It's 1904. There are only 45 states in the Union. Less than 10% of homes have electricity.

There's no radio, no TV, and building codes and fire safety are mostly things of the future.

In 1904, Baltimore had an enormous fire.

This is historian Daniel Emmervar.

And a fire that was so big and it went on for so long that, A, it completely overwhelms

Baltimore firefighters, but B, it just lasted long enough for Baltimore to desperately call

for help from neighboring fire companies.

No one knows for sure how the fire started, but as the fire spread to block after block of Baltimore's downtown, the SOS went out to nearby cities.

So Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, Harrisburg, and the other firefighters rushed to fight the fire, and they had their hoses, and they were ready to screw their hoses into the hydrants and get to work.

And when they start to do that, they realized that their hoses couldn't screw into the hydrants.

There was a fundamental material incompatibility, which basically left them completely unable to do anything.

And so they just watched as more than 1,500 houses burned in one of the worst fires in U.S. history.

When it was finally put out, one journalist said that the city looked like Pompeii.

80 blocks had burned for 31 hours.

The fire highlighted something about 1904 that we don't think about a lot today. The problem with those hoses not fitting was kind of the problem

with everything. A bushel of greens weighed 10 pounds in North Carolina, 30 in Tennessee. A 50-foot

truck leaving Vermont would be 25 feet too long to enter Kentucky. One of the examples I like is

football, what we call football in the United States, a national sport. No one agreed what a football

was. Different teams had

dramatically different size and shapes footballs. Just the central object of football, the football,

went undefined. The early 20th century was the Wild West for standards. Everywhere you went,

things were just defined differently. Before 1927, even traffic lights were different.

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