Could a chandelier fall in a fire?

[ravelda]

I have a scene where a mansion is up in flames. A crystal chandelier plummets and smashes on the marble below. Is this totally outlandish? It's set in a fantasy time period around the late 1600's. I love the scene, though. Any info?

Edited to add: Thanks so much for the fascinating information! I just had a ding! moment. Besides being on fire, the

Comments

[ananda_daydream]

1600s, the building frame would be made of wood. Fire burns wood. Chandelier, attached to wooden beams making up mansion, would definitely fall, when said beams caught fire. :)
Only complication I can think of is the walls burning down before the ceiling, and thus the chandelier would fall into a messy pile of burning wood and wouldn't crash quite so spectacularly, but that would depend on how the fire started.
I can't really think of any reason why it couldn't fall, unless there's something obvious I'm missing..?

[ananda_daydream]

Just asked my boyfriend, to see if there was anything spectacularly obvious I was missing.. He corrected me on the wall-collapse thing. If you think about buildings that have been through a fire, the roofs are always gone, with bits of the walls remaining. Fire moves upward quicker than anything. *facepalm*

I also realised if it's an older or wealthier mansion, it might well be made of stone or brick... in which case, your chandelier is still likely to fall, as interior infrastructure would still be wood. You probably wouldn't try to hang a chandelier from, y'know, rock. I've done a great deal of research on a fire which destroyed a local college building in 1900; it was a brick building, and some of the outer walls survived the initial fire, but the interiors were destroyed, and what was left of the outer walls was far too damaged and unstable to work with, and were soon torn down.

[julian_black]

One thing to keep in mind is that in the 1600s interior framing would very likely be heavy oak timbers. Wood burns, but a very large beam or joist, such as those supporting upper floors (or a chandelier) would take a while to burn all the way through. Softwoods, like pine, cedar, and fir, that would have been used for lighter-weight framing in later centuries burns up really fast--but heavy oak takes quite a while.

[julian_black]

With fantasy, you have a lot of room to fudge a few historical details. That said

[slomotionwalter]

Well, basically as soon as the fire got to the chandelier, whatever was holding it up would probably catch fire. If it was held up by a rope, swashbuckler-flying-up-to-the-balcony-to-save-the-damsel-style, then it would probably let go long before anything else. Though realistically, you're talking about four hundred years too late for that, but most likely it would drop the instant the ceiling holding up the chain became too weak to hold up the weight of the chandelier. Just think of how often in a fire the ceiling beams fall long before the rest of the house. Those beams are thick and would collapse long after the part the chandelier was attached to would give way. Just my thinking, anyway. I'm not an expert, but I can't imagine it's anything a real expert would point at and say "That's totally ridiculous!"

[jadecanary]

The falling makes sense, as most people have pointed out, but the crystal chandelier bit is a little iffy. See the second and third pictures here for a more likely style. A wooden ring with spikes for the tallow candles, or maybe a more ornate brass, bronze or iron fixture.

I do agree, though, that it sounds like a good idea for a scene.

[fuchsoid]

Modern chandeliers are incredibly heavy, and held up by heavy chains, and hung from heavy bolts that pass through floor joists, with a metal plate in the floor of the room above. Earlier versions would have been lighter, but probably held up in a similar way. The floor joists would have been very thick heavy baulks of seasoned oak, which doesn't burn all that readily, so you may have a scene where the chandelier hangs there glittering in the flames. Eventually it would fall down, of course, but the fire would have to be going for a pretty long time. I saw photos of a chandelier that fell in the
fire at Windsor Castle a few years ago. It was badly damaged, but they managed to save all the crystals and rebuild it.