ED: If you're just tuning in this is BackStory and we're talking about the history of heating and cooling. Earlier in the show we played a bit from my interview with Hal Harris, a historian of technology in England. He was describing what he calls the Stove Revolution of the mid-19th century. When huge numbers of Americans left behind the open hearths of their childhoods and started heating their homes with cast iron stoves instead. We're going to return to that interview now. I asked Harris to give me a sense of what winter was like in the North before the Stove Revolution really caught fire.
HAL HARRIS: During the drying of the dishes, the moment that you turned around from the fire the towel goes frozen hard in your hands and your bed will be cold and damp, everywhere will be cold and damp you'll just get used to the fact that through the winter you'll have no comfort at all.
ED: So that's the before, here's the after.
HAL HARRIS: That after begins for different people in different places at different times, but by the 1840s Americans begin to refer to the States as the Land of Stoves. And as far as their concerned, it's something that distinguishes their country from the European countries that they go to visit. Americans have comfort and other people don't.
ED: So what did it mean to live in a comfortable home then? Did they build their houses differently because they expected to have stoves?
HAL HARRIS: They came to, yeah. In the beginning the change that having the stove would make, let's say that you installed one in your kitchen. The change that will make will be that your fuel consumption will drop by perhaps as much as two-thirds.
ED: Wow.
HAL HARRIS: And you'll get more comfort for that. The whole room will be warm, not just a few feet around the fire. And of course when people can keep warm like that then they begin to alter the ways that they live in their houses. If they're wealthy enough, they'll buy perhaps a parlor stove too or they'll put a stove in the drafty hallway and all of a sudden the warmth will go upstairs and the bedrooms won't be freezing either. And what that will mean will be that, for example, people can live in more than one room of the house in winter. Different members of the family can get away from one another.
ED: Always a good thing.
HAL HARRIS: It is a good thing, I mean it is a good thing to at least have the choice, and it means that you can do things in winter indoors that are inactive. You find, for example, that clergymen and university teachers are really enthusiastic about stoves by the 1820s because in both cases you're talking about men who spend a lot of the time, even in winter, sitting down, reading, writing sermons, et cetera. Not things that keep you naturally terribly, terribly warm. So if you can have a warm study then the quality of your life is just transformed.
ED: So this is such an obviously good and natural thing, surely no one had anything negative to say about it, did that?
HAL HARRIS: They absolutely did, British visitors when they go into Canada in the 1790s and go into the East Coast towns and cities, from the early 19th century, they complained bitterly about how comfortable it was, how warm it was indoors, how few drafts there were. And they were absolutely certain it was really bad for peoples health. But the fact is quite a few Americans thought the same thing. And part of it is just nostalgia, early 19th century American is a society experiencing very, very rapid change. And people can see the familiar forms of life disappearing around them, and they're quite attached to the open fire, to the image of the family clustered around the fire, they just don't get quite the same emotional satisfaction out of looking at a black iron box. So by the 1840s you have really significant cultural commentators, there's a man called Andrew Jackson Downing
ED: Ah, very important, who invented the American style of home.
HAL HARRIS: Absolutely, he invented the American style of home, and it's kind of ironic because quite a lot of the houses that he designed were actually habitable because of stove or furnace heating. With larger rooms opening into one another, more air inside the house. But he himself was deeply suspicious of the stove, he called stove heated air, "The favorite poison of America." Thoreau was very suspicious of stoves too, Emerson was suspicious of stoves, you find loads and loads of New England worthies who are actually by that time, they're a generation beyond the introduction of stoves into New England. And they're looking towards a better past, and the open fire is the symbol of the better past.
ED: So, nostalgia takes only 25 years to create?
HAL HARRIS: It's quicker than that, in Massachusetts the nostalgic for the gold old days by the 1820s.
ED: That's Hal Harris, a history professor at Durham University in England. He's created digital archive of images of the 19th century stoves we were talking about. We'll link to it from our own website, BackStoryRadio.org.