If you’ve ever found yourself bored enough to interrogate your iPhone, you’ve probably stumbled upon one of the oldest "Easter eggs" in the book. Ask your phone, "Hey Siri, why are firetrucks red?" and you won't get a lecture on light wavelengths or the history of municipal paint budgets. Instead, you get a breathless, high-speed word salad about Queen Elizabeth, Russian history, and the number of inches in a foot.
It’s hilarious. It’s also completely absurd.
Most people expect a "smart" assistant to give a smart answer. You want to hear about visibility or safety standards. But Apple’s engineers decided to lean into a classic piece of playground wordplay that has been floating around for decades. It’s a bit of "circular logic" that sounds like it was written by someone who had way too much caffeine—or perhaps a Monty Python fan.
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The Ridiculous Logic Behind Siri’s Answer to Why Are Firetrucks Red
Let’s break down the chaos. If you trigger the response today, Siri usually rattles off a specific chain of "facts" that link together like a fever dream.
The explanation typically goes something like this:
- Fire trucks have eight wheels and four people.
- Eight plus four is twelve.
- There are twelve inches in a foot.
- A foot is a ruler.
- Queen Elizabeth was a ruler.
- The Queen Elizabeth was also a ship.
- The ship sailed the seas.
- In the seas are fish.
- Fish have fins.
- The Finns fought the Russians.
- The Russians are red.
- Fire trucks are always "rushin’" around.
Get it? Russians and rushin’. It’s a pun. A long, exhausting, beautiful pun.
Honestly, it’s one of those jokes that works because of the sheer commitment to the bit. It relies on homonyms (words that sound the same but mean different things) and a complete disregard for actual fire science. If you try to follow the math or the history, your brain might start to smoke. Queen Elizabeth (the ship) was a real thing, and the Finns did indeed have some legendary scraps with Russia, but none of that explains why a 40,000-pound pumper truck is painted vermillion.
Where did this joke actually come from?
It’s not an Apple original. This "logic" has been around since at least the mid-20th century. Some people swear they heard it from their grandfathers in the 1950s. It’s been attributed to various comedy groups, including Monty Python (though there's no specific sketch that matches it word-for-word), and even old vaudeville acts.
By hard-coding this into Siri, Apple preserved a bit of oral tradition that would otherwise be relegated to dusty joke books or obscure Reddit threads.
Why are they actually red, though?
If we put the "Finns and Russians" logic aside, the real history is a lot more about money and human psychology than you might think. There isn't just one single reason; it’s more of a "first-mover advantage" situation that became a global standard.
The "Red Paint Was Expensive" Theory
In the 1800s, fire brigades weren't always government-run. Many were volunteer-led or even owned by insurance companies. There was massive competition between different crews. They didn't just want to put out fires; they wanted to look better than the guys in the next town over.
Some historians argue that red was the most expensive pigment at the time. Painting your rig bright red was basically the 19th-century version of buying a Ferrari. It was a flex. It signaled that your department was well-funded and elite.
The "Red Paint Was Cheap" Theory
Of course, history loves a contradiction. A separate school of thought suggests that early fire departments were actually broke. Red paint—specifically the kind derived from iron oxide (think "barn red")—was incredibly cheap and plentiful. Many early horse-drawn fire wagons were supposedly painted red simply because it was the most affordable way to keep the wood from rotting.
The Henry Ford Factor
This is the most plausible explanation for why red stuck. In the early 1900s, Henry Ford’s Model T dominated the roads. Famous for his "any color you want as long as it's black" policy, Ford flooded the streets with dark, monochromatic cars.
In a sea of black vehicles, a fire engine needed to be unmistakable. Red provided the highest contrast. It screamed, "Get out of the way!" while everything else blended into the gray city smog.
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Is Red Actually the Safest Color? (The Science)
Here is where it gets interesting. Modern science actually says Siri—and tradition—might be wrong.
In the 1970s and 80s, researchers started looking at accident data involving emergency vehicles. A famous study by Dr. Stephen Solomon, an optometrist, found that red fire trucks were involved in significantly more accidents than those painted a specific shade of lime-yellow (technically "fluorescent yellow-green").
The reasoning is pretty simple:
- Low Light Visibility: Human eyes are remarkably bad at seeing red at night. As the sun goes down, red starts to look like dark gray or black.
- Peripheral Detection: Our eyes are most sensitive to wavelengths in the middle of the visible spectrum. That’s exactly where that "high-viz" lime-yellow sits.
- The "Safety Yellow" Movement: This is why you see many modern departments, especially in airports or newer suburban districts, using chartreuse or lime trucks. They are objectively easier to see in the rain, at dusk, and in heavy traffic.
So why aren't they all yellow? Tradition. People expect a fire truck to be red. If you see a lime-green truck in your rearview mirror, your brain might take a split second longer to realize it’s an emergency vehicle. That split second matters.
What to do if Siri stops answering
Sometimes Siri gets "smarter" and stops giving the joke. Apple occasionally updates its responses to be more helpful and less "punny." If you ask and get a boring Wikipedia summary, try these variations:
- "Tell me a joke about fire trucks."
- "Why are fire engines red?" (The word 'engine' sometimes triggers the legacy response).
- "Do you know the fire truck logic joke?"
How to use this for your own trivia night
If you want to sound like an expert, don't just repeat the Siri joke. Mix in the real facts. Mention the Battenburg markings used in the UK (the yellow and green checkerboard) or how the Purkinje effect explains why red disappears at night.
Moving Forward with the Facts
Next time you’re hanging out with friends and someone brings up an iPhone Easter egg, you can give them the full story. You've got the circular logic of the Finns and Russians, the "expensive paint" peacocking of the 1800s, and the modern science of lime-yellow visibility.
If you're interested in the tech side of this, you can actually look into how Apple programs these responses. They use "intent" mapping to recognize when a user is asking a specific "fun" question rather than a factual one. It’s a glimpse into the personality-driven AI design that made Siri famous in the first place.
Take Action: Check your local fire department's fleet. Are they sticking with the traditional red, or have they moved to high-visibility lime? Understanding the "why" behind these colors helps you stay more aware on the road—which is the whole point of the paint job in the first place.