John R Freeman

John Ripley Freeman's expertise was in hydraulics, earthquakes and fire prevention. He declined offers of professorship at both MIT, his alma mater, and Harvard, preferring to remain in industry. He was instrumental in designing the Charles River Dam in Boston. He joined a consulting team on the Panama Canal for President Theodore Roosevelt, and was the founder of Massachusetts Mutual Fire Insurance.

John Ripley Freeman was hired by Chicago industrialist Richard T. Crane to investigate the Iroquois Theatre Fire, and Chicago mayor Carter Harrison gave Freeman free access to any theater in Chicago.  Contemporary authors credit Freeman's investigation because it was founded on proper fire-preventive construction versus municipal fire standards. His team brought decades of analysis of factory fires to the investigation.  In January 1904, he pointed out several serious errors in Chicago's new theater ordinance.

Stage vent size and operation requirements were inadequate, fireproof paint and hand grenade extinguishers gave an illusion of increased safety while providing none, and some of the steel curtains being installed to comply with the ordinance would not perform properly in a fire.

Freeman judged only one playhouse in Chicago adequately constructed and equipped for fire prevention: the Illinois Theater. Ironically, the Illinois was designed by the same architect who designed the Iroquois, Benjamin Marshall, for the same consortium who owned the Iroquois, Klaw & Erlanger, and was managed by the same man who managed the Iroquois, Will J. Davis.

John Freeman married Elizabeth Farwell Clarke on Dec 28, 1887 in Lawrence, MA.