Fire safety signs are a requirement under health and safety legislation – but adequate signage should be viewed as more than a simple box-ticking exercise. Awareness plays a vital role in fire safety – ensuring people on site are aware of fire risks and hazards is essential in minimising the danger of damage, injury or death from fire.

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A global organisation Chubb’s global footprint, and local expertise is reflected in its 12,000+ team, working from 200+ offices across 17 countries. Get in touch with our regional offices

A global organisation Chubb’s global footprint, and local expertise is reflected in its 12,000+ team, working from 200+ offices across 17 countries. Get in touch with our regional offices

We deliver our services through a global network of over 12,000 highly specialised and fully compliant staff, 200+ branches and more than 20+ monitoring centres worldwide, providing a customised local service supported by expert teams, 24/7, 365 days a year.

A global organisation Chubb’s global footprint, and local expertise is reflected in its 12,000+ team, working from 200+ offices across 17 countries. Get in touch with our regional offices

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So while the device itself isn't racist, and neither was the reason Cover chose the name, there is value in acknowledging and confronting the prejudice hidden in names, Lartey writes​. As Erin Blakemore reported last month for SmartNews, in the case of Georgetown University renaming buildings that reflected the school's ties to the slave trade, such associations could bring about signficant changes.

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At first, Cover’s invention used gunpowder to launch darts that could deliver an electric charge to a target up to 15 feet away - not exactly the explosives-free solution he was seeking. It wasn’t until he teamed up with brothers Tom and Rick Smith to come up with a compressed air-powered version that the device started to get popular. The Smiths' company, Taser International, has since sold more than 750,000 Tasers, reports Kashmir Hill for Forbes. Though the safety and use of the weapons has faced criticism in recent years, CEO Rick Smith tells Hill that Tasers have saved about 100,000 lives by offering a bullet-free defense.

What arefire signsattracted to

Rather than showing danger, emergency signage is typically used to indicate safety or escape – fire exit signs that guide people out of a building in case of emergency are the most recognisable example.

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The tidy telling of this story often concludes with a message about the power of science fiction and creativity to inspire real-life innovation, but that simplistic version obscures an uncomfortable fact, writes Jamiles Lartey for The Guardian: the Tom Swift novel is rife with racism. For example, Lartey writes:

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This is an inappropriate and desperate passive-aggressive relationship based on a story in The Guardian that parallels a contrived racist etymology to a registered trademark and word that should instead evoke the goal of all civil people – the dream of having a Phaser-like device of the future specifically designed to replace beatings by batons and acid sprayed into eyes – to stun only as a response-to-resistance.

The idea of an electric handheld weapon might not sound very futuristic today, and indeed, Tasers are increasingly popular among law enforcement. But about a century ago, the concept only existed on the pages of a science fiction novel about a boy inventor named Tom Swift. It would be decades before the real-life version of the weapon, first described in 1911 in Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, would be developed by a NASA physicist who found inspiration in the pages of the science fiction novel.

Fire signsmeaning

A global organisation Chubb’s global footprint, and local expertise is reflected in its 12,000+ team, working from 200+ offices across 17 countries. Get in touch with our regional offices

A global organisation Chubb’s global footprint, and local expertise is reflected in its 12,000+ team, working from 200+ offices across 17 countries. Get in touch with our regional offices

Yellow or orange, in a triangle shape, these signs are used to warn that a hazard or danger is nearby – typically flammable materials.

Blue signs with white illustrations are used to display a mandatory action that must be taken, such as protective equipment that needs to be worn. ‘Fire door keep shut’ is likely to be the most commonly recognised sign of this type.

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These signs indicate a prohibited ‘do not’ action through the instantly recognisable red circle with a black illustration with a line through it. The action will be detailed below. A ‘no smoking’ sign is a typical example of this kind of fire safety sign.

A global organisation Chubb’s global footprint, and local expertise is reflected in its 12,000+ team, working from 200+ offices across 17 countries. Get in touch with our regional offices

Jack Cover, the Taser's inventor, originally saw a need for such weapons in the 1960s, when airplane hijackings forced air marshals to carry firearms on planes. As Elaine Woo reports in The Los Angeles Times, Cover wanted to create a weapon that would help marshals take down would-be hijackers without potentially damaging or even crashing the plane. Such a weapon would resemble Tom's Swift's fantastical, bullet-free gun.

The people Swift and his companion encounter during their quest, Latery continues, are described "at various points as 'hideous in their savagery, wearing only the loin cloth, and with their kinky hair stuck full of sticks,' and as 'wild, savage and ferocious ... like little red apes.'"

The different applications of fire signs are numerous, with a wide range required depending on the type and usage of your premises, including:

Africa, in the context of the book, exists only as a frontier of underexploited resources ripe for the wealth accumulation of white men daring enough to attempt. “Elephant shooting in Africa! My! With my new electric rifle ... what a fellow couldn’t do in the dark continent!”

We deliver our services through a global network of over 12,000 highly specialised and fully compliant staff, 200+ branches and more than 20+ monitoring centres worldwide, providing a customised local service supported by expert teams, 24/7, 365 days a year.

With so many different types of signage required in a wide range of different contexts, it can be hard to keep track of exactly what is needed and where. Chubb’s aim is to make it as straightforward as possible for businesses and organisations to manage their approach to fire safety – our fire safety experts can carry out an audit of your premises and guide you through the fire safety signage that you need.

Editor’s note, December 4, 2015: After we published the article, Steve Tuttle, the vice president of strategic communications at TASER, submitted the following as an official response. We are including it here, verbatim: