In 1907, a Scottish engineer knocked on the doors of financiers seeking funding for the development of a portable fire extinguisher. Failing to find a sympathetic ear, he was forced to take his invention to the US, where he established what would later become known as the Pyrene Company of Delaware in 1909. Five years later, an American businessman, Wallace B. Phillips, obtained UK patents for fire extinguishers and founded the Pyrene Company Limited in 1914, where a small range of hand pump fire extinguishers were sold for domestic and transport use.