In fact, the chief protection in early days in England seems to have been a practice of the old proverb that prevention is better than cure, care being exercised to regulate the fires used for domestic purposes: we see an instance in the arrangement of the curfew-bell, or _couvre-feu_, a bell to extinguish all fires at eight at night. Still, when conflagrations did occur, we may suppose that buckets and hand-squirts, as soon as mankind came to construct them, were the appliances used.
Entries for fire-extinguishing machines of some sort have been found in the accounts of many German towns: for instance, in the building accounts of Augsburg for 1518, "instruments of fire" or "water-syringes" are mentioned.
Fires appear to have been very frequent in Germany in the latter part of the fifteenth and in the sixteenth century. And though we do not know much of the contrivances used in Europe in the Middle Ages, it is not until 1657 that we have any reliable record of a machine at all resembling Hero's siphon on the one hand, or the modern fire-engine on the other.
This record is given by Caspar Schott, a Jesuit, and tells of an engine constructed by Hautsch of Nuremberg, a city long famous for mechanical contrivances. The machine was really a large water-cistern drawn on a wheeled car, or sledge; and the secret of its propulsive power, Schott supposes was a horizontal cylinder containing a piston and producing an action like a pump. The cistern measured 8 feet long by 4 feet high, and 2 feet wide; its small width being probably designed for entering narrow streets. It was operated by twenty-eight men, and it forced a stream of water an inch thick to a height of about eighty feet. Hautsch desired to keep the methods of its construction secret; but, apparently, it was not furnished with the important air-chamber, and does not seem to have differed very materially from Hero's siphon. Schott also says he had seen one forty years before at Königshofen.
Notwithstanding, therefore, the danger of great conflagrations, mankind does not seem to have made much progress in the construction of fire-engines from the days of Ctesibius until the time of Charles II., a period of about eighteen hundred years. On the other hand, we must remember that syringes and water-buckets can be of very great service when promptly and efficiently used. Even to-day London firemen find similar appliances of great value for small conflagrations in rooms.