> Fire fighters were not paid salaries, however. Each fire company was staffed with 36 residents of the district, serving under the command of two fire masters. Each man appointed had to serve a year or pay a fine of ten guilders.
Not sure about density in urban old Rome or old Amsterdam, but sounds like their "fire brigade" ended up quite larger in Rome unless Amsterdam had a lot of "districts":
> After Egnatius' death, Augustus set up his own fire brigade, which also consisted of 600 slaves, and later, in 7 or 6 BCE the fire brigade was enlarged, now consisting of 3,500 freedmen, the vigiles, who were divided into seven cohorts of 500 men each and made subordinate to a praefectus vigilum. In about 200 CE, their number was doubled to 7,000 men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Egnatius_Rufus
Invented? Ancient Rome would like a word: the Vigiles Urbani date back to 6 AD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighting_in_ancient_Rome
And private firefighters were active even earlier, with Crassus particularly notorious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Licinius_Crassus
Yeah the title is clickbaity, a more accurate title would be that they improved and/or scaled it.
From the article:
> Fire fighters were not paid salaries, however. Each fire company was staffed with 36 residents of the district, serving under the command of two fire masters. Each man appointed had to serve a year or pay a fine of ten guilders.
Not sure about density in urban old Rome or old Amsterdam, but sounds like their "fire brigade" ended up quite larger in Rome unless Amsterdam had a lot of "districts":
> After Egnatius' death, Augustus set up his own fire brigade, which also consisted of 600 slaves, and later, in 7 or 6 BCE the fire brigade was enlarged, now consisting of 3,500 freedmen, the vigiles, who were divided into seven cohorts of 500 men each and made subordinate to a praefectus vigilum. In about 200 CE, their number was doubled to 7,000 men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Egnatius_Rufus
Didn’t know that; in modern italian vigili urbani is the traffic police.
There were many private establishments going back to Ancient Rome.
Fully paid, professional municipal departments came in 1853 Cincinnati.
So I guess it depends on how you define it. US gets a lot of credit for the idea of a “fire department”
Amsterdam did not invent the fire department. This is silly.