A fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in Manhattan on March 25, 1911, and spread rapidly through the two floors above it. Most workers on the eighth floor escaped down the stairs or through the elevators as the two elevator operators made run after run to the burning floors. Nearly everyone on the tenth floor also escaped, many of them by reaching the roof and crossing ladders extended from a law school next door.
When the fire broke out, a bookkeeper on the eighth floor tried to phone a warning upstairs. It reached the tenth floor, and that’s why the workers there began evacuating. But the ninth floor’s line went unanswered. By survivors’ accounts, the fire seemed to arrive there with almost no notice at all. The workers headed to a stairway, but found the door leading to it locked, a common practice meant to prevent unauthorized breaks and theft. Flames cut off another stairway, while the building’s single exterior fire escape collapsed from the weight of the workers trying to use it.
Firefighters did arrive within minutes and entered the building, reaching the ninth floor quickly. But the fire had already done severe damage by the time they got there, and outside, their ladders extended only to the sixth floor, well short of the windows where workers had been calling for help. Dozens jumped or fell. As one journalist wrote, “I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture—the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.”
The fire killed 146 of the roughly 500 workers in the building that day, most of them young immigrant women, including two girls listed as only fourteen years old.
Garrett Morgan had spent years working in Cleveland’s garment factories before building businesses of his own. One of his most successful products came to be by accident out of a liquid he’d been testing to keep sewing needles from scorching fabric, which turned out, once he tried it first on a scrap of fur and then on himself, to straighten hair.
His wife had also come out of that same world of factory work; before they married, she had been a sewer in a Cleveland tailor shop, the same kind of job held by many of the young women who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire.