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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On September 2, 1666, fire erupted in a bakery on Pudding Lane in London. The fire quickly spread and raged for four days, ultimately destroying four-fifths of the city. To make matters worse, Londoners had been living without a simple but invaluable financial tool: fire insurance. Although the idea of fire insurance had been around since the early sixteen-hundreds, most people thought of fire as an act of God, and therefore not something that could be reasonably insured against. The Great Fire changed that. Soon after the city was rebuilt, a man named Nicholas Barbon opened up the Fire Office insurance company, and by the end of the century fire insurance was a thriving business.
Today, we insure our homes against fire as a matter of course. And cautious homeowners can also protect themselves against disasters ranging from windstorms and...
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