In prior Yankee Ingenuity columns, I have told the stories of prominent local inventors and businessmen. In this month’s column I will shift gears a bit and tell the story of a groundbreaking technology. This technology was developed in response to an energy crisis, resulted in unprecedented levels of inventive activity and patenting of inventions, and was roundly criticized by pundits and celebrities who claimed that it would result in the downfall of society as it had been known. Based upon my description, you may think that I am talking about nuclear power plants, wind turbine farms or other modern innovations in the power generation field. However, this groundbreaking technology is not of our era but, rather, was in its infancy over two hundred years ago.

Although we now live in an era of climate control, where the only real problem is figuring out how to pay the high cost of heating and cooling our homes, New Englanders of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries faced a far more difficult problem. Namely, how to stay warm during the cold winter months. Homes of this era were not insulated and typically included a single central wood-burning fireplace. As these fireplaces were used both for cooking and heating, their design was usually a compromise between the optimal shape for heating and cooking. Accordingly, stories abound in the diaries of people from that era of ink freezing in their inkwells as they wrote by the fire, of basins of water freezing solid even when placed directly in front of the fire and, generally, of the suffering that they encountered in dealing with the long cold winters.

One way to keep homes tolerably warm was to keep fires high and roaring. In fact, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the typical home burned a total of thirty to forty cords of wood per year for heating and cooking purposes. As a mature stand of trees will typically produce between thirty and forty cords of wood per acre, each home burned a full acre of mature forestland per year. Over time, local stands of timber were depleted and by the mid-eighteenth century fuel wood often needed to be transported in upwards of one hundred miles for use in highly populated areas. Given the lack of paved roads and heavy transportation vehicles, transporting wood was an arduous and expensive task and the cost of wood quickly began to rise based upon this additional expense. Like the rise in oil prices that we faced in the 1970’s and in recent years, this rise in wood prices created an energy crisis for the people of that era and this crisis led to the development of more efficient methods of heating homes.

The problem of heating a home more efficiently was addressed by a number of inventors prior to 1800. One prominent example was the Franklin Stove, which was invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1742 and was the first in a long line of innovations that would transform the way the homes were heated and meals were cooked. Franklin’s original stove design incorporated a box having an open front that was fitted into a conventional fireplace. The box was formed from cast iron plates having channels through which combustion gasses would pass before they were exhausted through the chimney. The use of cast iron plates having heating channels increased the efficiency of stove, as the fire and combustion gasses would heat the plates and this heat would be available for radiation into the room. Franklin claimed that his stove allowed the room in which it was located to be "Twise as warm as it used to be, with a quarter of the Wood…formerly consum’d there".

In the years following the development of the Franklin stove, stove designs evolved from Franklin’s fireplace insert to the airtight freestanding stove. Freestanding stoves provided a number of advantages as they radiated heat from all sides, did not need to be placed against a wall, and could be readily installed in most rooms of a home. Stove designs were varied and many were adapted both for heating and for cooking. However, the technology required to mass-produce these stoves had not yet been developed and these stoves were sold primarily to the wealthy.

By the 1810’s, stove making technology had evolved to the point where stoves could be efficiently manufactured and sold at a reasonable cost and the first widely successful cookstove, the "saddlebags" stove, was patented and marketed in 1815 by William T. James. The commercial success of this stove spurred a relative explosion of inventive activity in the field and between 1820 and 1839, there were 298 patents issued for stoves and stove attachments, which represented fully 2% of all patents issued during these years. For sake of comparison, were a particular industry to have accounted for 2% of all patents over the past 19 years, this would equate to nearly 48,000 patented inventions!

The explosion of the stove industry was characterized by a large number of companies vying for business; a substantial number of which were located in New England. One such manufacturer was Nicholas Smith of New Hampton, NH, who was granted United States Patent Number 71 for his "Parlor and Cooking Stove Combined" in October of 1836. It is not widely known that the current patent numbering system was not adopted until 1836 and, despite the fact that thousands of patents had issued from 1790 until 1836, Mr. Smith had the distinction of being the first New Hampshire inventor to obtain a patent under the current numbering system. Although his design appears to be a familiar one, research on Mr. Smith has not resulted in any additional information on him or his company and it appears that his story, like his stove, is forever lost.

Despite their many advantages, many decried the rise of the stove. The loss of the ability to view the flames of the hearth was, at the time, seen as the end of family life as they knew it and stoves were attacked as being unhealthy and morally repugnant. In fact, criticism of the stove was widespread. Albert Bolles, an early historian of the stove industry (yes, there is such a job description as "stove historian") noted "(w)hen stoves were first introduced, a feeling of unutterable repugnance was felt by all classes toward adopting them and they were used for a generation chiefly in school houses, courtrooms, bar-rooms, shops and other public and rough places."

Famous writers, who were the celebrities of their time, protested their use. For example, author Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote "Would our revolutionary fathers have gone barefooted and bleeding over snows to defend air-tight stoves and cooking ranges?" She mused that, the memory of an open fire "its roaring, hilarious voice of invitation, its dancing tongue of flames… called to them through the snows of that dreadful winter to keep up their courage, made their hearts warm and bright with a thousand reflected memories". Author Nathaniel Hawthorne was particularly concerned about the effects of stoves and wrote "In one way or another, the inventions of man are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life. The domestic fire was a type of all these attributes…It is my belief that social intercourse cannot long continue what it has been, now that we have subtracted from it so important and vivifying an element as firelight…there will be nothing to attract [our children] to one centre…Domestic life, if it may still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners." Despite these protestations, the stove was not about to go away and by the 1880’s most homes in America were equipped with them.

The story of the stove should seem to be a familiar one to you, as many technologies have followed similar paths. Society faces a problem, people find a solution to the problem, technology advances allow that solution to be economically viable, the solution begins to be adopted, people attack the solution as harmful and/or morally wrong, and, over time, the solution is fully integrated into society. This process parallels the rise of many of the innovations that are a part of our lives today, including the automobile, the television, the computer, and many others, and it proves, once again, that history does repeat itself.

Michael Persson is a Registered Patent Attorney and is the Managing Director of the law firm of Lawson & Persson, P.C., in Laconia, where his practice focuses primarily on intellectual property law and litigation. Mike serves as Treasurer of the Belknap County Economic Development Council and the Belknap County Bar Association, and on the boards of The Salvation Army and the Lakes Region Rotary Club. Mike lives in Laconia with his wife and two daughters and may be reached by phone at 603-528-0023, or via email at mike@laconialaw.com.

Photograph of Nathaniel Hawthorne, circa 1850. Hawthorne was one of many opponents to this new energy saving technology, which caused him to say, "In one way or another, the inventions of man are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life".