Insight On The Process

First, obviously, this xkcd comic is a joke.

I’m not going to analyze the joke.¹ But, like a lot of humor, there’s some reality behind it and I think that’s worth mentioning. First, of course, is the well-known idea that building codes are just collections of things not to do based on past experience. This isn’t true, as there’s a lot of other material in codes, but it certainly has some connection to reality. The example I like to use is the enormous expansion of egress provisions in the New York Code from the 1908 edition to the 1916 edition. The Triangle Fire was in 1911.

In this case, we have a mention of fire caused by bad wiring in a flammable building. That’s certainly a real issue, but it raises the question: is electric wiring more likely to cause fires than the open flame of fireplaces or the enclosed flame of iron stoves and gas lights? Assuming all are built with the same level of competence and used to the same level of skill, the answer is no. Electric wiring is less likely to cause fires than flame. However, badly-built wiring can cause hidden fires, while fireplaces and gas lamps tended to cause fires that were visible right away.²

The other issue is that electric wiring is, compared to a fireplace or stove, high-tech. In, say, 1900, the majority of people had some idea how to light, maintain, extinguish, and clean a fire in a fireplace. Very few knew how to run wiring or how it worked.³ If you look at the codes, there is a small section on the geometry of masonry fireplaces⁴ and a longer but still fairly small section on fireplace flues, but both are tiny compared to the electrical code. There are a lot more things that can go wrong with electric wiring installations. I think they’re safe, but like all complex technologies building wiring took some time to mature and is vulnerable to bad work. So electric fires still happen from time to time, although not all that often.

1. I signed up for an English class in college called something like “Humor and Satire.” I dropped it after the first two classes, as it had become clear that nothing kills jokes faster than analyzing them and there were several novels and stories on the syllabus that I really liked it. I had no desire to see my enjoyment of those works simultaneously killed and analyzed, like butterflies pinned in a case. ↩︎
2. If there was a problem with hidden pipe for gas lighting it was more likely to be leaks of poisonous gas than fire. ↩︎
3. President Harrison was famously afraid to touch the newly-installed light switches after the White House was electrified. ↩︎
4. Metal fireplaces are manufactured fixtures, like stoves, not integral to buildings. ↩︎

Top photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash