Substantial Antique American Bronze Fire Hose Nozzle

Heavy metal ! 🇺🇸 🔥

Before lightweight alloys, plastics and modern firefighting equipment, there was this.

A wonderfully substantial antique American bronze fire hose nozzle, standing just over two feet high and bearing all the scars of a working life.

It is an extraordinarily simple object. A long tapering bronze body, heavy threaded coupling at one end and narrow outlet at the other. No decoration. No attempt to make it beautiful. It was made for one purpose: attach it to a fire hose, point it towards the flames and hang on.

And yet, more than a century later, it has become a rather fabulous piece of American industrial history.

The surface is particularly good. Years of hard use have left the bronze with a deep brown patina, rubbed and marked throughout, with traces of verdigris and wear around the fittings. Look closely and the body is covered in hundreds of small knocks, scratches and indentations, many of which have themselves long since patinated - the accumulated evidence of a substantial working life.

At 61cm high and pleasantly heavy, it has enormous decorative presence, propped beside a fireplace, standing amongst books, or simply displayed as the sculptural industrial object it has inadvertently become.

And should you happen to need the world’s most over-engineered doorstop, we suspect it would perform admirably.

We know not which American fire company once used it, or exactly which fires it attended. That’s the bit of its history that has disappeared. But somebody once stood behind this and fought fire.

No maker’s mark is visible, so its exact origin and date remain unknown, but the form is consistent with late 19th to early 20th century antique fire service equipment.

American | Antique bronze fire hose nozzle | 61cm high | Late 19th - early 20th century.

Worldwide tracked shipping available.

Extraordinary Things, Americana.