Vintage Ansul Wagon Wheel Fire Extinguisher - New Melle, MO
Posted by: 
YoSam.
N 38° 42.723 W 090° 52.745
15S E 684405 N 4286958
Antique fire extinguisher on hand pulled cart.
Waymark Code: WMYGWY
Location: Missouri, United States
Date Posted: 06/15/2018
Views: 2
County of equipment: St. Charles County
Location of equipment: Groenberger St & MO-Z, firehouse, New Melle
Dimensions: 26.0" W x 50.0" H x 41.0" D
I could not find a model number, either on the equipment or on the web.
The vintage Ansul wagon wheel fire extinguisher. The extinguisher is mounted on a red wagon wheel style cart. There is an Ansul dry chemical extinguisher cylinder, a 110 Nitrogen cylinder and a hose.
"In 1928, DuGas (later bought by ANSUL) came out with a cartridge-operated dry chemical extinguisher, which used sodium bicarbonate specially treated with chemicals to render it free-flowing and moisture-resistant. It consisted of a copper cylinder with an internal CO2cartridge. The operator turned a wheel valve on top to puncture the cartridge and squeezed a lever on the valve at the end of the hose to discharge the chemical. This was the first agent available for large-scale three-dimensional liquid and pressurized gas fires, and was but remained largely a specialty type until the 1950s, when small dry chemical units were marketed for home use. ABC dry chemical came over from Europe in the 1950s, with Super-K being invented in the early 60s and Purple-K being developed by the US Navy in the late 1960s. Manually applied dry agents such as graphite for class D (metal) fires had existed since WWII, but it wasn't until 1949 that Ansul introduced a pressurized extinguisher using an external CO2 cartridge to discharge the agent. Met-L-X (sodium chloride) was the first extinguisher developed in the US, with graphite, copper, and several other types being developed later." ~ Wikipedia