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many fires in cotton mills that no insurance company would insure them except at prohibititive rates. They therefore established this Mutual, but along with the Mutual went a policy of requiring a pledge practically from the factories that they would do certain things and follow certain procedures which Atkinson invented for the prevention of fire and for the prevention of the spread of fire. Atkinson was in charge of the whole thing. He invented a program of policing this agreement. It was a voluntary agreement, but they let him police it so that anyone who didn't follow the agreement as to fire preventive and life protective measures lost his insurance. I don't want to claim that Atkinson invented the automatic sprinkler, but he very nearly did. He established the principle that fires could be put out by a method by which water was released at the origin of the fire before it spread. I think somebody else invented the automatic sprinkler, but he was the first one to take up some little device that he heard of and use it in these cotton mills where the hazards were so terrible. I had the advice of the National Fire Protection Association in this investigation.

I don't think I ran into H.F.J. Porter until later, but in the investigation of this fire in New Jersey I certainly had all the NFPA's literature and some of their correspondence. I also had Stewart and Wolston. I proceeded to make an