Existing in a Legal Limbo: The Precarious Legal Position of Standards-Development Organizations

Tyler Wolf, Washington and Lee University School of Law

10/21/2008
(Original Publish Date: 3/1/2006)

At 11:40 on the morning of February 7, 1904, Chief Belt of the Washington, D.C., Fire Department received a telegram from Baltimore. The telegram read, "Big fire here. Must have help at once." At 12:06, a train loaded with fire equipment pulled out of Washington and began the forty-mile trip to Baltimore. The train arrived in Baltimore just thirty-one minutes later, "probably the record for time between the two cities." When the Washington fire brigades went to work, however, they found that the couplings on their hoses did not match the Baltimore hydrants, rendering the Washington equipment useless. Help arrived from New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, and other towns, but the threads on their hoses also failed to match the Baltimore hydrants. The fire burned for thirty hours and destroyed more than seventy blocks of downtown Baltimore, while the assembled firefighters "stood around looking silly." "The glare of the conflagration forty miles away was plainly visible in Washington."