While the hearth and fireplace has been with us for tens of thousands of years, it took one man to make a major improvement in this simple technology — two hundred and sixty seven years ago, in 1742, Benjamin Franklin, in a life noted for a veritable inventing spree, created in addition to bifocals, the public library, and the use of electricity, the reinvention of the fireplace. Of course, I’m talking about the cast iron stove. He called it the Pennsylvania Fireplace, and today we know it, more simply, as the Franklin Stove.
In Franklin’s time, the fireplace was a dangerous thing, using a lot of wood and wasting a lot of heat. The Franklin Stove allowed people to cook and warm their homes with a little less danger and with less wood. The cast iron stove looks like a fireplace but it contains metal baffles and this increases its heating efficiency to such a degree that it has been used now to warm homes and farm houses for over two hundred and fifty years!
Here are some of the highlights of this amazing device. Two years after he invented the stove, he wrote a pamphlet titled, “An Account of the New-Invented Pennsylvania Fireplaces.” Then, in 1744, twenty-eight years later, a man named David Rittenhouse made the first real improvement to the stove: He added the L-shaped chimney. By 1790, the stove was considered a vital part of America. In 1895, the design was adjusted again, adding a flue damper you could adjust as well as a slanted fireback. In 1800, several manufacturers strove to improve the design, making the stove even more popular.
The state’s governor offered Franklin a patent, which would provide Franklin with the sole right to make and sell the stoves. Franklin turned down the patent, believing, as he said, that the appreciation of his invention was better than financial reward — a selfless act that would one would find hard to replicate here in the 21st Century.
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