At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Thomas Jefferson complained that he had to stop writing one evening because the ink had frozen in his inkwell. A diarist named George Templeton Strong recorded in the winter of 1866 that even with two furnaces alight and all the fireplaces blazing, he couldn’t get the temperature of his Boston home above 38 degrees Fahrenheit. It was Benjamin Franklin, predictably enough, who turned his attention to the matter and invented what became known as the Franklin (or Pennsylvania) stove. Franklin’s stove was an undoubted improvement, though more on paper than in practice. Essentially, it was a metal stove inserted into a fireplace, but with additional flues and vents that ingeniously redirected air flow and wafted more heat back into the room. But it was also complex and expensive and brought great—often intolerable—disruption to every room in which it was installed. The heart of the system was a second, rear flue, which proved to be impossible to sweep unless it was fully dismantled. The stove also required an under-floor cool-air vent, which in practical terms meant the stove couldn’t be installed in upstairs rooms or where there was a basement below, disqualifying it from many houses altogether. Franklin’s design was improved upon in America by David Rittenhouse and in Europe by Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, but real comfort came only when people sealed off their fireplaces and brought a stove fully into the room. This kind of stove, known as a Dutch stove, smelled of hot ...