This is the second chunk of the incomplete Chapter 6 of my book MS that I've decided to include as a separate posting, rather than just leaving it more or less buried in a shared document file only accessible through a link from a skeletal post. Translating the section on Philo Stewart into blog form was easy and not even very time-consuming, and certainly "value-adding," both for me as author and, I hope, for anybody who stumbles across this. Being able to include hypertext links to so many original documents (notably patents) and texts is the real plus of doing things this way rather than relying upon cold print. I have also embellished this with illustrations, of actual products rather than just the patent drawings; the latter are in any case all very accessible.
To explain the purpose of Chapter 6 and its several component parts, it will help to start with the Introduction:
Chapter 6. Completing the
Range
[Draft
“completed” or at least abandoned by summer 2012, then updated 26 June
2014. Yellow highlights = things I thought might need attention later. I have not resisted the temptation to edit it a bit more while doing this blog post, and have marked up my 2015 changes in pink, so that I can find them if/when I revise the chapter.]
The
inventors and entrepreneurs we met in Chapters One
through Four
introduced most of the principal stove types on which the industry's
early growth, between the late teens and the 1830s, depended, and
upon which other manufacturers and designers made minor modifications
and major improvements that increased their functionality. Daniel
Pettibone and his furnace; Charles Postley, James Wilson, and their
improved Franklins, cabooses, cookstoves, and portable ranges, so
important for opening up the New York market even before the coming
of anthracite; William James, James Conant, Thomas Woolson, and their
simple, robust wood-fired cookstoves that brought the stove habit to
upcountry New England; Henry Stanley and his much-imitated rotary
cookstove, the market-leading product from Massachusetts to Michigan
through the early 1840s; Eliphalet Nott, Jordan Mott, James Atwater,
and Denison Olmsted, designers of anthracite-fueled heating stoves
for the middle-class parlor – these men and hundreds of others less
original and influential had laid solid foundations. They had
succeeded in producing appliances that satisfied many of the cooking
and heating needs of households large and small, rich and poor, urban
and rural, and living in regions that remained firewood-dependent as
well as those that were adopting anthracite as their fuel of choice.
But there were still plenty of opportunities for significant
innovation between the 1830s and the 1860s, and the purpose of this
chapter is to explain the contributions of the men who made them,
rounding out the range of different kinds of stoves available to
consumers by mid-century.
In
the 1820s and 1830s there was still no single, standard cookstove
design. People bought and cooked on Nine and Ten-Plate Stoves, Oven
Franklins, and Step Stoves, with or without “elevated ovens,” as
well as on the many varieties of Rotaries. But between the late
1830s and the 1860s most of them were displaced by a single type, the
“square stove” with four boiler holes and a large oven, which by
the 1860s had begun to lengthen into an oblong, making room for a
second warming oven, a water-boiler attachment, and eventually six
holes. This layout, and its “portable range” variant, would
become the
universal American stove type from then until the end of the
industry, and would even influence what American consumers expected a
stove to do and to look like after solid-fuel appliances had been
replaced by gas and electric. Between the 1830s and the 1850s
inventors and designers also developed the efficient, convenient, and
attractive parlor stoves, and the powerful basement furnaces, on
which most Americans' domestic comfort would continue to depend until
the changeover to oil- and gas-fuelled central heating, which began
before the end of the nineteenth century but would not be complete
until the middle of the twentieth.
Jonathan Hathaway, Darius Buck and the
“Invention” of the Large-Oven Stove
P.P.
Stewart and Samuel Pierce had plenty of company among the stove
builders of New York's Capital District in the period from the 1830s
through the 1860s. About 170
men living in Albany, Schenectady, Troy, and nearby villages took out
at least one stove patent in these years, and many of them made a
habit and a business of it. But one of them left a larger imprint on
the historical record, of one particular kind, than any other: Darius
Buck, born in New York in 1801, dead before he turned fifty, with
just two patents to his name, and few other biographical facts readily discoverable about him. One key indicator of a stove inventor or designer's importance at the time, and to his peers, was his contribution to the development of American patent law through federal cases that mattered enough, and set sufficiently influential precedents, to be reported and to enter into the official records of significant litigation. Other leading stove makers – particularly Henry Stanley and Isaac Orr (see below) – were also active and successful serial litigants, but none made a bigger impact than Darius Buck.
Buck was not the inventor of the large-oven
stove, but he and his assignees were the most determined and, for a
while, successful exploiters of the intellectual property in his
patents that, they argued, gave them the potential to control and
profit by the development of the market for it. Other manufacturers
wanting to build the kind of stove that most consumers demanded by
the 1850s had to pay them for the privilege, or (like Stewart and
Pierce) design their way around Buck's patents (1157, taken out in
1839, reissued in 1850, and then extended until 1860 in 1853; and
5967 [1848]) with genuine innovations of their own, or risk having to
meet them in court.
The
search for a good large-oven stove seems to have begun in the
early 1830s, shortly after the death of Christopher Hoxie removed a litigious obstacle (even after he stopped making and selling his own patent stoves in the early 1820s he had licensed other furnaces to use his designs, and pursued infringers through the courts). It accelerated after the Patent Office Fire in 1836 consumed most of the evidence about his and others' earlier work, and while
most inventors were still working on improvements, or at least
variations, of Conant's step stove and Stanley's rotary.
The first and most important of the several resulting designs was the work of Jonathan Gaylor
Hathaway (b. 1793), an itinerant stove maker temporarily resident in
Painesville, Ohio (a lakeside town about thirty miles east of
Cleveland, and fifteen west of Samuel Wilkeson's stove furnace in
Madison township), who essentially reinvented Hoxie's expired and conveniently destroyed patent. Hathaway's stove as originally registered in 1837 had four boiler holes in a large and convenient top surface above the fire, and a wide shelf in front of the firebox which could also be used for cooking on. There were either two small ovens or a single larger one, heated via downdraft flues using Hoxie's three-flue system and wrapping four of their six sides in the products of combustion. A single damper controlled the air flow into the firebox and thus the heat of the fire.
When he reissued his patent nine years later, Hathaway kept the same basic arrangement, but only offered a single large oven with a convenient drop-down door, probably because by then a large oven was what the market had been taught to demand. His device's claimed advantages were its capacity, controllability, convenience, and economy. “[A] great quantity of baking, roasting, &c., may be done in a stove occupying comparatively a small space; ... the ovens may be more or less heated without augmenting or diminishing the quantity of fire; [and] when heated to the required temperature, the heat may be for a long time retained in the flues, rendering only a small quantity of fuel necessary for heating a room and doing the cooking.”
Hathaway had, by his own account, been in the business since about 1820, “giv[ing] my attention almost entirely to the construction of stoves and to experimenting upon their construction.” He made and tested “many hundred patterns and plans of stoves of different kinds with the view of improving upon the mode of producing an equal diffusion of the heat about all parts of the oven and ascertaining the best and most economical means of producing that result.” He travelled from furnace to furnace, contracting with their owners to make stoves to his patterns and selling them in the local market before moving on – a good way of diffusing the new technology across the northern states. He also sold other entrepreneurs the right to manufacture his stoves and sell them in particular districts, and extended his market that way too. His territory reached from western New York State around the Erie lakeshore communities, across into Canada, and eventually down into Pennsylvania and east as far as Massachusetts.
In 1832, while resident in Hamilton, Canada West (now Ontario), he took out a Canadian patent (No. 145, "the first in Upper Canada for a mechanical invention") for a “Hot Air Cooking Stove” which already contained most of his later features (an oven below the fire, boiler holes in the top plate, damper control) but had a single "sheet" flue like Charles Postley's almost twenty years previously, which survived as an option into his 1837 patent. By 1835 he was in Toronto and at war in the press (The Patriot, 17 Nov. 1835, p. 4) with local furnace operators J. & B. Van Norman, who had recently patented their own version of the Hoxie stove, No. 153, suspiciously soon after making castings of Hathaway's for his local agents to sell. Hathaway threatened to "immediately take the proper legal steps to punish the temerity of the self-styled 'INVENTOR'," only to be answered very robustly by the Van Normans on the same page:
Mr. Hathaway's only object was to retard the rapid sale of our Stoves, and to excite curiosity to his own. As to the infringement he knew well to the contrary, and he also knew the little inducement there was for us to imitate his Stoves if the character given by those acquainted with them may be relied upon; nor need he expect to frighten us or to make any person acquainted with their principles believe there was any similarity in their construction.
Mr. Hathaway's spleen may be accounted for in the total eclipse of his far famed "HOT AIR" by our new invention, which has given such universal satisfaction.
We would advise Mr. H. to call on Mechanics, examine the original drawings and specifications of his Patent; compare them with his present Stove, and get their opinion how far his Patent will protect the Stove he is now offering for sale as a patent article, before he talks about any invasions. We would also ask him to whom he was indebted for the present arrangement of flues, and in his research for infringements, to 'cast his mind's eye' to the old diving Stove of Massachusetts [actually the New York/Connecticut/Massachusetts border, the Hoxie stove], which took its last dive some 15 years ago, and see if any similarity exist.
Hathaway's and the Van Normans' patents had to coexist in Canada -- at least, there is no public record of any suit -- where the "reinvention" of earlier American patents was quite legal, something that remained a grievance for American stove makers for the next several decades. As was his habit, Hathaway moved on. In 1836 he was in Detroit and Cleveland, where he later claimed to have made stoves almost identical to those he patented in Painesville in 1837; and in 1838 he moved again, from Painesville to Lockport and Rochester, New York.
 |
| The earliest Hathaway illustrated stove advertisement that I have found -- in Walker's Buffalo City Directory (1842), unpaginated front matter. Dudley was his assignee, i.e. he had bought a portion of Hathaway's patent -- Disclaimer, 21 Sept. 1844, with US Patent 505. |
Hathaway's peripatetic manner of doing business required local partners,
and in the summer of 1838 he gave Darius Buck, then a wagon maker,
his start in the stove trade. Buck worked for Hathaway in Palmyra,
New York, twenty miles east of Rochester along the Erie Canal,
supervising a local pattern maker, James Seelye, who was crafting an
improvement to his stove that extended the oven under the shelf in
front of the firebox. After that job was finished, Hathaway
contracted with a local founder to make stoves to his pattern, and
financed Buck and a partner to sell them across the Burned-Over
District.
All
we really know about what went on in the Palmyra stove trade in 1838
comes from partial, contested, and sometimes contradictory testimony
ten to almost twenty years after the event. We can have little more
certainty about it than about the conversations and dealings said to
have taken place between Joseph Smith and the Angel Moroni in the
same town a decade earlier. But the version of the truth that
eventually undermined Buck's patent is
that in October of that year he met in a local tavern with John M. French, an Albany stove merchant who had recently moved to Rochester, Hathaway's agent in the sale to an Albany foundry of his iron patterns, which he must have
carted from place to place, and the right to use them. Together they went to visit Seelye's
workshop. Seelye was by that time working for Solomon Crowell, Jr.,
a local stove and tinware dealer who was also planning to make an
improvement on the original Hathaway stove. Buck inspected the
patterns and a mahogany model made to enable Crowell to meet the
patent-filing requirement, and accompanied him to Albany to get the
patent specifications drawn up and filed. He “declared it to be a
very good stove and expressed a wish to make money out of it.”
They “were going to break down the Hathaway patent, and get an
improvement on the said model, and ... if they could get the
improvement patented, it would use up the Hathaway stove.”
 |
| This advertisement shows the sort of small-oven stoves with which Hathaway, Buck, Hermance, and others competed, and which they quickly replaced -- Daily American Directory of the City of Rochester, for 1847-8 (Rochester, NY: Jerome & Bro., 1847), advertising section p. 15. See also the very similar Bush & Co. ad on p. 58. |
But
then Crowell's father and partner in business went broke “by reason
of endorsements” – a common experience in the aftermath of the
Panic of 1837, when the collapse of trading partners' credit brought
many firms down with them – and Crowell himself became “depressed
in spirits.” So no patent was filed, and the rumor spread that
Crowell had died. Buck therefore filed a patent on his own behalf
instead – something that depended on appropriating Crowell's
investment in imitating Hathaway's ideas, i.e. a sort of double
deception, which had relied in the first place on the ability of
Seelye to make a near-copy of Hathaway's plans. An alternative but not incompatible account of Buck's route to sole ownership of the patent was given by the man who actually drew up the specification, Benjamin Nott, Eliphalet's son and a partner in the company that made Nott's stoves, which had recently gone bankrupt – that Buck and Crowell were partners, and Crowell had paid the filing fee, but that they had disagreed between themselves about whose idea it really was and “Mr. Crowell's habits of dissipation were such at that time that I think they unfitted him for business,” which is what enabled Buck to get away with his theft.
It
did not take Hathaway long to find out what his former business
associate had done. As his recent Canadian experience helps explain, he was already accustomed to seeing his inventions (or reinventions) copied, and knew how to respond. He saw stoves that Buck had had made for him on
sale in Albany, one of Hathaway's most important markets, at the end of 1838 or early in 1839, i.e. while Buck's
patent application was pending, and told him that they were an
infringement on his rights. Buck admitted as much, and volunteered
to pay Hathaway a royalty “for the privilege of manufacturing”
and to move to another territory where he would “not interfere with
the sale of my stoves.” Hathaway refused, but Buck moved anyway,
first of all to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where Hathaway was also
developing his market, and then to Cincinnati by 1841, where he was
again pursued by Hathaway's lawyers. His strategy was to promise to
stop making stoves when threatened with a lawsuit, or to offer to pay
for the privilege in the usual, legal way, then start over somewhere
else when Hathaway repeated his refusal. In the end he wound up in
St. Louis, the market and emerging manufacturing center as far away
as possible from his former boss and mentor, now his cheated rival.
The
story of how Buck stole Hathaway's ideas (if indeed they were Hathaway's, rather than mostly Hoxie's) and then helped spread them
around the country is almost more interesting than the patent he filed to claim them for himself. It was well drafted, which may have
reflected the advice of the Albany stove makers -- Nott, and Amos T. De Groff -- with whom he
collaborated, given his own limited experience in the technical side of the business. It expressed very clearly the problems it was addressing – making a
stove that could bake and boil at the same time without using too
much fuel, and with an evenly heated oven, “so as to do away with
the occasional use of the brick oven, even in large families.” It
was basically just a Hathaway stove with the oven extended under the
hearth – a feature Hathaway had already offered in stoves he had
made and sold, and which he had been working to perfect in Palmyra –
and a modification to the flues claiming to guarantee that the front
and bottom of the enlarged oven would heat up evenly.
Probably
more crucial to Buck's success in business than “his” (or
somebody's) small but significant design improvements was his
chutzpah. Buck did not have the capital or the skill to do his own
manufacturing, but he was an effective salesman. He had his stoves
made in Cincinnati foundries and then transported to St. Louis, where
he advertised their many advantages. He was not modest in his
claims. By 1844 his “celebrated Stove st[ood] unrivalled before
the world.” They were “the most perfect article in the Western
country.” They “possessed all the advantages of any other Stove
now in use” -- unsurprisingly, as Buck had incorporated other
people's ideas -- “with at least one-third more oven, which is
heated with perfect uniformity in every part. There are flues in the
oven so constructed as to carry off the steam arising from the
cooking of various kinds of meats, into the pipe, thereby preventing
the mixture of flavors” -- a common objection to the baking of meat
in a sealed iron box rather than roasting it in open air before the fire. It also
consumed “a very small amount of fuel,” so that “The economy,
convenience and despatch in all the operations of cooking, render
this Stove decidedly the most preferable to any other ever offered.”
 |
|
|
Buck
went into partnership with Wiley Wright, a local tinsmith, and over
the next five years they began to make their own stoves in St. Louis and continued to enlarge and improve his stove
and broaden their product range until it included a full spectrum of
the common types -- “Improved Premium Air-tight, Parlor, and other
stoves; box coal, 6, 7, and 10 plates” -- all on offer “wholesale
or retail, at the lowest market prices.” But the Buck Stove, both
the original model and an even bigger two-oven variant introduced in
1848-49, remained at the center of their business. By this time Buck
had also established himself as a serial litigant, and this astute
copyist now complained of treatment by his competitors that was not
unlike his own past, and indeed continuing, practice. “[S]tove
inventers (sic)
now find it necessary, in order to sell their wares, to copy as
nearly as possible the form, and then, by diligent efforts, attempt
to palm off their productions upon the public as an improvement on
Buck's Patent.”
In Buck's case this was deeply ironic, partly
because the double oven had been a part of the original Hathaway
patent too, but also because it had already been reinvented again by
John C. Hermance of Schenectady in 1844 (“Cooking Stove,” Patent
3628). Hermance had been a sales agent for Buck's and
Hathaway's stoves. He rejected Hathaway's offer of a joint venture
(“I told him with his capital and tallents [sic]
the business could be extended to any amount”) and decided that he
could do better than his suppliers, becoming a manufacturer himself
in about 1840. By 1848 he had “Thousands of delighted purchasers”
for a product whose manufacturing rights he had licensed to two local
firms and also Warnick & Leibrandt, the leading Philadelphia
stove foundry.
Like
Jordan Mott, P.P. Stewart, Samuel Pierce, and others before and after
him, Buck tried to turn to his advantage the fact of being important enough to attract
copyists, as the strongest proof that “Buck's
stoves have a reputation beyond anything else in the shape of a
cooking apparatus.” The firm used essentially the same advertising
pitch through the mid-1850s, by which time Darius Buck had died, his
son Charles had replaced him, and the firm had begun to make its own
stoves, building a small foundry that opened in the spring of 1850
and grew rapidly until it occupied a whole city block. This upstart
firm, still on the run from Jonathan Hathaway a decade earlier, had
joined the St. Louis business establishment and was emerging as one
of the most important players in the national industry. As they
boasted, “During the time Buck's stoves have been before the
public, there have been issued from the Patent office a very large
number of new patents of various of Cooking Stoves. These Stoves have
each in turn been the nine days wonder of their season, and have then
died away, to give place to some new thing, equally unsatisfactory
and equally ephemeral.” Meanwhile, Buck's firm had left its shady
origins far behind. Its stoves – like many others in their makers'
eyes and advertising copy, of course -- were “Decidedly the Best
... Yet Invented.”
How
had Darius Buck turned in less than a decade from a patent violator
and fugitive from Hathaway and the center of the stove industry in
New York State, into a successful Missouri entrepreneur with the
funds to establish a St. Louis business dynasty, and an effective
defender of the intellectual property he had somehow acquired? Luck
and good judgment.
His first patent, though it eventually needed to
be rewritten and reissued to strengthen it, even after its validity
had been established in successive lawsuits, was better drafted than
Hathaway's. Hathaway's had to be radically narrowed when it was reissued in 1846 because, as he admitted, “by inadvertence and
mistake, and without any fraudulent or deceptive intention” he had
made so many claims that he had confounded his own case, rendering it
“inoperative and invalid.”
Buck's key strategic decision, after
moving to St. Louis and, thanks to Hathaway's problems, eventually
escaping his clutches, was to sell the rights to his patent in all
states save two (Missouri and Ohio) to the splendidly named
Shibboleth McCoy (b. 1812), one of the leading players in the Albany
stove industry between 1837, when he became partner in a new stove
foundry, and 1888, when he retired. In 1848 John Hermance, by then one of
McCoy's principal competitors, railed against him and his partners
and their licensees as “the vast moneyed monopoly ... engaged in
its (the Buck stove's) manufacture and sale”; he had already
endured three lawsuits at their hands, because each time he won they
simply shifted the venue to try to find a more sympathetic judge or
jury, and came back at him again.
Buck
and, after his death, his widow Desire participated in the lawsuits
and the management of the patent that gave McCoy's purchase its
continuing value, but the principal role in its defense was taken by
McCoy and his partners, his brother William and Stephen Clark, from their base in the heart of the industry. Within his own western territory Buck defended his rights by
himself – one of the targets of his many lawsuits described him as
a “drunken vagabond” whose technique was to give people enough
trouble that they would pay him off in order to settle. The McCoys
and Clark were well placed to levy charges on Capital District
competitors for the privilege of making large-oven stoves using
Buck's patents, and to police violations.
McCoy & Co.'s success in selling
stoves and manufacturing rights also meant that they could afford the
services of America's most expensive and effective patent lawyer,
William Henry Seward, who found “mechanical science ... a study for
which his keen perception and logical habit of mind gave him a
peculiar aptitude.” Seward, a former student and later a friend of
Eliphalet Nott, was filling the gap in his political career between
occupying New York State's governor's mansion and winning one of its
Senate seats, and mending a hole in his own finances, by returning to
the practice of law. He served as the advocate for some of the most
determined litigants in the American manufacturing community and the
investors who had bought their intellectual property, including the
Woodworth planer, the McCormick reaper, and the Buck stove. By 1849
four years of work had brought him thousands of dollars in fees,
relieving him from his “sea of debts,” and “the golden tide
continued to flow” -- both for him and his clients.
In the end, it did not and does not matter how much of his patented
inventions was properly Darius Buck's. Together with his principal
competitors Hathaway and Hermance, and their licensed manufacturers,
unlicensed rivals, not too blatant imitators, and the local sales
agents for all of the many makers in the 1840s producing large-oven
stoves claiming to be convenient, durable, economical, and efficient,
Buck helped to develop the standard cooking stove type of mid-century
America. This became the hottest-selling item in most makers'
product range and something on which other designers and inventors
who came after him would do their best to improve.
To do so, however, there was the small problem of Buck's controlling
patent to dispose of first. Desire Buck had secured the reissue of
her late husband's original patent in 1850, and then, the day before
it was due to expire in May 1853, extended it for another seven
years. The prospect of having to keep paying tribute to a patent
troll was evidently too much for one of Buck's son Charles's St.
Louis neighbors and competitors, and he determined to break it.
 |
| Kennedy's St. Louis City Directory for the Year 1857 (1857), advertising section p. 57, showing the increasing amount of surface decoration even on cooking stoves by mid-century. Cf. the very similar ads for their major local competitors Bridge & Beach (p. 18) and Excelsior (p. 44). |
[Rereading the Patents of Canada, from 1824 to 1849 (1860) while revising this for posting and inserting hyperlinks into the notes, I came across a detail that says a bit more about the complicated Hathaway/Buck relationship. In 1848 Reuben Colton, a Brockville, Ontario founder, took out a patent for "an improvement on 'BUCK AND HATHAWAY'S PATENT COOK STOVE, CALLED 'THE CANADIAN HOT AIR STOVE.'" Colton's improvements were largely cosmetic, but his patent suggests that Buck had settled his conflicts with Hathaway as he would eventually with Hermance, and that they were now cooperating, at least in the Canadian market. So maybe the phrase "escaping his clutches" above needs a rethink -- maybe Hathaway and Hermance both reached agreements with Buck and his assignees to let one another be, perhaps by market sharing, leaving Buck and the McCoys free to harass other makers? Probably we will never know for sure.]
 |
Buck's in 1910, by which time it was embroiled in the huge lawsuit against the American Federation of Labor for which it is best remembered. The 1846 date must be for the partnership with Wright, or the beginning of manufacturing, or both.
|
NOTES
