In pages 53-60 Captain Beatty comes to Montag's house, already suspecting that he was going to call in sick for the night. Beatty says he has seen whats wrong with Montag lots of times and we learn the correct history of the firemen and how them came to be. After everything started to become easier of people the need for books because less and less and they started to become an innocence
The significance of the firemen was to eliminate the unhappy things. This is important because we see how by the way people don't have to think they stop thinking they need education and the society has lost that intelligence.