* * *
[From Chapter 2]
Schools
were the not the only institutions where growing numbers of the
North-East's young people spent increasing amounts of their time, and
which were difficult or costly to heat in the traditional fashion.
College dormitories, too, presented challenges. Harvard simply
avoided them until the early twentieth century, leaving its students
shivering around their open fires. But the problem of providing
fuel-efficient, economical warmth for a new and cash-strapped
institution seems to have been the initial inspiration for the work
of early nineteenth-century America's perhaps most unlikely but also most
influential stove inventor – the Reverend Doctor Eliphalet Nott (b.
1773), president of Union College, Schenectady from 1804 until his
death in 1866, during a period when it was one of the largest and
most progressive in the country (Figure #2.1).1
 |
Figure #2.1. Eliphalet Nott, frontispiece to
Van Santvoord, Memoirs.
|
Nott
was born to a struggling family in Ashford, Connecticut, and orphaned
young, but he nevertheless gained a good classical education and
became a minister in 1795. He went as a missionary to New York
State, and served as both pastor of Cherry Valley, about sixty miles
west of Albany and then still a frontier settlement, and principal of
the local academy that he established. If he had not already learned
it, Cherry Valley, with its unheated barn of a church, and minimum
temperatures down to -20º F, must have taught him the value of
indoor comfort. As one of his successors recalled, “The feeble
warmth of the foot-stoves carried by the women barely sufficed to
keep the congregation from freezing as they listened to Dr. Nott's
young and fervid oratory in the keen air of winter.”2
Nott's
talents were quickly recognized, and in 1798 he moved to Albany to
take charge of the Presbyterian “Court Church,” which brought him
into contact with the state's political élite. In his preaching to
them he developed an attractive theology reconciling religious belief
with scientific progress, and placed his faith for improvement in
“the marketplace, the workshop, and the schools of America,” all
of which had their contributions to make toward realizing the kingdom
of God on Earth.
What elevated him above being a man of merely local influence was the duel in 1804 between two members of his congregation, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, and the obituary sermon Nott delivered on his friend Hamilton's death. According to one of Burr's biographers, it was “the strongest expression of feeling which the event elicited,” quickly recognized as a classic piece of eloquence by a culture that appreciated the art. It helped, as Jabez Hammond later put it, to make Burr “politically as dead as he now is naturally.”3
What elevated him above being a man of merely local influence was the duel in 1804 between two members of his congregation, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, and the obituary sermon Nott delivered on his friend Hamilton's death. According to one of Burr's biographers, it was “the strongest expression of feeling which the event elicited,” quickly recognized as a classic piece of eloquence by a culture that appreciated the art. It helped, as Jabez Hammond later put it, to make Burr “politically as dead as he now is naturally.”3
Nott's
resulting celebrity propelled him into a new career that suited his
talents as an organizer and educator -- the presidency of Union
College in nearby Schenectady, which he held for the rest of his long
life. The college he took over was “pining for want of means and
students,” and he rapidly transformed its fortunes in both
respects, using his political connections and deal-making skills to
assemble property for a campus, gain financial support from the
state, and commence an ambitious program of construction and
recruitment. In the process he acquired a problem – how to heat
his new college buildings? -- which gave him an opportunity to apply
what an early biographer called “the natural bent of his mind” to
his “first love,” the natural sciences. Nott believed they were
the route to material progress and prosperity: as he advised his
young men in 1812, “It is an old proverb, That wealth is power.
The same may be said, and more emphatically, with respect to
knowledge.”4
That
same year Nott commenced a course of experiments into what he later
termed “those general principles of heat that have a bearing on
most of the processes and comforts of human life,” in a laboratory
that he built on campus. He believed that “We live in an age of
action, not of study,” and that “There is no rest this side of
Jordan, unless we take it at the expense of duty.” But every man
needed some recreation, so he determined to use his little leisure
profitably. In his “occasional play hours” he gave “the
little incidental attention that I was obliged to give to
something” to a constructive pastime that “suited my own views of
propriety better than walking, riding, or other kindred exercises.”
He hoped to come up with beneficial results for “the human family.
I should deem it a happiness, should it yet be in my power to
increase the comfort of the rich, and lighten the expenses of the
poor, and stimulate the exertions of the industrious.”5
The
first beneficiaries were his own students. The college buildings
were originally fitted with Russian stoves (see Chapter 1, note #46),
but they did not heat the bedrooms. Nott's first attempt at stove
design involved making a simple, cheap, wood-burning box stove that
could be installed in every student's quarters, increasing their
comfort quite economically.6
These stoves, known as “coffins,” were crude and heavy even by
the standards of the time, but after their introduction in about 1815
they survived and warmed generations of students. As one later
recalled, from his time at Union in the late 1840s,
The iron was about an inch thick and could be neither broken nor
bent. It served as an anvil for all sorts of mechanical experiments,
from the cracking of hickory nuts to the splitting of kindling wood.
And even if in a playful mood, as occasionally happened, one of them
took a flying leap from a fourth story window upon the pavement
below, the only injury was to the person who might be standing under
it. As for the stove itself it only needed to be carried back and
put in its place again.7
By
1816, the “year without a summer” (because of the effects of the
volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia), whose “general
misery ... swelled the stream of New Englanders moving west,” Nott
was well set on his alternative career as a stove inventor, which
would lead to at least twenty-five patents between 1819 and 1839.
His reputation in this field, too, spread rapidly beyond the
Albany-Schenectady-Troy district, so that in 1820, when the Lehigh
Navigation and Mining Company wanted to encourage research leading to
the design and manufacture of stoves to burn its anthracite, and
build them a consumer market, it was to Nott that they turned. They
went to the trouble and expense of sending him a free load of “stone
coal” with which to experiment – an investment which paid off
handsomely for both parties by the late 1820s. But that part of the
story must await another chapter.8
 |
| This stove (Peirce, Fire on the Hearth, p. 99), still in the Litchfield Historical Society's collections, may be a surviving "Coffin." If so, it was hardly an "invention" at all -- it was just a version of the generic New England box stove. Nor was it as thick and heavy as in Murray's account. I have discussed Nott's work and the possible influence of the Shakers on his first heating "innovation" in my essay on Shaker stoves. |
NOTES.
1 William B. Meyer, "Harvard and the Heating Revolution," New England Quarterly 77:4 (Dec. 2004): 588-606. The standard work on Nott is Codman Hislop, Eliphalet Nott (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), but the near-contemporary Cornelius Van Santvoord, Memoirs of Eliphalet Nott, for Sixty-Two Years President of Union College (New York: Sheldon & Co., 1876), also remains useful.
2 D.
Hamilton Hurd, The History of Otsego County, New York 1740-1878
(Philadelphia: Everts & Fariss, 1878), p. 128.
3 David
G. Hackett, The Rude Hand of Innovation: Religion and Social Order in Albany, New York, 1652-1836 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), pp. 73-5 [quotation p. 75]; Parton, Life and Times of Aaron Burr, Vol. 1, p. 360; Nott, “A Discourse Delivered in the City of Albany, Occasioned by the Death of Alexander Hamilton, July 9, 1804,” in E.B. Williston, comp., Eloquence of
the United States (Middletown, CT: E. & H. Clark, 1827),
vol. 5, pp. 207-229; Jabez D. Hammond, The History of Political Parties in the State of New-York, from the Ratification of the Federal Constitution to December 1840 (Albany: C. Van
Benthuysen, 1842), Vol. 1, p. 214.
4 [William
Wells], “Union College,” Scribner's Monthly 12:2 (June
1876): 229-41, quotation p. 230; Hammond, History of Political Parties, Vol. 1, pp. 373-4, and Craig and Mary L. Hanyan, De Witt Clinton and the Rise of the People's Men (Toronto:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 39-41, on Nott as a
political operator; James Parton, People's Book of Biography: Or, Short Lives of the Most Interesting Persons of All Ages and Countries (Hartford, CT: A.S. Hale & Co., 1868), p. 24;
Nott, Counsels to Young Men on the Formation of Character, and the Principles which Lead to Success (New York: Harper &
Bros., 1855), p. 101 [quotation].
5 1812
as the date of his first experiments from Wayne Somers, comp. and
ed., Encyclopaedia of Union College History (Schenectady:
Union College Press, 2003), p. 523; Van Santvoord, Memoirs of Eliphalet Nott, pp. 240-1, quoting undated letters.
6 Hislop,
Eliphalet Nott, pp. 173-5, 179, 257; Editor, The Parthenon
Magazine, "A Brief Memoir of the Reverend Dr Nott," The
North American Magazine 2 (1833): 220-3 at p. 222.
7 Hislop, Eliphalet Nott, pp. 173-4; David Murray, “Annual Address: Industrial and Material Progress Illustrated in the History of Albany [delivered 25 May 1880],” Transactions of the Albany
Institute 10 (Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1883): 85-104 at
p 94 [quotation]. Contributors to the Yale Literary Magazine through
the winter of 1836-37 illustrated how important stove heat was to
creating the comfortable private spaces in which a college student
lifestyle emerged and thrived – see e.g. “Polymigia, No. 1,”
2:1 (Oct. 1836): 27-29 at p. 27; R.R., “Our Magazine,” 37-40 at
p. 37; “Dick versus Dike, Or, the Invisible Steed,” 2:3 (Dec.
1836): 79-88 at pp. 82, 83; “An Antique Visitor,” 2:4 (Feb.
1837): 130-42 at pp. 130, 132, 133, 141.
* * *
[From Chapter 4]
There
were two important dates in the history of New York City and State's
adoption of Pennsylvania anthracite: 1825, marking the completion of
the Erie Canal after eight years' construction; and 1829, when the
Delaware & Hudson Canal, jointly authorized by the legislatures
of Pennsylvania and New York six years earlier, opened for through
shipments from the north-east of the Anthracite District to Rondout
on the Hudson, mid-way between New York City and Albany.
The
Erie Canal was, briefly, a national wonder and source of inspiration.
Eliphalet Nott impressed its significance upon his Union College
students, whose campus in Schenectady was just half a mile from its
banks: it demonstrated the huge potential of the United States for material and moral
progress. “We have lived to see inland
villages converted into ports of commerce, and inland products
floating on artificial rivers traced by human hands, and connecting
distant lakes with the distant ocean. These are achievements which
must ensure celebrity to individuals, and render memorable the age
they lived in.”
When the Canal finally opened for through navigation, it immediately reduced by 90 percent the cost of shipping goods the 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo. It had already, even in its partly finished state (the first 280 miles opened in 1823), helped encourage the westward flow of freight and migrants from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, and this growth now accelerated sharply. Together with the completion of the Champlain Canal in 1827 and Oswego Canal in 1828, it strengthened Albany and Troy's natural advantages as centers for the commerce of a huge region stretching from western New England north as far as the St. Lawrence and west as far as the southern shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario. Their population doubled in the 1820s, and they rapidly became important locations for manufacturing and commodity processing as well as trans-shipment points between river and sea-going vessels and the canals. This had an immediate effect on the stove trade: the late 1820s through early 1830s was a period of unparalleled growth in the number of local firms active within it. ....1
When the Canal finally opened for through navigation, it immediately reduced by 90 percent the cost of shipping goods the 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo. It had already, even in its partly finished state (the first 280 miles opened in 1823), helped encourage the westward flow of freight and migrants from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, and this growth now accelerated sharply. Together with the completion of the Champlain Canal in 1827 and Oswego Canal in 1828, it strengthened Albany and Troy's natural advantages as centers for the commerce of a huge region stretching from western New England north as far as the St. Lawrence and west as far as the southern shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario. Their population doubled in the 1820s, and they rapidly became important locations for manufacturing and commodity processing as well as trans-shipment points between river and sea-going vessels and the canals. This had an immediate effect on the stove trade: the late 1820s through early 1830s was a period of unparalleled growth in the number of local firms active within it. ....1
1 Nott,
Counsels to Young Men on the Formation of Character, and the Principles which Lead to Success (New York: Harper & Bros.,
1855), for his “Address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society of Union College,” n.d. [1820s], pp. 275-312 at p.
288; T.W. Van Metre, “Internal Commerce of the United States,”
in Emory R. Johnson et al., History of Domestic and Foreign
Commerce of the United States (Washington, DC: Carnegie
Institute, 1915, repr. 1922), p. 220; Edward Howe, "The Hudson-Mohawk Region Industrializes: 1609-1860," Hudson
River Valley Review 19:2 (Sept. 2002): 40-57.
* * *
... because of supply problems (possibly a shortage contrived by the mining companies themselves), another severe winter, and sharply increasing demand resulting from household consumers' rapid adoption of anthracite grates and stoves, fuel costs surged in the latter part of 1831 and early 1832, both in New York and Philadelphia. Temporary agitation against the protective tariff on imported bituminous coal followed, but the more significant result was to renew and strengthen inventors' and consumers' interest in the search for fuel economy.1
#4.5
Eliphalet Nott and the Anthracite Heating Stove
New
York inventors were prominent in this endeavor (see Table 3.#). The
best known and perhaps most influential was Eliphalet Nott himself.
The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company's gift to him in 1820 of a
load of “stone coal” for experimental purposes began to produce
results by 1826, when Nott took out the first of his twenty-four
anthracite stove patents (his entrepreneurial and inventive energies
up until then had been consumed in putting Union College's finances
on a sound footing with the aid of the proceeds of state lotteries).
Most of his early work has been lost, but it combined a set of
empirically-derived principles for the efficient burning of
anthracite with workable designs for heating stoves and their key
components. Nott did not simply invent stoves, he went into business
manufacturing them, setting up H. Nott & Co. in Albany in 1827, a
company nominally owned and managed by his young sons Howard and
Benjamin, but probably backed with Union College funds and dominated
by Nott himself (his own, his college's, and his many speculative
ventures' money were always almost inextricably confused, and the
business's alternative name was the Union Furnace).2
Nott
& Co.'s foundry was a substantial enterprise – it melted 150
tons of iron in 1828, and 250 by 1830, making it the third-biggest of
Albany's five foundries, or the fourteenth-largest in the state; by 1833 it was the largest in Albany, melting over a thousand tons, 43 percent of the city total. But
we cannot tell how much of that iron went into stoves, because the Union Furnace also
made a wide range of other castings as well as building Nott's patentanthracite-fuelled boilers for the Hudson River's great steamboats.
These burnt more than twenty tons of best pinewood on a single ten-
to twelve-hour dash from New York to Albany, procured at great cost
from Maine and the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and taking up valuable
cargo space, so converting them to run on cheaper and much more
energy-dense anthracite was an attractive proposition.3
In any event, Nott & Co.'s stove output was not limited by the casting capacity of its own works, because like other Albany stove-makers it
still bought most of its stove plate from Pennsylvania and New Jersey
furnaces – enough for another 1,500 to 2,000 stoves in 1830.4
Nott's ornate heating stoves had many distinctive features, all of which he attempted to protect against competition by taking out ten detailed patents on the same day in 1833, and successfully pursuing imitators, of whom the most flagrant was James Wilson, through the courts. The most notable were (a) the “magazine,” enabling users to fill the stove three or four times a day and keep a long-lasting fire, with the aid of (b) a grate hanging on trunnions, so that it could be shaken or turned over, permitting users to separate ashes and clinker from the fire with relative ease, and without having to let the fire go out, and (c) windows made of Vermont mica, to allow a sight of the fire and remove one of the common objections to installing a closed stove, particularly in the intimate setting of a parlor. His devices were neither perfect – the magazine had an unfortunate tendency to produce a build-up of explosive gas if incorrectly operated, and some users never mastered the revolving grate – nor altogether original; Oliver Evans, for example, had anticipated the mica windows a quarter-century earlier. But Nott’s stoves were a marvel at the time.5
[For more about Nott stoves, including illustrations,
see my blog post on columnar and parlor heating stoves.]
see my blog post on columnar and parlor heating stoves.]
They
were also quite costly and, as befitted objects designed for
middle-class consumers in both the public (shops, offices, hotels,
churches) and private spaces that they occupied, uncommonly
decorative. Nott claimed to be indifferent about style – his
stoves could “present any external form, though some regular
architectural form is preferred.” In practice, they usually wore that most
modern of fashions, Gothic (the same as the new carriages built for the
Albany & Schenectady Railroad in 1832, the “Gothic Cars,”
whose decorative appearance was inspired by Nott's stoves). This
distinguished them from the patriotic and neo-classical “Federal”
design of most stoves up until then, including for example the one
installed in the Bank of the United States branch in Boston in 1825,
whose “dress” was “intended to be of a severe and masculine
character becoming a National edifice of a young Republic.” Their
appearance as well as their functionality turned them into
aspirational goods for bourgeois consumers in the urban north-east.
The fact that the furnace industry was capable of producing them, and in very
large numbers, showed how far the skills of its pattern-makers and
molders had developed by the end of the 1820s (Figure 4.#).6
 |
Figure 4.#. Nott's “Stove Pipe,” U.S.
Patent 7639X (1833) – designed to sit on top of one of his
stoves, and illustrating (Figs. 1 and 5) the way in which the
structure was built up from elaborately decorated, precisely
jointed flat iron plates, bolted together; testimony to the skill
of the molders at Nott & Co.'s foundry and/or its castings
suppliers. The massive, heavy pipe functioned as a large
heat-exchanger, as well as adding height and impressiveness to the
stove. (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.)
|
They
were an almost immediate success, not least because of the effect upon consumer choices of
urban fuel shortages during the severe winter of 1831-32. William
Emerson, for example, wrote to his mother from New York that
December, reporting “fuel scarce and high-priced, so that suffering
among the poor was in prospect,” and described his Nott stove as
“the greatest comfort ever devised in the matter of warming rooms”;
his brother Ralph Waldo replied from Boston on Christmas Day, “I
think I ought to have a Nott stove by your description of its
beneficence.”
Nott & Co. established in 1830 or 1831 its own store on New York's Water Street (see my post on the rise of the New York stove trade, for the context) to supply Manhattan with “A complete assortment of stoves for halls, stores, steamboats, churches, &c.,” and had agency agreements with dealers in other markets to ensure availability throughout the seaboard cities. Nott evidently expected his stoves to appeal to the English bourgeoisie too, sending another son, Joel (Union College's Professor of Chemistry), to represent the firm's interests in Great Britain, and making sure that his designs were patented, manufactured, and sold there.7
Nott & Co. established in 1830 or 1831 its own store on New York's Water Street (see my post on the rise of the New York stove trade, for the context) to supply Manhattan with “A complete assortment of stoves for halls, stores, steamboats, churches, &c.,” and had agency agreements with dealers in other markets to ensure availability throughout the seaboard cities. Nott evidently expected his stoves to appeal to the English bourgeoisie too, sending another son, Joel (Union College's Professor of Chemistry), to represent the firm's interests in Great Britain, and making sure that his designs were patented, manufactured, and sold there.7
Nott's
stoves soon became international celebrities of a sort in their own
right, as well as early examples of the export of novel American
manufactured goods to Europe. An American tourist, John McVickar,
and his family, visiting the Alps in the late summer of 1830, were
saved from death by the monks of the Hospice of St. Bernard, “among
the choicest points of interest to the European traveller,” almost
8,000 feet up and the highest inhabited spot on the continent. While
enjoying their life-giving hospitality, he learned that there were
outcrops of poor-quality anthracite in the mountains nearby. This,
he instantly realized -- McVickar was a versatile man, Professor of
Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Belles-Lettres, Political Economy,
and the Evidences [of the existence of God] at Columbia College -- could free the monks from depending on hauling firewood on mule-back
twenty-five miles up from the valleys below. As their fuel was
accordingly so hard to get, they could only afford enough for cooking
and to warm their “shivering or frozen guests,” while they
themselves froze all year round. American know-how and technology
could liberate them from this hardship. Before he left he showed
them how to make a crude grate and burn the anthracite, then after
his return home he and four other New Yorkers raised enough money to
buy a large Nott stove (about seven feet high, $25 wholesale), and a
friendly shipping line provided free carriage to Le Havre. Overland
transport to Switzerland cost $33, and by the Spring of 1833 the
stove had been hauled up into the mountains in pieces (some of which
broke on the way), assembled with difficulty, and successfully ignited
to give “the blessing of abundant warmth to the pious brotherhood
who pass their lives amid eternal snows, for the cause of ...
humanity.” The “joy of the brethren” had “no boundary.”
For them, the stove was “a monument which will perpetuate the
generosity and the devotion of our friends in America.”8
This
uplifting story was widely reprinted in the American press at the
time, and soon given wider circulation by the German author Francis
Lieber, to whom the Nott stove represented “a monument of American
practical sense” and evidence of “the pulsations of extending
civilization.” James Fenimore Cooper, who visited shortly after the
gift arrived, was not so enthusiastic: his encounter with a group of
monks who “did nothing but talk of stoves and coal mines” did not
fit with his romantic image of Augustinian piety, but as McVickar's
son acidly commented, he would probably have “sympathize[d] as
fully in their feelings ... had he himself been under bonds to remain
up in that freezing atmosphere for two or three years.”9
By
the end of 1833 Thomas Jones, the editor of the Franklin Institute's
Journal, simply assumed that “among those who live in our
cities there are but few who have not seen [Nott stoves] in actual
operation.” And not just in America's cities. In the
winter of 1834-5, one of the leading tourist attractions in London,
England was the great painted “View of New York” at the Panorama
in Leicester Square. Appropriately, it was heated by a Nott stove,
which its advertisers did not fail to mention; it was an attraction
in its own right. By 1836 a Nott stove warmed the Museum of National
Manufactures and the Mechanic Arts, also in Leicester Square, too,
and by 1838 the London branch of Nott's Stove Company, the lasting
consequence of Joel Nott's promotional visit, advertised them “for
Warming Churches, Public Offices, Halls, Staircases, Shops,
Warehouses, &c.” Nott became known in England not as an
educator, rhetorician, or anti-slavery and pro-temperance moralist,
but “chiefly for the stove which bears his name,” on sale between
at least 1833 and 1845 and claiming to give out “twice the heat
with half the fuel.” The international recognition Nott won made
him unique among stove inventors both at the time and since. He had
been elevated into a pantheon whose only other inhabitants were
Benjamin Franklin and Count Rumford, both long dead, while Nott could
still look forward to another three decades of life, in the course of
which he turned into something of a national monument himself.10
Postscript: Nott and his Stoves in the late 1830s and after
 |
Rereading the above [February 2015], I am struck by the fact that it has hardly anything to say about the later career of Nott and his stoves. That's because Chapter 4 of the book focused on the development of the urban market for anthracite fuel in the American north-east in the 1830s, and of the appliances consumers used to burn it. That was the context within which I related Nott's story of invention, which was concentrated in the late 1820s and early 1830s, when he made his most important contributions as well as those that were documented best. But it continued, to an extent, for some time afterwards, which was also when the commercial exploitation of his ideas, and the growth of the market for them, mostly took place.
Nott's participation in the "stove boom" of the early to mid-1830s was enthusiastic and, for a time, very successful. After 1833, his inventive activity concentrated on extending the range of products he offered to include cooking stoves and ranges, mostly for anthracite but also for wood, still the principal fuel outside the major cities, which suggests an ambition to expand his market. Nott's cooking stoves were highly elaborate. They did work, but were not big sellers, and they had little influence on competitors or on later stoves. Nott seems to have been responding to middle- to upper-class consumer objections to the changeover to stove cookery, aiming to improve "the quality and flavor of articles cooked therein." With iron stoves, he claimed, "the heat is variable, the smell offensive, and the quality and flavor of the articles cooked, injured." In addition, "much heat escapes into the room without producing any useful effect." Finally, cooking smells permeated the house much more than with traditional open-fire cookery. Nott's solutions involved insulating ovens and other parts of the stove, rigging up sheet-tin ovens in front or alongside the stove to capture waste heat, ventilating the oven into the smoke-flue, and even capturing smells from cooking vessels on top of the stove, "the effluvia from each article being conducted off by separate pipes."
Nott was not the only cooking stove inventor to pursue these objectives, but what the mass market really wanted in a cook stove was cheapness, simplicity, capacity, and controllability. Fuel efficiency was not so large a concern, "waste" heat was welcome winter warmth, and as for cooking smells, American households for whom the kitchen was their principal or only living room were used to them, unlike those with servants, parlors, and dining rooms -- the class to which Nott belonged, and for whom he designed.
Nott's growing involvement in building steamboat boilers and engines encouraged him to construct a big, well-equipped new foundry on the East River in about 1833, and to relocate Nott & Co. from Albany to New York City entirely in 1836. However, he soon ran into the Panic of 1837, and in its aftermath the firm became insolvent. What happened then is hard to extract from the thin and somewhat contradictory surviving record, but his sons left the business, which was taken over by a new partnership under the nominal ownership of the Notts' former manager, Thomas Stillman, probably in 1838. However, Nott may have remained the actual owner until at least 1850. [Hislop, Eliphalet Nott, pp. 356, 452, 477.]
Even after the family firm's failure, Nott continued to improve the mainstay of his business, the magazine heating stove, and Nott stoves retained their presence in the New York City market. Charles St. John Seymour and Robert M. Stratton, two of Stillman's partners, took over the Water Street premises, which doubled as the offices for the Novelty Works, and continued with the stove trade. From 1842 onwards, that part of the old business passed to a new partnership, Charles J. and Thomas M. Shepard, who ran it as "Nott's Stove Warehouse," indicating the continuing value of the established brand name, until at least 1856. Something similar seems to have happened in Albany, where there was also still R. & F. Harvey's "Nott's Stove Warehouse" in the mid-1840s, stocking his "Hall and Parlor Coal Stoves." Though they were no longer market leaders they were still good sellers, and the royalties Nott's successors in business paid to him for the right to use his patents continued to bring Union College a substantial income for years. [Ref needed?]
Nott was not the only cooking stove inventor to pursue these objectives, but what the mass market really wanted in a cook stove was cheapness, simplicity, capacity, and controllability. Fuel efficiency was not so large a concern, "waste" heat was welcome winter warmth, and as for cooking smells, American households for whom the kitchen was their principal or only living room were used to them, unlike those with servants, parlors, and dining rooms -- the class to which Nott belonged, and for whom he designed.
Nott's growing involvement in building steamboat boilers and engines encouraged him to construct a big, well-equipped new foundry on the East River in about 1833, and to relocate Nott & Co. from Albany to New York City entirely in 1836. However, he soon ran into the Panic of 1837, and in its aftermath the firm became insolvent. What happened then is hard to extract from the thin and somewhat contradictory surviving record, but his sons left the business, which was taken over by a new partnership under the nominal ownership of the Notts' former manager, Thomas Stillman, probably in 1838. However, Nott may have remained the actual owner until at least 1850. [Hislop, Eliphalet Nott, pp. 356, 452, 477.]
Even after the family firm's failure, Nott continued to improve the mainstay of his business, the magazine heating stove, and Nott stoves retained their presence in the New York City market. Charles St. John Seymour and Robert M. Stratton, two of Stillman's partners, took over the Water Street premises, which doubled as the offices for the Novelty Works, and continued with the stove trade. From 1842 onwards, that part of the old business passed to a new partnership, Charles J. and Thomas M. Shepard, who ran it as "Nott's Stove Warehouse," indicating the continuing value of the established brand name, until at least 1856. Something similar seems to have happened in Albany, where there was also still R. & F. Harvey's "Nott's Stove Warehouse" in the mid-1840s, stocking his "Hall and Parlor Coal Stoves." Though they were no longer market leaders they were still good sellers, and the royalties Nott's successors in business paid to him for the right to use his patents continued to bring Union College a substantial income for years. [Ref needed?]
1 Frederick
M. Binder, unitled review of Powell, Philadelphia's First Fuel
Crisis, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 103:3
(July 1979): 402-4 at p. 403; Report of the Committee of the Senate of Pennsylvania, pp. 38-9, 80.
2 The following account supplements Hislop, Eliphalet Nott, pp. 261-71. For Nott's early patents, see “American Lottery, being a System of Arithmetical Chances,” Patent 4189X (1825); “Rotary Grate and Floor,” 4368X, “Evolution, &c., of Heat,” 4477X, “Evolution and Management of Heat,” 4622X, all 1826; “Evolution and Management of Heat: Grate,” 5048X, 1828; and “Magazine Stove: Stove Adapted to Open Fire-Places,” 7258X, 1832. Illustrations for some of these survive in the Patent Office records, but usually not the accompanying text. However, some of it – Nott's principles for burning anthracite, communicated to the author – is reproduced in a pamphlet by Dennis G. Littlefield of Troy, who perfected a generation later the stove type that Nott claimed to have invented, and made it fully practicable – A History of the Improvements Applicable to the Base Burning or Horizontal Draught Stove, ... by the Inventor of the Railway Coal Burner, Parlor Furnace, &c. (Albany: C. van Benthuysen, 1859), pp. 14-16. Financial transactions between Nott and the firm are detailed in Reply of the Trustees of Union College, to Charges Brought Before the Assembly of New-York, March 19, 1850; and before the Senate, on the 12th of April 1851, by the Hon. J.W. Beekman (Albany: Chas. Van Benthuysen, 1853), pp. 88-90.
3 McLane Report, Vol. 2, p. 115; “Water Tube Steam Boiler,” 4772X (1827), “Steamboat Furnaces, Boilers and Chimneys,” 8791X (1835), and “Steam-Boiler Furnace,” 9521X (1836), for his steamboat work, which resulted in the famous “Novelty” in 1836, and the movement of Nott & Co.'s headquarters to New York -- 'Archimedes,' "Mechanical Improvements -- Novelty Works," Mechanics Magazine and Register of Inventions and Improvements [New York] 6:4 (Oct. 1835): 187-8; "Notes and Notices," Mechanics' Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal, and Gazette [London] No. 681 (27 Aug. 1836): 368.
4 E. Morrison [New York] to Samuel G. Wright, 5 Dec. 1829, Box 3, Folder 16, Wright Papers, for 1830's planned output. Nott's suppliers included the Reading and Windsor furnaces in Berks County, PA, and Gloucester Furnace in New Jersey -- "Iron Manufactures," Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania 12:6 (10 Aug. 1833): 87-88; Charles S. Boyer, Early Forges and Furnaces in New Jersey (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), p. 74. Nott's stove castings from the mid-Atlantic furnaces would not necessarily have had to be carried to Albany. As he had markets and wholesale agents in the major seaboard cities, the more normal and sensible course would have been for castings to be sent straight from the furnaces to the manufacturer-dealers, who finished and assembled the stoves themselves. It is also possible that some of these furnaces may in fact have been Nott's licensees, paying for the right to use his patents, patterns, and name, but doing business on their own account; or the wholesalers may have been the licensees, with a right to do business in a particular market, and getting their own plate cast at the furnaces with copies of Nott's patterns. The lack of surviving records means that we will never know, but all of these arrangements were common at the time.
5 These patents, 7635X-7645X, all filed on 29 June 1833, do survive, recapitulating most of his earlier work, which is probably why the latter were not restored after the Patent Office Fire; but the records are very mixed up – illustrations and descriptions are often mismatched. For Nott's victory over Troy stove-inventor Sylvester Parker and award of $2,550 damages, see “Infringement of a Patent Right,” New England Farmer 11:33 (27 Feb. 1833): 261, and for his later [May 1834] decisive triumph over James Wilson, who had by then gone bust, see Hislop, Eliphalet Nott, pp. 268, 270. For the Nott stove's defects, see William J. Keep, “History of Heating Apparatus” (1916), pp. ##, unpublished manuscript, Baker Library, Harvard Business School -- Keep was a Union College alumnus who became one of America's leading stove designers and an expert on the industry's history; he actually owned an original Nott stove, given him by his old Principal, and understood its operating problems from experience.
6 For the Nott stove's style, see “Anthracite-Coal Stove Pipe,” Patent 7643X (1833) and, critically, Mary H. Shaffner, “Old American Stoves,” Bulletin of the Pennsylvania Museum 5:19 (July 1907): 45-46 – it was “covered with meaningless, conventional design, over-ornate, and showing the debasement of art which prevailed during the early years of the nineteenth century” [p. 46]. For the “Gothic Car,” see Arthur J. Weise, History of the City of Albany (Albany: E.H. Bend, 1884), p. 471; for the neoclassical style that Gothic displaced, “The United States Branch Bank,” The City Record, and Boston News-Letter 1:1 (5 Nov. 1825): 6-7, quote p. 7.
7 Ralph
L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1939), Vol 1, p. 342; Edwin
Williams, New-York As It Is, in 1834: And Citizens' Advertising Directory (New-York: J. Disturnell, 1834), p. 239; Charles
Varle, A Complete View of Baltimore (Baltimore: Samuel Young,
1833), p. 161; Resolves of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston: Dutton & Wentworth, 1834), p. 705.
Nott's Baltimore (John Gable) and Boston (H.H. & F.H.
Stimpson) agents were both also well-established Delaware Furnace
and Millville customers, and the leading wholesalers in their
respective cities. “Recent Patents,” The London Journal and
Repertory of Arts and Sciences; and Repertory of Patent Inventions
7:46 (1836): 311-14 [the British patents were taken out in
November 1830 through December 1831, indicating how long Nott
stayed]. There is an excellent illustrated account of the design
and operation of Nott's stove in his own words, sent by him to John
C. Loudon, the influential British architect and taste-maker, in
Loudon's Encyclopædia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and
Longmans, 1836 ed.), pp. 1030-3. Nott was probably seeking Loudon's endorsement; he certainly received it, pp. 702-3. This material remained in subsequent editions for at least a decade.
8 William
A. McVickar, The Life of the Reverend John McVickar, S.T.D. (New
York: Hurd & Houghton, 1872), pp. 202-7 for McVickar's
journal of his visit, 261-5 for details of his gift; “Hospice of St. Bernard. From the New York American,” Niles' Weekly
Register 8:20 [4th series] (13 July 1833): 335-6, for
the original published version.
9 Francis
Lieber, The Stranger in America: Or, Letters to a Gentleman in Germany: Comprising Sketches of the Manners, Society, and National Peculiarities of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea &
Blanchard, 1835), pp. 217-8; McVickar, Life, pp. 264 for
“pulsations” quote, 265 for Fenimore Cooper; 'An American'
[James Fenimore Cooper], Sketches of Switzerland (Philadelphia
Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1836), Vol. 2, pp. 143-7, for his own
account of his visit, and The Headsman; or, The Abbaye des Vignerons. A Tale (New York: James G. Gregory, 1864; first
published 1833), a novel as gothic as Nott's stove, based on his
Swiss travels but set in 1730, when the Monks of St. Bernard and
their great rescue dogs were more suitably picturesque.
10 "American Patents for June, with Remarks," Journal of the Franklin
Institute 12:6 (Dec. 1833): 395-415 at pp. 404-7 [quotation p.
404]; “America,” The Court Journal: Gazette of the
Fashionable World [London] No. 305 (28 Feb. 1835): 144; Luke
Hebert, The Engineer's and Mechanic's Encyclopaedia (London:
Thomas Kelly, 1836), Vol. 1, p. 535; “Nott's Patent Stoves,”
The Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal [London] 1:6
(April 1838): 146; Andrew Reed and James Matheson, A Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches, by the Deputation from the Congregational Churches of England and Wales (London: Jackson &
Wolford, 1835), Vol. 1, p. 344 [quote]; Nott Stove Company
advertisement, The Times 6 Nov. 1845, p. 11.
