Fire Grenades: the Dangerous Extinguishers of Yesteryear 

the lead doesn't need to melt, just soften. they still sell fragable links for doors that are propped open and are meant to melt and close the door in case of a fire, they use a low melting lead alloy

These are relatively rare find in antique stores because most were either used to put out fires and just thrown away and broken.

The final downfall of these came from the US and Royal Navy. Who had discovered that Carbon Tet did a great job in putting out shipboard fires, while at the same time greatly increasing a ships casualty count. Shipboard fires being prone to rapidly exceed 400 degrees resulting in the navy ships staging what is effectively a chemical weapons attack on themselves. There were a few incidents that got them very quickly banned from Naval Vessels in the runup to WW2.

3:12 It decomposes into ammonium and hydrogen chloride... so instead of a fire you've now got some corrosive and toxic gasses hanging around. Good times. Also I remember learning about carbon tetrachloride in chemistry in high school. Apparently if you have a lot of alcohol in your system and get a big whiff of the stuff, it can basically dissolve your kidneys in a couple of hours. Obviously that's not survivable.

These still exist! I work in a school in South Korea. There are special bottles on the wall meant to be thrown at fires. They had only ones collecting dust on the wall so I thought it was just a relic no one bothered to remove. But just this year, 2023, they replaced them with new ones!

My father is a volunteer firefighter, and growing up, I always thought this was the coolest device in terms of design and aesthetic. I was always warned by my dad to never break them or let the liquid out, as it was incredibly toxic.

I had accidental automatic fire suppression system in the trunk of my car :) Some 12gr Co2 canisters had fallen out of their box and was laying at the bottom of the trunk of my car. One day I was driving at the highway and passing some big rigs keeping it floored for a long time to get up to speed doing around 150km/h when I heard a loud bang then another loud bang. I stopped at first opportunity to try find out and found the exploded empty Co2 cartridges on top of the burnt carpet of the trunk. There was a leak in the exhaust and when driving fast the hot exhaust gases had heated up the trunk so much the carpet had stared to burn and was put out again by the exploding Co2 canisters....

I remember a friend of mine discovered he still had 2 or 3 installed in the rafters of his garage, complete with the wire holders that would drop them "automatically". Never know when you'll find a nearly 100 year old chemical weapon somebody's grandpa installed once & forgot about.

I have a fire grenade, virtually identical to the one you showcased in this video - clear glass, clear liquid - save that mine has no label; it is completely unmarked. It is perfectly intact, no leaks, not even a scratch. I found it back on our family farm in the 1970s. We had an old farmhouse (built 1834) with a nearby summer house. One spring, I was over at the summer house and saw a glint of light on the ground. It was the glass globe of the fire grenade, barely protruding. It had obviously been there for a long time, and since it had been exposed to freezing winter temperatures without breaking, it was obvious that the liquid was not water. We carefully extracted it and cleaned it up. A little research soon identified it. I had had good chemistry classes in school, and was fully aware of the toxicity and danger of carbon tetrachloride, so we treated it as the hazardous object it is, but wanted to keep it as a historical curiosity. Currently, I have it stored wrapped in several layers of very soft towels, in a strong and secure box in a storage area far from the residential part of our house. Thank you for this video.

I remember one of those glass containers filled with Carbon Tetrachloride being on a shelf in the first house I lived in. It didn’t make the move(early’50’s)to the home I grew up in however. A while after the move, there was a newspaper article about the toxicity of Carbon Tet. A person had died who had been given a drink laced with it as a joke.

In my early days as a firefighter, my first department carried a tote full of sandwich bags with either baking soda or ABC fire extinguisher powder on both the engine and pumper trucks. The idea wasnt so much for a large fire but specifically for chimney fires. If you tried using a normal ABC extinguisher or even a water can on it, you were just as likely to spread the fire inside the house by making the embers come flying out of the fireplace or wood stove. We woukd just take the bags of powder and throw them into the fireplace with some force to bust the bag, spilling the powder out, or just toss one or two into the wood stove and shut the doors. The heat from the fire would melt the plastic bag and the powder would be taken up the chimney by just the heat from the fire and choke out the fire in the chimney. If the bags didnt completely knock out the fires, it would usually slow it down enough for us to give us time to deploy a handline and ladders to get a crew on the roof to drop the piercing nozzle into the chimney to knock it down and save the house by keeping the fire from extending beying the chimney.

Slight correction @7:30 the heat melts the metal tab, releasing a spring loaded hammer that shatters the globe. This way the height doesn’t matter as a fall from lower height may not break the glass.the lead doesn’t have to melt, just soften enough for the spring pressure to overcome the lead tab.

1:39 I have the modern version of Godfrey's explosive extinguisher. They are made by a company called AFO (Auto Fire Off). It is a 5" styrofoam ball filled with flame retardant powder and a small explosive charge. The ball is wrapped in a fast acting fuse. I have tested them on an old 8'x8' garden shed we were removing and they work! The first test was the ball mounted in its wire wall rack. The shed was filled with flammable materials and lit. It took about three minutes for the fire to get big enough to reach the ball. The second it exploded thick black smoke started rolling out of every crack and the fire was out. In the second test we doused the inside with a pint of diesel and let it really get burning. I tossed a ball in and it exploded immediately. This time it didn't completely extinguish the fire. It knocked it down but it needed another ball. The beauty of the design is it is self-actuating. The drawback is they only work in enclosed spaces. I use them for my 3D printers as extra insurance against fires.

This is so steampunk. Also I like your Peewee Herman suit. Complete with boomerang bow tie!

A buddy of mine bought a semi restored 67 Volkswagen bus for camping and surfing. I bought him a fire extinguisher to take with him on his adventures. As expected his van caught on fire at a campsite when he was outside of it but the fire extinguisher I bought him exploded within the van and put the fire out. The van and all of his stuff was wrecked but at least the fire went out.

You just made all the home chemists day knowing you can basically find ampules of carbon tet. So many reactions become possible. I am also glad to see you will be testing one of the new ones. I have thought about buying a bunch of them but wanted to see how they worked first. We have a cabin that I am always worried will get burned down by the locals.

I moved onto a remote 1883 Montana farm which is overflowing with legacy items (I call them; for preservation). Amazing times seeing all the old tools and utterly confusing items ... like the fire grenade found at one of the 2 intact dumps. I was guessing some kind of Spencer's Gift lava lamp part if not so obviously heavy and well-made (clear; clear fluid. I also hear they filled some w/saltwater. Regardless taking note of the chemicals.) Revisited yesterday and my mom was able to tag it enough for me to ID these insane things. Also explained what the hell the conical holders were in the barn/shed. Went back today after figuring it out, hoping to find more and yep, recovered 3 more, 2 still in holders and all intact. Holders have the spring-loaded devices but are PLASTIC; confusing as the whole idea is so old. Bizarre as hell; love it.

Ha, Carbon tetrachloride, we had a old glass bottle that was labeled as a fire extinguisher. The other rather inexplicable thing is that Daddy brought home a Gallon (US) jug of Carbon Tetrachloride, how or where he got the jug I have no idea. It was sitting on an upper shelf for the rest of the time I lived with the folks, I just knew I was not to mess with it. Ha, such memories, without this video, I doubt I would have been able to call the above to mind.

This video has really got me thinking hard for the past half hour! How could one easily know whether their antique fire grenade contained water, or carbon tetrachloride?? Labels on such old items rarely list the contents and are often absent altogether. One could attempt to look in various records noting the particular shape of the thing, etc. but that's likely to be extremely unreliable at best. CCl4 is not fluorescent, I thought maybe you could see its Raman shift with a laser pointer, but it's only 10nm and probably invisible without expensive cutoff filters. Index of refraction is only modestly different than water, so focal lengths of the sphere would be a difficult project to discern from those of water. Professional IR and Raman spectroscopy is obviously the way to go, but that's not easily or cheaply available to the common person. Then I thought about speed of sound. Water is 1500 m/s, but only 915 m/s in CCl4. The CCl4 grenade should sound significantly different when shaken or tapped, but without a similarly sized glass container of water would you really be able to tell? And then, after all that, I just remembered now....just measure the goddamn density! The tetrachloride is like 60% more dense than water! You don't even have to take accurate measurements! Just pick it up and it must be obvious that it's weirdly heavy! I think I'm going to go to bed now...🥴

Actually the canister that you have in front of you that was wall-mounted, when fire actuated the spring device it wouldn’t cause the globe to drop to the floor it would actually shatter the globe where it was on the wall. My father used to add one of these near the top of our Christmas tree every season in the early 50s. He did find out that they were dangerous and no longer used them.

There were a couple of the glass globe filled with liquid ones near the furnace in a 1920's house I lived in back in the late 90's.

I remember my grandparents still had several of the Red Comet extinguishers mounted on the walls of their house, all the way through the 80's and into the 90's! I'm glad they never had to find out if they worked.

I've seen one one of these. A plumbing shop my Dad used to work at had one. The liquid was red so anyone looking for it could see it easily. It said "in case of fire throw at base of fire, if no personal is present the fire extinguisher will activate itself". The running joke was they were gonna set something on fire just to see it throw itself at the base of the fire.

I still have a Pyrene brass extinguisher. My dad had a few of them, this one was mounted in his 1949 Buick woodie station wagon. He actually used one of them to put out an engine fire on somebody's car at the side of the road. I saw the red liquid come out as he used it. The replacement unit stayed in the Buick until he sold the car in the mid 1960's for $50. He kept the extinguisher in his garage.

When dad was a kid, sometime before WW2, he was a neighbour of the famous Kiwi racing car driver Garth Hogan. He used to go next door and help fixing up the latest of Garth's cars. One day, when they were putting a test amount of petrol straight into the carburetor of a big V8 eingine sitting in a test-frame, to give it a quick run, the bottle of petrol burst into flames in dad's hands, he thinks from a static electric spark. He dropped it in shock, it broke open at his feet, but before he could get burnt, Garth had followed it with one of these. I never saw one until I saw this video, but it looks exactly how he described it to me, 50 years ago.

We still use updated versions onboard ship for various hot zones and to use by tossing in enclosed spaces

This has such a Sheldon Cooper's Fun with Flags feel to it.

This is awesome, and more practical on tight spaces than fire extinguishers! Plust they just look beautiful. I am sure they could find a replacement for the chemicals to make them safer

My dad has one that he removed from the basement of a local diner in the mid 70's. He was the local fire Marshall at the time. This style hangs from a hook on the ceiling, and has a tab at the bottom that softens with heat to allow the liquid to spray out of the bottom. It is a red glass globe held in a white plastic cone, the bottom of which has the tab/nozzle mechanism.

In the 1970's, one of these probably saved a neighbor's house. A fire started in a plastic trash can and the fumes were so bad that they couldn't get near enough to use a modern extinguisher. They happened to have a fire grenade nearby, as an interesting antique. They threw it at the wall above the trash can and it extinguished the fire.

When I started school in 1947, we had the teardrop shaped bulbs full of carbon tetrachloride in racks on the walls of the old unified school (built 1910) in our little town. The school was destroyed by an earthquake in 1953 and they were still hanging there.

The house I grew up in had one mounted by the chimney. It was a brass cone with a globe in the top and a shotgun shell in the base

Wow, so glad one of your videos appeared in my feed! You’re doing fantastic work, sir.

I was maybe twelve when I saw one of the glass "throw at base of fire" ones in a store, and tried to get my mom to tell "the store" (an old but large department store, so quite impossible) about the danger. It's not just that it loves to suffocate you, it's what happens AFTER you use it on a fire. Then you get stuff far more toxic than Carbon Tet.

I’m so glad the algo helped me find you.

We had one of these in my uncle’s welding and metal fabrication business that I worked in growing up. It was a really cool conversation piece that looked straight out of the 1920s.

Great show thanks for all you do.

I remember seeing carbon tetrachloride grenades at my technical school's workshops in the eighties. I can't believe they had been banned in the US a few years after my school was founded in 1948, and that they still hadn't been removed by 1982.

There were two of them in the house my Grandparents moved into in the early 70s. Grandma kept them for the carbon tet, as a clothing cleaner that was prohibited by then.

For some strange reason, the firefighters of “Hell-A” in Dead Island 2 seem to have used something similar as part of their equipment, as you can pick up a “Chemical Extinguisher” that’s basically a modernized version of this thing while exploring the hotel during the main storyline that can be used to extinguish both environment fires as well as stun the mutated fire-emitting zombies that you can find shambling around the place.

Thanks so much for the video, my local antique store has one of these out in the open with no toxicity warning, just a note that it's fragile. I'll be sure to let them know to put it in one of their locked cases and to advise whoever purchases it of the toxicity.

This was a VERY good video!! Thank you for making it!

was the fusible plug on the Fire Chief wall bracket lead or a lower-temperature alloy such as woods metal which is I believe still used in sprinkler systems today? I love your writing and presentation, BTW!

Good stuff, as Always!!!

Cool channel, subscribed!

Fantastic episode! Thank you!

I'm 65 and I remember these were disappearing as I grew up. Cool viddy!

I sell and service fire extinguishers, one if my clients, an old church, has a few of these still in the building, they had some red ones and a clear one. Those brass "twist and pump" type were also available with a dry chemical in them. Cool video.

i'm really enjoying this channel the information is really well presented. I'm in the early process of making a (pc) game about scientific discoveries and inventions based on them. (its a lot of work.) this channel is certainly helping me come up with influential inventions for my tech tree list.

Looking forward to the live "fire" test. It would be cool if you could get a glassblower to make a few old style salt water ones and see how well they work too.

When I was in college in 2019 my friend was renting a large home built in the 1880s with those glass fire grenades and the landlord gave them out and said they were fire extinguishers for the house. They were very pretty. The fire department apparently had a policy not to enter that particular house if it went up it was made with horsehair plaster.

There’s still one hanging on the wall of the garage in my Grandma’s house. I always wondered what it was because it was sitting in a makeshift holder made from an oil can nailed to the wall, I only recently discovered what it was when I finally decided to actually take a look at it.

My great uncle had a small factory behind his house and I remember when visiting there were several of the Red Ball Grenades hanging on the walls by every entrance to his factory.

This channel is great I get to learn about all the inventions that came from the science fair of America, and also my home state.

Where is the test video!!?? Awesome video by the way , love the detailed information!!

Thank you very much!

My dad and mom had several of these and I had found out how toxic they were. I called our local fire station and asked what we should do with them. The whole family was home for the holidays and suddenly a rather large amount of fire fighters was knocking on the door. We were all hustled out the door and they removed the objects. Dad was a little affronted by this until it was explained just how toxic they were. The kids thought it was a great addition to the holiday celebration.

I just stumbled upon your most fascinating channel. Mssr. Messier (BTW, any relation? To the 18th century astronomer of the catalogue fame, of course?) I never heard of fire grenades, at least the household kind. And your video intro with the cabinet and Mussorgsky is beautiful. Subscribed.

Thank you Gilles!

Every time I hear 'carbon tet' I think of an Australian RU-vidr doing dangerous chemistry in a natty shed

Huh, neat. My grandfather has one of those auto extinguishers in his basement with some other antiques. I had no idea it was a local production though

I'm old enough to remember when you could actually buy Carbon Tetrachloride for use as a solvent. The EPA banned its use in 1985.

At my last apartment, they had aluminum cans that hung above the stove. apparently, in the event of a fire, they would pop open and disperse a powder.

Discovered you cus Simon Wistler pluged you. Loved this video I will be watching more of your content.

Keep it up Bro.

I'm an electrician, and having worked in houses built in the mid to late 1800s, I have seen several of these. Usually in basements. Always found the coolest shit in old walls and basements. Was doing demo work In a barn from the around the turn of the 1900s. Found a pastors Bible with marriage certs and a .22 Derringer hidden in the wall.

I remember staying at some ::ahem:: vintage hotels in the 80s that still had racks of fire grenade extinguishers on the walls near the fire hose cabinets.

I'm looking forward to the bonfire demo!

Your explanation of how your wall bracket functions is a little off. The fusible link doesn’t drop the whole glass globe, but rather springs up and breaks the glass.

The old Carnegie library in my home town of Cloquet, MN, USA had these devices in service as late as the 1970's (they may still be there, as far as I know).

What was the piece at the beginning of the video? It gave me chills, but it sounded so familiar.

I went to elementary school in a very rural area of Canada in the late 1960's and we had these in the classrooms and hallways.

There is also a product called 'BlazeCut' that have a tube style device full of HFC-227EA for small enclosures that works similar to the old carbon tet ones. Just with less toxisity. :)

I remember seeing those in a school that I attended in the 1950's (Canada). Also in use, were ASBESTOS fire blankets. And water fire extinguishers that used acid/soda reactions to make the pressure to spray - aim the hose, and wack the top to break the glass of acid. Ah, the good old days!

When "fighting fire with fire" is taken literally. Reminds m how on lesson learned from the the WWII bombing campaigns of bombing german cities was that bombs designed to create high pressure waves and incendiary bombs shouldn't be mixed and used in the same bombing run, as the blasts of the former would put out the fires started by the later.

Gallium is used as a plug in automatic fire sprinklers today, because it melts at about 80 F, below body temperature. Rather than CCl4, a fire suppressant named bromotrifluoromethane (CBrF3), trademarked Halon, which is heavier than air and has very low toxicity, is dumped into computer rooms in case of fire, and personnel have time to escape and close the doors before the gas reaches nose level. Halon displaces oxygen, and does not damage any components not already damaged by the fire.

When I was a kid our home had a fireplace. One day we were having friends over and my parents lighted a fire in the fireplace. However, they forgot to remove the brass pyrene fire extinguisher they kept in the fireplace. A few minutes before the people arrived the extinguisher exploded and shot across the living room. I ran outside because the fumes from the extinguisher smelled terrible. What a mess.

Did you ever make the video with the exploding extinguisher? I can't find it among your vids.

I never knew...thanks

Greetings from Winnipeg!

I say this with nothing but love: I didn't know that there was a nerdier RU-vid than Technology Connections but here you are eating his lunch. Brilliant video regardless and hopefully you take this comment with as much appreciation as it's intended

The mechanism of a melting component in fire suppression devices is still in use today although mostly for doors, gates and shutters that close automatically in the event of fire.i think you will find it is not lead but likely an alloy of lead that melts at a much lower temp. At a melt point of 621.5 i think if an area got that hot many other item near by would have already started to flash over.

I came across 3 of the red ball design a couple decades ago, still mounted on floor joists above the basement floor. I was a service tech at the time.

Stat-X fire grenades not mentioned, quite surprised, another modern K+ type donor device, but comes in a throwable smoke-grenade form-factor for people extrication, or much larger fixed-installation configurations.

The Modern Rogue did a video about these new fire granades, the idea with them is also that they can also be placed in a place that is likely to start a fire and they will automatically deploy.

British fire helmets were brass they had to be changed as people kept walking into bulbs hanging from ceilings and electrocuting them selves

I was kind of thinking this would be grenades to SET fires because my device didn’t display the whole text but this is cool too

Another method of automatically deploying fire grenades was a metal wire that would expand when heated, pulling a safety pin out and releasing one or more fire grenades. My school when I was a kid was build in the 1910's and still had some water grenades on display; most only held one fire grenade, often located above the waste basket in a classroom, but others located near a wood burning stove or furnace held up to three of them, with the idea they would all come tumbling out one after another. They all cork seals and most were empty or mostly empty, but some of them were still full.

I remember seeing a sign that read "In case of fire, throw grenade." People posted it to an Engrish site. I remember these existing and commented about it.

I've seen a few modern variants of these. One is a small device to be mounted in turbine powered model aircraft, which are prone to catch fire when they crash. The device is supposed to burst if the plane crashes, putting out the fire. Another one looks like a stick of dynamite, to be used in case of a chimney fire. You light it and put it next to the fire in the hearth / stove, then close the door. The thing will ignite and give off some kind of gas that is carried up the flue, displacing oxygen and smothering the fire. I have 2 of these lying around just in case.

My lab has some of the modern fire grenades in some of more flammable rooms. Luckily we haven't had to use one yet

Can't wait to see how it turns out, build a nice fire!

I got one fire bomb in red that has the lead link. In the ship yard carb tec was use to clean motors. Was fantastic spraying a wasp nest.

Hard to say from the photos, but that fusible 'trap door' in that grenade design looks more like a mouse trap that will smash the bottle rather than drop it.

We had thoes in the Army National Guard Armory at 355 Marcy Avenue in Brooklyn NY built in 1883. We had them when i left in 2005.

Your fire chief is assembled incorrectly. I grew up with one of these in my parents basement until they tore the house down in 2012. The large end of the glass bulb sits on the other side of the metal hoop leaving the thin end towards the melting link at the bottom. When the link melted it was like a mousetrap that would spring round and shatter the small end of the glass bulb.

I have never heard of these devices before, but they are now my favorite thing ever! Fire Grenades! Frickin cool!

I keep fire extinguishing flares in my vehicles called a Fire Safety Stick, which is used like a hand held flare.

I don’t know if they are still there but they had these on display in Erddig House, near Wrexham, Wales. They were hung on the door frame. I mentioned them to a fireman and he told me they were lethal due to the fumes. They we’re a beautiful blue in colour.

5:50 The lower temperature of vaporisation says lowering the temperature of the burning staff that also helps with fire fighting.