This is another trip down Memory Lane -- digging up one of my earliest "working papers" on the history of the stove industry and placing it here rather than only accessible as a document file via my old website. It doesn't make sense to keep stuff in different formats, and really the website has had its day. Many of the numbers underpinning this report are now out of date -- for example, I have long completed my patent database with post-1873 design patents -- but incorporating the greater accuracy that took me so long to achieve would probably make only a marginal difference to the look of the overall results, certainly when represented in chart form.
It's interesting, for me at least, to see what I knew just a couple of years into my serious research, and how much I got right about it at the time. Compiling a patent database of my own from Source Translation and Optimization™'s lists of patents, organized by principal classification (freely available online almost twenty years ago) and also Paratext's much more detailed version of the 1790-1873 patent record, which was only available to me for a precious few weeks on a free-trial basis, was my most important route into understanding the industry and its products. This would be obvious to anybody who looked at one or more of my four published articles about this subject, or many of the posts on this blog. As sources they're not without their problems, especially as all I have to work with are the published versions of patents, not the archival records behind them, but even within those limitations they are full of possibilities.