Anna Connelly Patented the Fire Escape in 1887, and Cities Started Requiring Them

US368816 was granted to Anna Connelly of Philadelphia on August 23, 1887. It describes an external fire escape: a railed bridge connecting the roof of one building to the roof of the adjacent one, with steps at each end. Connelly is among the earliest women to be granted a United States patent, and the problem she was addressing was killing people in large numbers.

American cities in the 1870s and 1880s were building upward faster than they were thinking about getting people back down. Tenements, factories, and workshops rose four, five, six stories, built largely of wood and lit by open flame, with a single interior staircase — which in a fire acts as a chimney. Once the stairwell filled with smoke, everyone above it was trapped.

Newspapers of the period carry a steady drumbeat of fires where the dead were found at windows.

The insight

Connelly's design does something specific and clever: it refuses to rely on the building's own interior at all.

The escape route is on the outside, and it goes sideways rather than down. Occupants climb to the roof, cross the railed bridge to the neighboring building, and descend through a structure that is not on fire. In a dense city block of adjoining buildings — exactly the environment where these fires happened — that is often a far more survivable path than trying to descend inside a burning structure.

The railings matter more than they sound. Rooftop escape was already something people attempted in desperation; what killed them was falling in the dark and smoke. A railed, defined path converts a panicked scramble into a walkable route.

What followed

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a wave of municipal fire codes requiring external escapes on multi-story buildings, and the iron fire escape became the defining feature of the American urban facade — the zigzag of ladders and landings on the front of every tenement in New York and Philadelphia.

The push for those codes accelerated brutally after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 146 workers died, many because the single exterior fire escape was inadequate and collapsed, and because doors had been locked. That disaster reshaped American workplace safety law.

Connelly's specific bridge design was not the version that cities standardized on; the descending iron stair-and-landing escape came from a different lineage. What her patent represents is the moment the underlying principle was formally articulated: the way out must not run through the fire.

The historical record on Connelly herself is nearly empty — a name, a city, a patent date. She is one of a number of nineteenth-century women whose patents survive and whose biographies do not.

See the original

The full text and figures of US368816 are on patents.us.