Bucket Brigade
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A bucket brigade or human chain is a method for transporting items where items are passed from one (relatively stationary) person to the next. The method was important in
firefighting Firefighting is a profession aimed at controlling and extinguishing fire. A person who engages in firefighting is known as a firefighter or fireman. Firefighters typically undergo a high degree of technical training. This involves structural fir ...
before the advent of hand-pumped fire engines, whereby firefighters would pass buckets of water to each other to extinguish a blaze. This technique is still common where using machines to move water, supplies, or other items would be impractical. This method needs a number of participants sufficient for covering the distance.


As a metaphor

This principle inspired various technical items, e.g. the bucket-brigade device. The term "bucket brigade" is also used for a certain method of organizing manual order picking in distribution centers. Here customer orders to be processed are passed from one order picker to the next. When the last picker in line has finished picking an order they walk back and take over the work of the next-to-last picker, who in their turn also walk back and so on, until the first person in line is reached, who then commences picking an entirely new order. Similar applications of the idea of bucket brigades also exist for production lines.


See also

*
Electron transport chain An electron transport chain (ETC) is a series of protein complexes and other molecules which transfer electrons from electron donors to electron acceptors via redox reactions (both reduction and oxidation occurring simultaneously) and couples th ...
* Chain gang * Pipelining


References


External links

{{Commons category
One-minute video about Colonial American firefighting with bucket brigades
Firefighting Logistics Metaphors referring to objects