James' World 2

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On November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre opened in Chicago to rave reviews. “Few theaters in America can rival its architectural perfections,” applauded one commentator. The venue was “absolutely fireproof,” its playbills boasted.

Five weeks later, during a December 30 holiday matinee performance with 1,800 people in the audience, the Iroquois was engulfed in flames. Until the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, it was the worst building disaster in the U.S.

Underwriters Laboratories, founded in 1894 to promote safety, joined the investigation into what went wrong at the Iroquois. The building didn’t have a single fire alarm. Crucial escape routes were barred with locked doors. And the one safety tool that could have stopped the fire at its initial spark, when an ​​electric light ignited a curtain backstage, didn’t work: the fire extinguisher.

“A man put 10 cents’ worth of baking soda in a 5-cent tin tube. He sold it for $3 as a fire extinguisher,” fumed UL founder William Henry Merrill, Jr., likening the contraption to a phony magic wand. “Unfortunately, there was nothing ‘make-believe’ about the fire, and the result was very real to the families and the friends of over 600 women and children, whose lives were sacrificed that a man might make a profit of $2.”

Determined to prevent such pointless tragedies in the future, Merrill created a certification operation to assure the public that products with its distinctive mark had been scientifically tested and could be used safely. More than a century later, UL is still at the forefront of fire prevention.

“What made us relevant in the late 1800s is the same thing that has us relevant today, if not more,” says Steve Kerber, vice president and executive director of the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), a part of UL Research Institutes (ULRI). “We’re trying to understand these new products or behaviors or technologies when they’re a concept … to understand the impact they have before people die.”

Danger at the Edge of Town

FSRI and its partners among ULRI’s other research institutes are focused on two main issues, both born of new technological and societal developments: fires caused by lithium-ion batteries and fires that ignite where wildland and urban development meet.

Wildland-urban interface fires, as they’re called, are especially hazardous. Not only do they threaten homes and businesses but “the fuel that can burn includes many things of human origin: plastics, fuels, energy-storage systems, solar panels and more,” says Christopher J. Cramer, ULRI’s interim president and chief research officer. “The gases and particulates that are produced under these circumstances are likely to be much more dangerous.”

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