ED: That gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "room temperature."
PETER: Exactly.
ED: So Peter, what was the room temperature in say colonial New England in the 17th and 18th century. Is he reconnecting with an old pattern or is this actually colder than it would have been back then?
PETER: Well, I'd say the front side of Dan is actually not connecting with the colonial experience, but the back side is. What I mean to say is that, heat in colonial houses would be an open hearth and would be very, very local. I mean, so local that you'd get toasty in front and you'd be still chilly behind.
ED: I guess you could turn around.
BRIAN: That wasn't invented until your century, Ed.
PETER: And I think our modern idea of comfort is to have a more general, homogenous, universal condition. That is, that we're warm all over. The technological challenge is, how do you deliver heat in a general way so that you can move around a room, for instance, and not suffer these extreme variations going from place to place.
ED: And only one name comes to mind, Benjamin Franklin. So tell us about the Franklin stove, Peter.
PETER: Well, the Franklin stove was one of Franklin's great early life inventions, you know, it was in 1742.
ED: Wow, that is early.
PETER: Yeah, well he was still working as a printer before he retired really early in life to become an in effect public man. And the Franklin stove was one of several innovations at this period but it was notable for its efficient burning of wood, we still do variations on the Franklin stove today and the basic idea is it's an anti-open hearth fire system. It's slow burying and the heat is radiating out from the stove itself because most heat in an open hearth will go up the chimney and gone
ED: That's what this marvelous invention of the stove is doing
PETER: It's containing
ED: It's modulating both the air intake and the air outtake, right?
PETER: Yeah, exactly right and that's the secret of comfort because with that modulation, and you can regulate the speed of burning or how quickly the coal or the wood is burning, then you can regulate the temperature and it will be more or less even. At least compared to that old idea of front and back than a regular wood fire.
ED: Well, I feel so patriotically proud that such a wonderful device has the name of one of our founding fathers on it.
PETER: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
ED: And I don't doubt that the Franklin stove is important but I have to share something with you that you might not like that much. It's from a conversation I had with a guy named Hal Harris, he's a historian at Durham Unversity in England. And he writes about the early days of castiron stoves. Tony, can you queue that tape?
HAL HARRIS: The Franklin stove was a failure, it was a failure commercially. It didn't sell, it didn't even work terribly well unless you had Benjamin Franklin to work it.
ED: Peter, are you okay with that?
PETER: Well, I'm having some trouble Ed, this is upsetting to me. I mean, I actually like Franklin, he's maybe one of my favorite founding fathers but he didn't invent everything, I recognize that actually it was Thomas Jefferson that invented everything.
ED: I was wondering if there's anymore American history. No, they pretty much invented it all. Well, hang in there Peter because frankly it gets worse.
Hal Harris told me the idea of building a fire inside a metal box to maximize fuel efficiency had been around a long time before Benjamin Franklin designed these stoves in the 1740s. The Germans have been doing it decades and a lot of them actually brought stoves with them when they started settling in Pennsylvania in the beginning of the 18th century. So this Franklin stove, it wasn't even Franklin's idea in the first place.
HAL HARRIS: No, Benjamin Franklin observed the stoves that European settlers had brought with them. There were a few in Boston when he was a kid and there were a lot more in the Philadelphia and surrounding regions by the time that he was an adult pursuing his career. He made very, very few design changes of his own and they were mostly a really bad idea.
ED: I'm so glad that the 18th century guy is not here to hear this. As the 19th century guy, I have no stake in this. So, please continue.
HAL HARRIS: Well, what happened even with the Franklin stove is that people took a device that didn't work terribly well, and they improved it, they simplified it, they stripped out the features of it that Benjamin Franklin had been proudest of and they turned it into something that actually worked. And they gave it his name because by the 1780s he was a national hero. So, the Franklin stoves are not the stoves that were invented by Benjamin Franklin in the 1740s. They're the stoves that carried Benjamin Franklin's brand name.
ED: But he was not the beneficiary of the brand name, other people were exploiting it for their benefit.
HAL HARRIS: Yeah, and he wasn't worried about that at all. He didn't try to make too much money on it, which is just as well because he wouldn't have. Anyway, so the Franklin stove in its simplified form turns into something that takes this new technology into more houses and then what we will call the German stove, that gets improved too; made lighter, made more durable, made more elegant, made more functional, made cheaper. And put all of those things together and you have the basis of a product that can build its own market. By 1860, one million stoves are sold in a year and by 1870 it's more than two million in a year. So, you're talking about durable appliances that are being sold one into every four or five American households, raising the internal temperature in winter, first of all into the 60s and eventually into the low 70s to something that we would recognize as comfortable today.
ED: Wow.
HAL HARRIS: And that's a revolution in people's experience of comfort.
ED: That's Hal Harris, a historian in Durham, England. We'll hear more from him in a few minutes. But first, we're going to take a quick break. So get up, make whatever adjustments you need to your thermostat or better yet, cruise on over the BackStoryRadio.org to see what others are saying about today's topic.
PETER: We'll be back in a minute with more about the history of heating and cooling in America.