In the crowded wooden Philadelphia of the 1730s, one careless act could take a block of homes, shops, and lives before morning. A shovel of coals carried upstairs, an unclean chimney, or a poorly watched hearth could turn a private mistake into a public disaster.
In February 1735, an anonymous letter in The Pennsylvania Gazette urged residents to keep chimneys clean, handle fire carefully, and prepare before the flames came. It opened with a line that has lasted almost three centuries: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
The writer was Benjamin Franklin, working under a pseudonym in the newspaper he owned. And he was not writing about medicine, but about fire…