

Thus the "three-fold" boxes featured (1) non-interfering pull (2) quick succession non-interfering (for boxes on the same circuit) and (3) automatic grounding (used as a substitute circuit in the event of a broken cable.)

After the original hand cranked boxes came boxes locked with a key, which was issued to a policeman, or responsible citizen, or kept on the side of the box. In 1900 the "Cole keyguard" appeared, being the familiar glass-front projection, with the instructions, "BREAK GLASS, OPEN DOOR, PULL HANDLE DOWN ONCE, LET GO". In 1922 a quick action door was made available, replacing the Cole keyguard.

After World War II the telephone alarm boxes began to appear, and in the 1950's and 1960's the first radio transmitter boxes appeared. With their inherent advantages over telegraph boxes, easier maintenance, and leasing arrangements, the fire alarm telegraph boxes have become, as one manufacturer of telegraph boxes states in his advertisements, "a relic of the past".

[res6cue 67]

Yes Rockland has a few...Haverstraw still has them as well. In Nyack when the box is pulled the horns and sirens sound in town.....at Empire I think the box # is sounded by the old bell still on top of the firehouse...is this correct???  The bell and tape punches in all the firehouses still...now thats old school !!!

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I believe so, haven't been up that way in a while though. But yeah, Nyack is REALLY old school, and I love it!