The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-01-09
STOVES FRANKLIN MADE,
ONE THE ANCESTOR OF MODERN
 HEATING APPARATUS.
A Phase of Trnnklfn's Greatness Not

Heating Discovered by Him--His
 Theory of the Perfect Fire stin
 Where He Left It. Housekeepers in the American col onies during the half century before the Revolution were confronted by prob lem quite as serious as any which the obstinacy of kings and parliaments inn
 posed on their men folk-a general scarcity of fuel
 The time had long gone by when one could cut unlimited quantities of wood in his own back yard, while the least fortunate towns had no>adequate supply within one hundred miles. Seven months of winter and no railroads
 made fuel, as one householder expressed it in 1745, "a very considerable article in the expense of families Life must indeed have been one perpetual coal strike.
 Evidently, under these conditions. the
 older style of fireplaees, which opened
 shoulder high and took in a four-foot l stick, had become impossible. The
 wonder is that they were ever tolerated at all. They took more wood than a paper mill and more draught than a blast furnace "so that" as our colonial ! householder continues, "the door can l seldom be shut; and the cold air so nips the backs and heels of those that sit before the fire that they have no
 comfort till other screens or settles are provided to keep it off.
 By TAO it had become the fashion so to brick up the old fireplaces as to re-
 duce them nearly to the modern type. For some reason or other the Ameri- can colonists, like the Englishman or against the closed alright stove such
 as was in general use in Europe. On
 the other hand they were unable to adopt the open grate soft coal fire of the mother country, because, though soft coal had been discovered long be- fore, and in the Virginia fields had been worked as early as 1T50, the dis tance of the deposits from tidewater
 and the condition of the roads made
 the price of coal higher than it has | ever been since. In short, our forebears of the middle of the century warmed themselves as well as they could at open and wood fires. and for the rest went cold.
 Such, therefore, was the state of af- fairs when Benjamin Franklin took up the problem. People still call him Franklin the Philosopher, for the sake of the alliteration, but he was little of a philosopher In the modern sense. On the contrary, he was an especially hard headed practical man who understood equally well nature and human nature, and in the scanty leisure of a life de- voted to the service of the state made himself one of the first men of science
 of his age.
 He knew all that anybody knew in
 his day about heat combustion and the theory of chimney draught; in fact, some of his own discoveries had been
 in this very field. He knew his coun- trymen also, and he knew it to be equally impossible to persuade them to adopt at once closed stoves or to satisfy
 their demand for comfort with open l fireplaces. He devised, therefore, not
 so much new form of stove as new system of heating.
 The so-called Franklin stove of com 1 merce, which some of us are con- strained to use, happened 10 get them- selves built between the two fireplace eras, is so far as the name goes an utter fraud. It has no more to do with Benjamin Franklin than with Napoleon 1 Bonaparte.
 Franklin's stove, the Philadelphia 1 fireplace, as he called it--the old nhil-
 osopher seemed to like alllteration as well as the rest of us embodied at least two absolutely new principles of ! stove construction and though the orig ! inal Franklin stove is as the ichthyo-
 saurus one or both these principles still
 appear in almost every modern piece of
 heating apparatus. America today in convenient and effi- cient stoves and furnaces altogether 1 outclasses all other countries of the world. She does So largely because | other inventors have developed Frank | lins ideas. That famous epigram about
 the lightning from heaven and the scepters from tyrants might justly have included some alusion to zero weather.
 The Philadelphia fireplace, stove without stovepipe, stood everywhere | clear of the wall and connected with
 the chimney only through It's bottom ! It had no legs, but rested fiat on the hearth, portion of which had to be re- l moved to make fiues, while brick wall behind it closed the opening of the orig | inal fireplace.
 The smoke of the fire, therefore, in-
 stead of passing directly into the chim- 1 ney along the top of the stove, then down again and under the floor. This down draught was one unique feature The other was that between the two passages, at the back of the fire, was the air box into which fresh air entered ! from beneath the hearth through pipe | opening out of doors. This air after
 becoming warmed passed into the room | through holes near the top of the stove. l There was also movable front which l served as a blower; or, the back dam per being shut, converted the fireplace into a closed stove. In whichever way | it was used it allowed the gases from | the fire to escape up the chimney only | after they had been long in contact with thin plates of metal and parted ! with all their available heat. The Franklin stove is the great 1 grandfather of all American heating | apparatus. The principle of the down [ draiIotet anpaars in Y1ans+ r,u rth,- sstn,,As,