The year was 1871.

• Henry Stanley finds missing missionary David Livingstone
• Official weather forecasts begin
• The Barnum Circus opens in New York and makes a fortune with its shows

Meanwhile . . .

The summer of 1871 had been particularly dry in Chicago. The ground parched, the wooden city vulnerable. A tinderbox waiting for a spark.

At the time, many of the most important assets of the city – account ledgers, ownership papers, cash and other valuables – were protectively stored away inside the hundreds of our Diebold & Kienzle safes in use throughout the town.

Then, on Sunday evening, Oct. 8, 1871, shortly after 9 p.m., it happened.

No one knows for sure what started it – a cow kicking over a lantern, boys playing rambunctiously in a barn, perhaps even a meteor shower – but it happened. A fire began behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary at 137 DeKoven Street. It became the largest and most destructive fire in American history.

Fanned by 30-mile-an-hour winds, flames grew and roared through the neighborhood, spreading north and south. Firefighters, first summoned to the wrong area, had to confront the inferno even though exhausted from battling another major blaze just the day before.

The fire raged on, its superheated convection whirls, called fire devils, driving flames and hurling fiery planks and embers in all directions for hundreds of yards. The fire seemingly engulfed everything in its way, for block after block after block – 34 blocks, in all. The entire central business district of Chicago was leveled.

An observer of the day recounted that, “The fire literally flowed in all directions, and ceased only when there was nothing left to burn.”

After two days, rain began to fall. Left in the fire’s aftermath were 300 dead, many more injured, 100,000 people homeless, and $222 million in property damage, almost one-third of the city’s valuation. Destroyed were more than 73 miles of roads, 120 miles of sidewalk and 17,500 buildings. An area four miles long and a half-mile wide lay in ruins. Neither people nor houses, mansions, factories, corner shops, hotels, department stores, the opera house, not even the water works was spared. But the contents of the Diebold & Kienzle safes were.

The fire was a major milestone in American history. It turned out to be a major milestone in Diebold’s history, too.

As merchants and business leaders sifted through the ashes, something amazing was discovered. Of 878 Diebold safes recovered, all had kept their contents intact and undamaged. There’d be no property rights questions. There’d be cash to tide businesses over for the rebuilding. The seeds with which to plant a new beginning for Chicago were safe.

Diebold made no attempt to capitalize publicly on the fire-safe quality of its products. We didn’t have to. The newspaper accounts of the resilience of the Diebold brand were enough to flood us with new orders, exhausting our stock of supplies almost instantly. Just the new orders would take us almost a year to fill.