Silsby Rotary Steam Fire Engines (1877) — Digital Download

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About this book

Silsby Rotary Steam Fire Engines, 1877. The catalog of the Silsby Manufacturing Co. of Seneca Falls, New York — the name that defined the American steam pumper. When a 19th-century city ordered a steam fire engine, odds were it wore the Silsby name, and this illustrated catalog shows the rotary steam pumpers that made the firm famous, reproduced from the original 1877 edition.

Inside the 136 pages: engraved illustrations of Silsby rotary steam fire engines, with specifications, dimensions, and capacities; the Holly patent rotary pump at the heart of the Silsby machine — including Holly's Patent Rotary Pike Pump, discharging 750 gallons a minute in streams thrown over 175 feet; hose carts, hose reels, and fire department equipment; and fire pumps for mills, factories, and distilleries, 'the best fire protectors that can possibly be used' — the full sales apparatus of the Gilded Age fire trade, with testimonials and particulars for fire chiefs and city councils.

For the fire apparatus collector and the antique steam pumper restorer, this is working documentation, not just ephemera: period pump ratings, Holly rotary pump details, and the exact look of a Silsby engine as it left Seneca Falls — invaluable for anyone restoring a steam fire engine or building a scale model of one.

A genuine piece of fire service history — the catalog behind the Silsby engines that still sit in fire museums across America, reproduced complete for fire buffs, apparatus collectors, and historians of the fire service.

Details: PDF digital download, 136 pages.

?? Please read before ordering — about print quality

This is a digital edition scanned from a historical document. The pages were scanned from an original 1877 printing, and the quality of your download reflects the condition of that original scan.

What that means in plain terms: you may see faded text, uneven inking, age spots, show-through from the back of pages, and other imperfections that were in the 1877 original or introduced by the scanning process. These are preserved as-is — they are not printing defects, and they are not something we can fix.

We are not responsible for the condition of the original source material. If you want a pristine modern typeset book, this isn't it. If you want the actual 1877 manual with all its character intact, you're in the right place.