Donald Kaufman, whose trove included a highly prized 1912 Märklin live-steam fire engine before he began auctioning off his treasures in March, died on Monday at his home in Pittsfield, Mass.
The town acquired its first steam driven fire engine in 1914 which cost £100 and was paid for by voluntary subscription.
When the steam-powered fire engine arrived, however, he was forgotten.
He provided Harrogate with its first steam-powered fire engine and the rest of us with a family of very fine actors.
The sale, with items from mainly one owner, includes antique firefighting toys, a real 1905 hand-pulled steam-powered fire engine that resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption, hand-painted leather fire buckets, daguerreotypes of 19th-century firemen, and lots of hardware: brass nozzles, lanterns, primitive extinguishers.
Steam-powered fire engines were used in the Chicago Fire of 1871.
Richard D. Waistell, an engineer from Berkshire, England, came looking for good examples of British vehicles to add to his collection, which includes a 1919 steam-traction engine, a 1957 Land Rover ambulance and a 1954 Bedford fire engine.
The Pneumatica, in two books, describes a menagerie of mechanical devices, or "toys": singing birds, puppets, coin-operated machines, a fire engine, a water organ, and his most famous invention, the aeolipile, the first steam-powered engine.
La France Fire Engine Company.
The fire engine kept going.
