Thanks for sharing the “the unreasonable effectiveness of insurance” books and pieces about fire safety. This is also a theme that fascinates me, and while I was working in reinsurance modeling for cybersecurity I became fascinated with the history of steam boilers. This technological innovation is a great case study for progress that creates problems that requires more progress to solve.
The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company (now a part of MunichRe) was created to address this problem and the blog post below describes why the sinking of the Sultana steam ship in 1865 was a critical turning point: https://blog.hsb.com/2015/03/30/sultana/
I believe this precedent setting case predates the UL by about 30 years and well before the commercialization of electricity (besides nascent telegraph systems). Prior to the HSB Inspection and Insurance Company, insurance was limited to covering mostly natural causes of marine/storm (ancient) and property/fire (Stuart Era) losses. There was risk of piracy, so some of the losses were man-made, but prior to the Industrial Revolution technological risk was solved by lack of progress.
Thanks for sharing the “the unreasonable effectiveness of insurance” books and pieces about fire safety. This is also a theme that fascinates me, and while I was working in reinsurance modeling for cybersecurity I became fascinated with the history of steam boilers. This technological innovation is a great case study for progress that creates problems that requires more progress to solve.
The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company (now a part of MunichRe) was created to address this problem and the blog post below describes why the sinking of the Sultana steam ship in 1865 was a critical turning point: https://blog.hsb.com/2015/03/30/sultana/
I believe this precedent setting case predates the UL by about 30 years and well before the commercialization of electricity (besides nascent telegraph systems). Prior to the HSB Inspection and Insurance Company, insurance was limited to covering mostly natural causes of marine/storm (ancient) and property/fire (Stuart Era) losses. There was risk of piracy, so some of the losses were man-made, but prior to the Industrial Revolution technological risk was solved by lack of progress.
Fascinating, thanks for the pointer!