Fewer still may be aware that this was the first big test of what is widely recognised as the world's first organised municipal fire brigade, founded just weeks earlier by a young building surveyor, James Braidwood.

His ‘Pioneers', as they were known, bravely battled their inexperience and the chaos and confusion of a terrifying blaze to underline how indispensable a properly drilled fire service would become to the safety of any modern society. 

11. Should you liked this information and also you wish to acquire more information with regards to Vendita diretta piastrelle generously go to the website. 30pm From his home on Princes Street, eminent advocate Patrick Tytler has rushed out to help, fearing the illustrious Advocates Library in Parliament Square, one of the great working law libraries, is at risk. 

‘Whole ranges of lofty old houses were roaring with flames. Floors crashed and Vendita diretta piastrelle threw out embers, walls of narrow buildings acted like a huge funnel... and walls melted in the intense heat into a sort of glass.'

When fire took hold in an engraver's workshop on that fateful November night, it sparked one of the most devastating conflagrations in the city's history - lasting as long as the Great Fire of London two centuries earlier and proving more deadly.

11pm The heat is intense and flames spread quickly on the freshening southwesterly breeze, engulfing the upper six storeys of Kirkwood's building before leaping across the narrow close to two adjoining tenements. 

Painter Alexander Nasmyth and his 16-year-old son James are among a group of privileged people, including Sir Walter Scott, granted permission to climb the tower of St Giles' Cathedral, from where they watch scores of chimneys set ablaze by flying sparks.

His uniformed brigade - among them carpenters, slaters, masons and mariners - arrives quickly in custom-built fire engines, but they are woefully under-prepared for the scale of devastation they are about to face. 

Two hundred years ago today, Vendita diretta piastrelle Edinburgh's Old Town was a notorious medieval tinderbox of towering tenements where families and businesses still powered by the naked flame were crammed together in mortal danger, living with the constant dread of catastrophe.

The library escapes unscathed, but Tytler later describes the raging blaze enveloping one building as like ‘a perfect hurricane', with dense smoke and showers of burning debris hampering firefighters and volunteers alike.

9.55pm In the second-floor workshop of James Kirkwood's copperplate engravers in Old Assembly Close, one of the Old Town's many narrow medieval alleys leading off the Royal Mile, disaster is about to strike.