er.

Automatic-sprinklers have proved to be a most valuable form of
fire-apparatus in operating with great efficiency at fires where their
action was unaided by other fire-apparatus, particularly at night. In
mill fires the average loss for an experience of twelve years shows that
in those fires where automatic-sprinklers formed a part of the apparatus
operating upon the fire, the average loss amounted to only
one-nineteenth of the average of all other losses. If the difference
between these two averages represents the amount saved by the operation
of automatic-sprinklers, then the total damage from the number of fires
to which automatic-sprinklers are accredited, as forming a portion of
the apparatus, has been reduced six and a quarter million dollars by the
operation of this valuable device.

Although there have been numerous patents granted to inventors of
automatic-sprinklers since the early part of the present century, yet
their practical use and introduction has been subsequent to the
invention of the sealed automatic-sprinkler by Henry S. Parmelee of New
Haven, Ct., about twelve years ago. This device being the first, and for
many years the only automatic-sprinkler manufactured and sold, and
actually performing service over accidental fires, to him belongs the
distinction of being the pioneer, and practically the originator, of the
vast work done by automatic-sprinklers in reducing destruction of
property by fire.

Although nearly or quite 200,000 Parmelee automatic-sprinklers have been
installed, their manufacture has been supplanted by other forms; and the
total number of automatic-sprinklers in position at the present time
must be about 2,000,000.

When automatic-sprinklers were first introduced there were many
apprehensions that leakage, and also excessive water discharged upon
small fires, would be sources of damage. In England this opinion found
expression in increased insurance rates in buildings where
automatic-sprinklers were installed.

The logic of figures shows that this liability to damage is merely
nominal in the case of well-constructed sprinklers. An association of
underwriters who have given careful attention to the subject obtained
the facts that from the automatic-sprinklers installed in some
$500,000,000 worth of property insured by them, the average damage from
all causes, except fire, was $2.56 per plant per annum.

Although automatic-sprinklers have proved to be so reliable and
effe