As a lad of fifteen, Jan van der Heyden had witnessed the fire that burned down the Old Town Hall on 7 July 1652. The event, as he describes it, led him to study ways of improving existing fire-fighting methods. The Slangbrandspuitenboek of 1690 opens with an impression of this famous fire. While dozens of people are busy passing buckets of water from one to another from the harbour in the foreground, others are risking their lives on ladders propped against the burning building. To the right things are more relaxed, because the new fire extinguisher is operating. It required less manpower and the results were greater. As in an ‘artist’s impression’, Van der Heyden has set his new invention in a historical panorama, because in reality 38 years had passed between the two events.