Science with Fire Extinguishers! Putting Out a Fire.
Reconstructed for the archive — this video never had a written companion, so I wrote one from the original footage with my own custom AI tools and a little good old-fashioned tweaking for accuracy.
Join me as I teach my son how to use a fire extinguisher. We picked the Fourth of July on purpose — if you’re setting off fireworks that night, the odds you’ll eventually want an extinguisher within reach aren’t small, so before we lit anything I sat him down with a real one instead of just telling him where we keep ours.
The gauge is the first thing to check and the part people skip: a little needle that sits in the red when it’s empty and green when it’s full. If you’ve never looked at yours, do it now, not during a fire. After that it’s simple — pull the pin, aim low, squeeze the trigger, and sweep from the base of the fire outward, killing the flame closest to you first rather than spraying over the top of something still burning underneath. We’d shown in an earlier video that blowing on a fire only feeds it more oxygen, so this time we did it right: one good sweep and it was out. The chemical does not smell good, for the record — though there’s something satisfying about it once you know it means the fire actually died.
The part I wanted my son to walk away with wasn’t the spraying, it was the order around it: tell a grown-up the second you see fire, have that adult call the fire department, and only use the extinguisher yourself, while you’re waiting, if it’s safe. An extinguisher buys you time — it isn’t a substitute for calling for help. Worth running through with your own kids before the next Fourth of July, not during it.
I'm Joseph Dattilo — engineer-founder in Lansing, Michigan, author of the FleetHarbor suite, and founder of Date Palm Media. More about me · More writing · Get in touch