Strike the box! Pull the box! Box the still! We have a box! Box it, baby! Gimme a box! Mutual-aid box alarm! Strike out the box…. No matter how the term is used or what area you may be from, “the box” usually refers to a fire. The term originally referred to the fire alarm box found on the street corner of many cities of towns across North America.
The familiar fire alarm box or pull box was used for notifying the fire department of a fire. Normally installed on street corners, fire alarm boxes were the main means of turning out firefighters before telephones were common. This Close Call is all about how a very old but still very reliable street corner fire alarm box and its box alarm system made a huge difference in one community.
History of “the box”
According to the book Fire Alarm! by the late fire service historian and fire buff Paul Ditzel, fire alarm “systems” to summon firefighters started in the 1700s. Back then, organized fire companies used church bells to alert the firefighters of a fire. One of the most famous bells was Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, which was used to notify firefighters of fires before it rang out for freedom.
Other means to notify firefighters of a fire ranged from shooting guns to using moose horns to hitting old railroad locomotive tires with a hammer. Some towns had night watchmen who would patrol the streets. Upon discovering a fire, they would shake a wooden rattle that was, evidently, loud enough to wake people. Upon hearing the rattle, the homeowners would throw their leather buckets outside for volunteers to pick up and start a bucket brigade.
William Ellery Channing, a physician from Massachusetts, is credited with the design of the first telegraph fire alarm box system in the mid-1800s. He envisioned a system of fire boxes and overhead telegraph lines leading to a central fire alarm office. He tried to convince the City of Boston to consider a system like this, but the city turned down his idea.
Channing partnered with Moses G. Farmer who was considered by many to be an expert electrical mechanic. But what really interested Channing was Farmer’s bell-striking device. In 1848, the City of Boston decided to investigate the potential of this new fire alarm system, and the City Council later voted for funds to construct two of the bell-striking machines that would strike the bells from distant points.
In March 1855, Channing gave a lecture at the Smithsonian Institute on “The American Fire Alarm Telegraph.” In the audience was John Nelson Gamewell. Gamewell was a bit of a telegraph buff and was quite interested in Channing’s topic. Gamewell returned home to South Carolina and sought out his friend James Dunlap, who ultimately financed Gamewell’s enthusiasm for the purchasing rights for installation of systems in the Southern United States. A few years later, Gamewell bought all the rights for about $30,000.
Gamewell did not fare very well. He sold only a few systems, and with the start of the Civil War, focus shifted. In addition, Dunlap refused to put another cent into Gamewell's fire box system. During the Civil War, the government confiscated all of the patents for the fire alarm box system. Penniless, Gamewell moved his family to Hackensack, NJ, in 1866.
John Kennard later purchased the patents and sold them back to Gamewell, forming Gamewell, Kennard & Company. Meanwhile, other fire alarm companies were forming. But it was Gamewell's company that ended up capturing about 95 percent of the total market.
Simply put, each box has a unique number assigned to it, and within the box is a system that transmits that number. When pulled, bells in firehouses immediately rang the box number and the firefighters counted the bells and compared it to a chart indicating the box location. In communities with on-call volunteer firefighters, a very large boat-style or fog-style horn (or several horns) would blast the box number, turning out the members.
In today’s world, the only company still manufacturing telegraph fire alarm boxes is the Gamewell, now owned by Honeywell, Inc. While no one is purchasing new complete telegraph fire alarm systems anymore, there are some towns that still add to their existing systems. Thus, there is still a need for these boxes.
About the Jeannette Fire Department
Jeannette is a city in Westmoreland County, PA, located southeast of Pittsburgh. Covering a population of about 10,000 people, the City of Jeannette Fire Department (FDCJ) has both career staffing and paid on-call firefighters responding to approximately 1,000 calls annually out of one station. Any working fire receives automatic response of off-duty personnel as well as a mutual-aid ladder, engine, and air and salvage truck. The career members belong to IAFF Local 78.
The incident
On Feb. 14, 2017, at 0042 hrs, the City of Jeannette Fire Department was alerted to a pulled street box working at the intersection of Penn Avenue and South 15th Street. Within 2 minutes, the captain and firefighter on duty had responded to the box where they found three teenagers stating that their house was on fire a few houses past the box.
Upon investigation, smoke was found coming from the open front door of a two-story, wood-frame home. The alarm was upgraded to a working fire, bringing the tower ladder and an outside engine company for the city cover assignment, and the duty crew made entry to investigate with a thermal imaging camera, water can and irons.
A working fire was located on the first floor with some minor extension into the balloon-frame exterior wall of the bathroom. This was quickly dug out and extinguished with the water can, preventing any fire extension. Companies did further work to ensure that the fire was out.
One of the teenagers stated that he had been awoken by the hardwired smoke detectors that are required in all rental properties within the city, and when he awoke, the house was full of smoke. He attempted to call for help but his cell phone was dead and there was no landline phone in the residence. He made his way downstairs where he could see the fire burning on the first floor. He then exited out the front door, ran to the municipal fire box across the street, and pulled the hook of the 103-year-old box.
A combination of a community-based proactive fire prevention, inspection programs and fire protection systems did exactly what they were always intended to do—save lives and property!
FDCJ’s box alarm system
The Gamewell Municipal Fire Alarm has been in continuous service in the City of Jeannette for over a century. The system was expanded citywide in 1914, but history is hard to trace prior to the establishment of the paid fire department in 1915.
There is evidence that the first fire boxes were installed in the downtown area well before the 1914 citywide expansion. Most of the boxes installed in 1914 were the Gamewell Excelsior model boxes. These boxes are sought after by collectors for their unique scrollwork with double torches cast into the door and their limited numbers because most cities installed the full-size cottage-style boxes instead. At that time, the boxes were marketed to smaller towns and cities as a more affordable alternative to the full-size cottage-style boxes. Jeannette still has about a half a dozen of these Excelsior model boxes on the streets today from the original install in 1914, and the department believes that the city is the only municipality in the country that still has this type of box in service.
Starting with the 1914 expansion, six-inch gongs were installed in all full-time and call firefighters homes, and they all had a card listing the box numbers so that they knew the area to respond to for a fire. The system was expanded and updated over the years, originally by city electricians, fire department personnel and, in later years, a contracted electrician.
Today there are approximately 153 boxes in service citywide on six different fire alarm circuits. These circuits are all “repeated,” or tied together citywide via the central office at the fire station, so any box transmitted on any circuit is repeated over all circuits citywide. This feature is not as important as it was in the days before cell phones and radios, but there are still a handful of members who still have gongs in their homes.
Most of the early boxes were replaced and updated to newer boxes over the years, but a least a handful of every style box that Gamewell made between 1910 and present day remain on the streets and in service. The FDCJ is well known by Gamewell enthusiasts as an operating Gamewell museum and get several visits each year by people wanting to see the system. Every one of the city’s calls are transmitted over the Gamewell system, including one round of box 9-1-1 for all still alarm tone activations from the county 9-1-1 center. Even with the more modern digitized system that they use to provide the incoming box information on a computer screen, they still use one punch register or “ticker tape” like the old days to verify the correct box numbers were interpreted by the computer.
In addition to the “street boxes” that are on the street corners as a means of manual transmission of alarms, the city also has about an equal amount of “master boxes” in service on the system. Master boxes are boxes that are tied to a building fire alarm or sprinkler system, and they will automatically trip upon any fire alarm or water flow at that location. These boxes account for about 90 percent of the automatic fire alarms to which the department responds within the city, and are still the fastest means for an automatic alarm to get to the fire department.
The FDCJ has been to locations that are dual monitored with a master box and an alarm company, and have actually handled the call and returned to quarters before getting the alarm company call from 9-1-1! The Gamewell system also works during power outages from battery and generator backup, without dependence on phone lines, and even works with a break in a wire on one side of the loop.
Maintaining the system
As you can imagine, like any other once-booming industrial town that has suffered through the closing of plants and industry, Jeannette is working with a slim budget. There was a time when the Gamewell system had fallen in a state of disrepair, with breaks in the circuit wires on nearly every circuit, boxes that hadn’t been painted in decades and other issues while it was not being managed directly by fire department staff.
In 2015, the mayor and city manager were faced with a decision—to fix the system or pull the plug. When they brought in an electrical contractor for a meeting, they were told that all new wiring would need to be strung, costing tens of thousands of dollars.
Knowing the benefits of keeping the system, FDCJ Captain Bill Frye, with the support of Fire Chief Vance Phillips, met with the mayor and city manager and assured them that they can make the system 100 percent again at a fraction of the cost if they turned the maintenance responsibility back over to the fire department. (It hadn’t been the responsibility of the fire department since the 1970s.)
In August 2015, city leaders agreed and Phillips appointed Frye as the superintendent of fire alarms for the city. Frye consulted his good friend Tom Donathon from the Wheeling, WV, Fire Department, and they spent about two weeks bringing the city fire alarm back to full operation—all for about $600 worth of wire and other construction hardware.
Today, the fire department maintains the alarm, with Frye overseeing the project and a few other firefighters assisting with pulling new wire or other maintenance issues that need to be handled. They are still adding new master boxes to this day.
Thoughts from Captain Frye
Some people try to argue that the system is obsolete and there is no need for the boxes now with cell phones and alarm companies, but I always try to explain that even after 100-plus years, it is the fastest and only sure way to contact the fire department—and I cite numerous instances like the one that just occurred. With today’s digital age, there are so many systems that can become overwhelmed or fail whereas the Gamewell system will always work with rock-solid reliability.
We had a citywide “100-year flood” back in 2009, with nearby towns also flooding, and the 9-1-1 system became overwhelmed with calls for help. During the mass confusion and hundreds of calls coming out, we began receiving box 16 at South Fifth and Cassett. We responded to the box to find a group of people there pointing at a house along the flooded creek. There we saw a young mother and her three kids on a porch roof because the first floor of their house was under water and the sandstone foundation was being washed out. We set up our tower ladder at the edge of the flood waters and reached over to pick them off to safety. Afterward, the bystanders who pulled the box told us that they were trying to call 9-1-1 for several minutes and were getting a busy signal so they pulled the nearby box.
Additionally, in April 2016, we had what would be the largest fire in the last decade in the downtown area; it was reported by a street box pull. Just before midnight, box 18 began ringing, and when the engine turned onto the avenue, heavy smoke was pouring from the block. Crews were already on scene and stretching the first line when 9-1-1 radioed that they had received reports of a fire on the 500 block. This building was heavily involved upon arrival and attached to a block of other buildings. It could have proved catastrophic to our downtown business district if the alarm was delayed.
The list goes on and on, so when people question the system, I ask them this question: “Why fix something that isn’t broken and get rid of something that was bought and paid for a long time ago?”
Thoughts from Chief Vance
It was my number one priority when I became chief to get the system back to 100 percent.
Often for citizens or city politicians who may not understand the importance of the system or how it works, we just simply walk them to a master box located on a commercial structure across the street from the station, which is monitored by both master box and outside alarm company. With the garage door open to the station, I ask them to take notice of the time it takes the master box to alert our station, compared to the time the 9-1-1 center receives a activation from the monitored alarm company.
Once the hook is pulled, almost instantly the bells start ringing 1-2-1-4. As we wait patiently, the shock usually starts to settle in on why the 9-1-1 center hasn’t notified us that the alarm company called them. Roughly 3 to 4 minutes later, 9-1-1 will call on the radio, letting me know they received that alarm. At this point, no more doubt remains, and I’m frequently asked how they can get a box attached to their house.
Observations from Chief Goldfeder
New Hyde Park, NY, is a town neighboring the one where I grew up on Long Island. I remember as a kid the New Hyde Park Fire Department’s (NHPFD) box alarm system—a system that is still in use today! When NHPFD’s boxes were pulled, three giant Gamewell Diaphone airhorns would sound, “honking” out the box numbers, four times in a row, so that everyone knew where the fires were. In other words, box 9-3-8-7 sounded the horns 9 times … pause … then 3 times, etc., and then repeated that another three times. You KNEW when there was a fire call in New Hyde Park! Those horns are very loud and easily heard 4-5 miles away. In addition, they have bells and punch tape to identify the location of the box. Like Jeannette, the system works and works well—old fashioned technology that works well in the 21st century.
While I push forward personally to do all I can to embrace change (I try but am not always successful), I cannot ignore the fact that some things work and shouldn't be messed with.
In the 1980s, one of my responsibilities as a chief officer was communications for a pretty large county—large in both land and population. That was a time when everyone and their brother was trying to sell us computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems. These CAD systems offered “so many great features” and, generally, there was only one set. But I found that these systems could actually delay the processing of fire and emergency calls. At that point, I was very proud of our dispatchers, who could process fire- and EMS-related calls in about 30–40 seconds, so why we would purchase a CAD system that slowed that down?
Many jurisdictions bought CAD systems because it does all kinds of great stuff, but few pay attention to the fact that when their dispatcher takes a call using paper and pencil, the call is processed within seconds. But when they switched to a CAD system, it took minutes.
While I am not saying we should necessarily process calls using paper and pencil, I am saying that if your dispatchers processed calls pre-CAD (from the time the phone rings to the time the fire apparatus is alerted) in seconds, and it now takes longer with the CAD system, you have done a disservice to those who need help. Rapid call-taking/processing time saves civilians, their property and reduces risk to the firefighters crawling down those hallways. The quicker we get there and do our jobs, the better it is for those who called us to begin with.
Any agency that develops specs to upgrade or purchase a CAD system should always have a section related to performance (based upon NFPA 1221 standard) in call-handling and processing. A new system should never reduce response times, no matter how great the other features it offers may be. The only reason people call is because things are going really bad, and we have an obligation to serve them with equipment that expedites that help, not slow it down. This is especially important for fire/EMS departments that are served by regional police/fire/EMS communication centers. Make sure the CAD system gets the needed help to that child choking, that person struck or that family whose home is on fire—quickly! That’s the priority, not a CAD system’s ability to manage police records or crimes that occurred three hours ago.
Final thoughts
It’s nice to know that there are still some Jeannette’s out there—cities that understand how important time is and that still have a system that gets help to the members of the community in a hurry, regardless of the status of phones, landlines, cell towers or technology.
While most areas don't have a functional pull box system, those in leadership positions should make sure that however their fire, EMS and related alarms are received, that modern technology—no matter how well intended—is reliable, backed up and is designed based upon rapid call processing, turnout and response. At the end of the day, getting help to those in need as quickly and successfully as we possibly can is pretty much why we exist.
Our sincere thanks to Jeanette Fire Chief Vance Phillips, Captain Bill Frye and all the members of the FDCJ for their assistance in sharing this very unique Close Call.
Billy Goldfeder
BILLY GOLDFEDER, EFO, who is a Firehouse contributing editor, has been a firefighter since 1973 and a chief officer since 1982. He is deputy fire chief of the Loveland-Symmes Fire Department in Ohio, which is an ISO Class 1, CPSE and CAAS-accredited department. Goldfeder has served on numerous NFPA and International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) committees. He is on the board of directors of the IAFC Safety, Health and Survival Section and the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.
