At Home - Bill Bryson [66]
Gas was particularly popular in America and Britain. By 1850 it was available in most large cities in both countries. Gas remained, however, a middle-class indulgence. The poor couldn’t afford it, and the rich tended to disdain it—partly because of the cost and disruption of installing it, partly because of the damage it did to paintings and precious fabrics, and partly because when you have servants to do everything for you already there isn’t the same urgency to invest in further conveniences. The ironic upshot is that not only middle-class homes but also institutions like lunatic asylums and prisons tended to be better lit—and, come to that, better warmed—long before England’s stateliest homes were.
Keeping warm remained a challenge for most people right through the nineteenth century. Our Mr. Marsham had a fireplace in virtually every room of his rectory, even the dressing room, in addition to a hefty kitchen stove. Cleaning, laying, and stoking such a number must have been enormous work, yet for several months of the year the house was almost certainly uncomfortably cold. (It still is.) Fireplaces just aren’t efficient enough to keep any but the smallest spaces warm. This could be overlooked in a temperate place like England, but in the frigid winters of much of North America the fireplace’s inadequacies at projecting warmth into a room became numbingly apparent. 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 iron and dried out the atmosphere, but at least it kept the occupants warm.
As Americans moved west into the prairies and beyond, an absence of wood for fuel caused problems. Corncobs were widely used, as were dried cow pies—known euphemistically and rather charmingly as “surface coal.” In wilderness areas, Americans also burned all kinds of fat—hog fat, deer fat, bear fat, even the fat of passenger pigeons—and fish oils, though all these were smoky and stank.
Stoves became something of an American obsession. By the early twentieth century more than seven thousand types had been registered with the U.S. Patent Office. The one quality all had in common was that they took quite a lot of work to keep going.