The
Circular or Rotary Stove -- Stanley's and Other Inventors'
Henry Stanley's rotary stove, patented in December 1832 and on public trial for some months before then, was the first and most successful of this kind available on the American market. It and its imitators were sold widely across the northern states, and particularly in New York and New England. It may not have been the first stove with a rotating top, but it was the first such stove to be patented, workable, and saleable. It was also extremely profitable: Dana & Church, Stanley's agents in Troy, reported that between 1833 and 1835 they sold more than 5,000 stoves at a profit of $7-$9 each for Stanley and $12 for themselves on a retail price of up to about $40. (As a proportion of average annual earnings, this was about as large a purchase as a consumer durable worth between $12,000 and $24,000 today, depending on the comparator used -- unskilled wages or production worker compensation.) Stanley sold most of his stoves directly, through agencies owned by family members in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, which meant that they secured the profits from distribution as well as manufacture. The stove's success made it a prime target for imitation over the next several years.
* * *
The original patent does not survive, only an amended version taken out after the decision in Stanley v. Hewitt in November 1835 caused it be surrendered, rewritten to remove its defects (claiming too much originality), and resubmitted. We are left with two versions of the revised text, one handwritten (7333X, 1832) and the other printed (91, 1836), but they do not differ significantly from one another, except that 91 does not include the image at the head of this post. Both describe the stove in detail.
Briefly, it was a development of a common stove type introduced in Vermont in the late 1820s, the step stove, except that it did not have a stepped top, and an iron oven N behind the firebox A was only an optional and not a normal feature. Stanley's stove had the usual long firebox for burning wood (and an optional grate inside on which to burn the new wonder fuel, anthracite), and a large hearth containing a sliding, sunken tray D (a "box hearth") for ash removal, draft control, and also some cooking -- a reflector oven ("tin kitchen") could be placed in front of the open front doors, or the box hearth cover could be removed, coals raked forward into it, and a griddle placed over the top.
 |
An early Stanley Rotary, with cap removed, showing inside of firebox.
Used gratefully, with the owners' and photographer's permission. |
The stove's USP was of course the rotating top, which had three key parts:
- A flat, circular plate E extending over the fire box and right to the back of the stove with two sections cut out of it, one over the fire box itself, the other to allow the products of combustion to exit to the stove pipe. The plate had a raised rim around its circumference, and a raised cup G at its centre.
- The stove cap sat on top of plate E and was an even more complicated, precise piece of casting. It had a centre pivot pin H sitting in the cup G, and an incised groove in its underside which made a reasonably airtight tongue-and-groove joint with the raised rim of plate E. It also had cog-gear teeth around its circumference that engaged with a handle-turned pinion I attached to plate E, and together with the centre pivot G/H bore its weight so that the tongue-and-groove joint did not bind. To further reduce friction and improve the seal, the groove was supposed to be partially filled with black lead (graphite). Regular stoves had almost no moving parts and were mechanically extremely simple. Stanley's showed his background in mechanical engineering, and the precision of which his Poultney foundry was capable.
- The other main features of the cap were the four boiler holes L, of varying sizes, and the flues M joining them. These directed the products of combustion from the fire, around under all of the boiler holes, and then out at the back into the stove pipe through the aperture K. The holes were covered by cast-iron lids with wrought-iron "bails" or handles allowing them to be lifted off when the cook wanted to place a pan (also cast iron) in them, exposing the bottoms of the pans to the full heat of the fire and the combustion gases. Some cooking could also have been done directly on the covers themselves (griddle cakes, biscuits), of flat-bottomed ware would have been placed on them for warming rather than operations requiring a fiercer heat.
What the patent documents do not say is how Stanley came to build his stove, and why, and what its advantages for the consumer were supposed to be. Some of these questions were answered in the eight-page pamphlet Stanley had printed to promote and accompany his stove, others in newspaper advertisements for his stove and its rivals and imitators.
When Stanley introduced it, most American cooks, even in the most developed northern states, were new to stove-top cookery and used to cooking on or in an open hearth. Stanley's stove accommodated itself to their habits. It enabled "the obtaining at any time, such a degree of heat as may be required for either boiling or stewing," which a hearth cook could achieve by moving her vessels closer to or further away from the hottest parts of the fire, but was more difficult on earlier stoves. It also saved a lot of labour in lifting or moving heavy cooking vessels. The stove top was fairly low, hence reducing lifting, and suiting cooks used to sitting, squatting, kneeling, or stooping by an open fire. Equally helpfully, the low top meant that the stove could simply be fitted inside an existing kitchen fireplace and use its chimney; and the crank handle made it easy to rotate a cooking vessel closer to the heat (immediately over the fire) or further away (towards the back), at the same time as freeing the cook of the need to reach deep into the fireplace itself to get to the rear boiler holes. The relatively small fire box and well-controlled draft also meant that Stanley's stove would do a lot of cooking for relatively little fuel.
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| Newburgh Telegraph 30 Oct. 1834, p. 2. |
Convenience, controllability, labour-saving, and economy: these were what justified the Stanley stove's high price, and enabled its maker and distributors to rake in the profits. This recent video of a surviving Stanley makes this all reasonably clear, even better than the still pictures.
* * *
In the court cases in the 1830s in which Henry Stanley attempted to defend his patent against imitators, rivals, and challengers, the greatest threat to him came from the testimony and sometimes the physical evidence provided by other members of the stove trade who claimed to have invented, built, and used key features of his rotary cooking stove years before he did. But there is no trace of these earlier supposed inventions, except perhaps in the case records in court archives, if they still exist anywhere. His main challengers, Elisha Town of Montpelier, VT, and Gould Thorp, of New York City, did not register their own first stove patents until after he had.
Elisha
Town was
"a most ingenious inventive Cabinet Maker" with a history
of commercially unsuccessful mechanical improvements stretching back
more than twenty years (for which see this other blog post). He was, according to the
town historian, writing in 1860,
a "genius." "Montpelier [the
state's capital, second-largest town, and biggest center of
manufacturing and trade]
never produced, and it is doubtful whether the whole state ever
produced, a man of a more truly inventive mind. But his book
knowledge of mechanics and previous mechanical inventions, was quite
limited; and he was known to have studied out principles and spent
much time in building machines for their application to inventions,
which,though perfectly original in him, were found, at last, to have
been long before made and put in operation by others. And although he
was continually getting up something new, yet we now find his name
coupled with no invention of much importance... Like most men of
inventive genius, he was through life emphatically poor, but was ever
esteemed, up to the time of his death a few years ago, a most
inoffensive and worthy citizen." Announcing his final
patent, in 1837 -- a device to enable railroad locomotives to climb
steep inclines -- the Vermont
Telegraph,
of Brandon, used similarly respectful language to praise the efforts
of "our worthy and persevering fellow citizen." ["Vermont
Against the World,"
30 Aug. 1837, p. 3]
"Elisha
Town's Improved Crane Stove," his first stove patent, taken out in December 1833, 7871X, was not a rotary at all, but simply a less drastically modified step-stove. The drawings are of the revised (1836)
version of his patent, number 37 (new series) including a removable furnace (for charcoal or,
more probably, anthracite) fitting underneath the oven of his baking
stove. This was probably intended, though the patent was
silent about its purpose, to enable the oven and large rear
boiler hole to be used in summer, with less fuel consumption and a
correspondingly reduced amount of heat in the kitchen, just as in the earlier Conant stove (for which see this blog post).
The
distinctive features of the original and improved
versions of the Crane Stove were the swinging covers, or "cranes,"
for the front two boiler holes. They served a similar purpose
to the turntable top on Stanley's stove, allowing the cook to
regulate the heat applied to a vessel by moving it away from the
fire. Apart from these, Town's was a pretty standard
step-stove, except perhaps for the double plates, with an air gap
between them, at the front of the oven. The intention of these
was to prevent a hot spot within the oven, and (probably) reduce the
problem of burning out of the oven plate immediately behind the fire,
a weak spot in any stove design. Other step-stove designers in
the 1830s attempted to achieve the same object with slightly
different means of reinforcing and/or insulating the vulnerable
plate. (Stanley avoided the problem altogether, by not having a conventional oven, and designing his fire box to make it easy to replace the plates most likely to burn out.)
Town's
was evidently a commercial product rather than a design destined to
get no further than the Patent Office. Jonathan
Wainwright, a local manufacturer and dealer, explained and
highlighted its advantages in an advertisement. It
was, he claimed, a stove "that will make its way into almost
every family. This stove takes in a large round boiler back, and two
smaller in front, that can be swung off the fire: a convenience not
found in other stoves -- also, has a Furnace attached underneath that
can be used without heating the whole stove, and will be found very
convenient for summer use -- has a large oven, and taken altogether
will be found a perfect stove." Wainwright operated his
own furnace, which probably answers the question about how the
impecunious Town managed to get his stoves made and sold. [Jonathan
Wainwright ad., Burlington
Free Press 30
Nov. 1838, p. 3 -- this ad ran until 1 Mar. 1839, i.e. throughout one
stove sales season, but it is the only such
advertisement for Town's stoves in the Vermont newspapers in the
Library of Congress's collection, which suggests that Wainwright may
have had exclusive rights to the stove but did not find it sold as
well as he had hoped.]
Town,
Elisha. Montpelier, VT. Cook Stove, Called Town's Rotary. 8206X. 16 May 1834. Class 126/1R
However
successful or otherwise Town's Crane Stove may have been, as a design
and/or as a commercial product, in the following year he determined,
or was persuaded, to compete with Henry Stanley even more directly,
producing a rotary of his own. (Whether this was a version of the
stove he claimed in court to have invented a decade earlier, and even had cast in Starksboro, VT, is
impossible to tell for sure, though some advertisements asserted as much, while others described it as something quite different: a stove whose top revolved because its oven underneath did.)
It differed from Stanley's in being
operated, not by rack and pinion, but by raising and lowering the
whole top stove plate with the foot-operated lever C projecting
at the side of the stove near the floor. Town did not explain how the plate
was supposed to be rotated once it had been elevated -- perhaps by
the cook giving a hefty push to the hot iron rim with a hand wrapped in protective cloth, balancing on one leg
while the other held the lever down; a tricky operation made all the
less pleasant by the smoke and heat pouring into the kitchen at waist
level while the stove top was raised. This cannot have been a
very attractive feature of it, and indeed one of the advantages that
Stanley claimed for his rotary over all of the
competitors was the quality of the tongue-and-groove seal between the top plate and the
rim it sat on. [M.N. Stanley & Co., "To the
Public," Albany Evening Journal 1838 frame
0854.]
On the other hand, Town's rotary had a perfectly flat
top, and claimed to be easier to cook on and keep clean than Stanley's,
because he provided flue space below it for the bottoms of cooking
utensils to project into, as in any conventional stove. Stanley relied on his system of
raised collars and flues above the rotating plate,
so vendors of his and Town's rival rotaries had something other than
just their claims to originality, precedence, and thus legality to
argue and advertise about.
Town's stove also had a conventional oven behind the firebox, a feature Stanley's lacked. It was made by Maynard
French of Albany and sold by Rensselaer Granger of Troy and W.H.
Cheney of Albany, amongst others. According to French's advertisement in
the Albany Evening Journal, his "Improved Rotary"
was "made of the best Scotch and American pig iron, and for
smoothness and beauty of casting, is not surpassed by any. ...
[W]herever the stove is seen, it is taken in preference to any
other," more than 2,000 being sold in the spring and summer of
1836 alone [5 December 1836, p. 4].
In
another advertisement that same summer Granger promised to "warrant
and defend all who may purchase Rotary Stoves of me,
from all damages." This was a necessary part of their
sales pitch to buyers, because Stanley's lawyers had already
advertised "forbidding all persons from purchasing or using
Rotary Top Cooking Stoves made by Mr. French, and others."
Town's rotary stove was, Granger claimed, "the one that
defeated [Stanley's] pretended rights [in the suits in 1835
before Stanley v. Hewitt], and will hold the application
of the rotary motion as applied to a cooking stove, and every stove
Mr. Stanley makes that the top revolves is an infringement of Mr
Town's patent, and he will be prosecuted for such infringement."
[There is no record that this actually happened, but given the
lack of reporting of most federal cases absence of published evidence
does not necessarily mean that something didn't happen.]
An
incomplete record of the battles between Town's rotary design and
Stanley's, in the courts and in the market, is all that we have, but
it seems clear that Town's was a serious challenger.
Thorp,Gould -- New York, NY -- Cooking Stove Pat. No. 9778X June 25, 1836
This
patent survived, or was restored after, the Patent Office Fire of
1836, but unfortunately not its drawing. However, the
description is
pretty clearly of a standard three-boiler stove, which Thorp
describes as an improvement of the lost Philologus Holly (or Holley)
cooking stove patent of 1 March 1822, X3462. Holly was still
alive, showing up as an active but untrustworthy Freemason
in 1832, and then in successive New York City directories in the
early 1840s as a land agent, real estate broker, and architect, so he
would presumably have been available in 1835 to serve as a witness against
Stanley alongside or instead of Gould or Town, had his testimony been
useful. There is no evidence in the patent of the system of flues designed to distribute heat evenly to the cooking holes that, Gould claimed, Stanley had appropriated from him, while Stanley counter-claimed that the borrowing had all been the other way round.
Thorp
himself was a New York City stove merchant, recorded in the
directories between 1834 and 1838, and trading just five doors away
from Stanley's own Water Street warehouse and manufactory. As
so often in the stove industry's patent wars, these pitched neighbour
against neighbour.
Nott,
Eliphalet -- Schenectady, NY -- CookingStove Pat.
No. 7948X January 9, 1834
Nott's
stove was large, heavy, and far more complex than Stanley's. It
was probably intended for big, prosperous households and commercial or
institutional customers, like his anthracite heating stoves. Its
design principle differed from Stanley's in that its key object was
fuel economy -- extracting the maximum in cooking capacity from its
fire, which required the central location and disposition of ovens and boler holes around it. Though its plate of boiler holes was circular, like
Stanley's, it was not rotating: the stove depended
instead on a system of "valves" (dampers) to direct heat to
one side of the plate or the other.
Burnell,
Levi -- Elyria, OH -- Stove,
Cooking Pat.
No. 8509X November 25, 1834
Burnell's
stove differed from Stanley's in that the circular top plate was
fixed, while the firebox was mounted on casters or rollers so that
the direct fire could be brought under one boiler hole or another. This seems to have been more of an imaginary design than a practical one -- moving a hot, heavy metal firebox with no assistance from a gear or lever could not have been easy.
Burnell
was Secretary and General Agent of Oberlin College, and very well
acquainted with Philo Penfield Stewart, a much more successful stove
inventor also working at Oberlin at exactly the same time. He
was the
former head of the defunct Lorain Iron Co.,
and before that a
druggist in Rochester, NY as
well as an abolitionist pioneer. This was not his only patent
-- like Town, he also addressed the important problem of making it
easier for railroad locomotives to climb hills (8284X), as well as
developing improved steam boilers (8212X) and means of propelling
boats in canals and shoal water (8211X), all in the same year.
He
and Stewart were probably engaged in the same task -- trying to boost
the finances of their fledgling college by making and selling useful
inventions. Stewart's stove (for whose patent Burnell served as a witness) succeeded in this respect, though
only to a moderate extent; Burnell's does not seem to have got any
further than the Patent Office.
Spoor,
Abraham D. -- Coxsackie, NY -- Cook
Stove Pat.
No. 8573X January 7, 1835
Spoor,
b. 1791, was a physician
in Coxsackie in
the Lower Hudson Valley. Evidence
for the production and sale of his cooking stove is limited,
but there must have been enough of both to encourage him to persist
with it. This was neither his first stove patent (that
was 8084X the
previous year, an anthracite heating stove of more conventional
appearance and arrangement, worth reissuing in
1838 the better to defend it against imitators and infringers), nor his
only round stove (there was also 8574X,
taken out the same day as its partner), nor yet his last (8043 for
"Agitating Grate-Bars," in 1851). Whatever the commercial fate of
Spoor's circular cooking stove design, he was certainly a serious and
quite successful inventor. His anthracite heating stove and
grate design was bought, brought into production, and sold widely,
first of all by the Nott family's Union Furnace in Albany, and then
by J. & A. Fellows of Troy. [J. & A. Fellows,
"Notice," Troy
Daily Whig 1839
frame 1130.] At least one example of his cooking stove still survives.
Spoor's "Salamander Cooking Stove" was designed to solve a particular problem for the first generation of users of anthracite stoves, accustomed to the very different way that it burnt as compared with the wood they were used to, and the stoves suited to it:
the want of sufficient flame and the limited extent of the horizontal surface of the fire in stoves cooking with anthracite coal hitherto in use have made it difficult if not impossible to expose more than one or two boilers at once to the degree of heat necessary to carry on culinary operations to advantage and ... also it has been found difficult in such stoves to increase or diminish the fire suddenly for different purposes...
Spoor's answer, like Nott's, was to place the fire directly under the middle of the top plate,
The ... top of the stove has several openings for boilers and kettles or other cooking utensils, the openings for them being in such order and arrangement that all of them to the number of three or more stand partly over and are directly exposed to the fire and may consequently be kept boiling at the same time, thus avoiding the necessity of removing one after another successively to the fire, or of giving a rotary motion to the plate in which they are contained to attain the necessary degree of heat.
Like Nott's, Spoor's was thus a circular rather than a rotary stove -- "The circular form, tho' not essential, being the best adapted to the arrangement that is to be made of the boilers and other utensils for cooking..." The heat applied to individual boiler holes was also provided by a secondary flue controlled by dampers, so that one or more could receive a double dose. Spoor's stove, like the original Stanley, had no conventional oven, except for reflector ovens ("tin kitchens") that could be placed around the hot radiating iron column on which the top plate stood.
Gill,
Bennington -- New York, NY -- Stove, Cooking Pat. No. 9285X December
9, 1835
Gill was Maynard French's partner in the stove business: French ran manufacturing operations in Albany, while Gill operated their store on Water Street in New York alongside Gould Thorp's and Stanley's. His was also a circular rather than rotary stove, like Nott's and Spoor's, and his claimed improvements also included a complicated arrangement of "valves" (dampers) to direct the heat to one or another of the four boiler holes. Thomas P. Jones, editor of the Journal of the Franklin Institute, was rather dismissive of it in his influential review of new American patents published there in July 1836: it was unoriginal in design and, he thought, "we should much prefer one of Stanley's rotary stoves to it, as being less complex, and more convenient." However, Jones was not the most unbiased commentator: wearing his other hat, as a patent agent, Stanley was already one of his clients.
French's rotary looked as if it was a step-stove like Stanley's, but equipped with a proper iron oven behind the fire like Town's and, later, Chester Granger's. In fact, as the specification made clear, his claimed innovation was just that he, like Town, raised the entire top of the stove high enough above the oven that Stanley's arrangement of raised caps for each individual boiler hole was dispensed with, but unlike Town there was no foot-lever to raise the top in order to rotate it, so he could, like Stanley, provide a better permanent seal. The imitation went further -- his stove-cap could be rotated with a rack and pinion mechanism like Stanley's, or a "leaver" like Town's, or even a knob like Chester Granger's (below). French's patent was thus presented as an improvement which could be applied to any of his rivals' stoves. But there does not seem to be much evidence that it was, and Thomas Jones was as dismissive of it as he was of Gill's -- "We see no essential difference between these caps and those used by Stanley nor any superior advantage to be derived from them." (JFI 18:5 [Nov. 1836], p. 317.)
Douglas,
Beriah -- Albany, NY -- Stove, Cooking Pat. No. 9806X June 30, 1836 (the drawing is with his parlour stove patent of the same day, 9805X, and vice versa)
Douglas's was a very idiosyncratic design, originally made, like Spoor's to burn anthracite rather than wood. It was actually made and sold -- as late as 1844-5 the Schenectady stove dealers Clute & Billings and Worcester, Massachusetts's Aaron Billing still advertised it as "The Best Stove Out" (Schenectady Cabinet 26 Mar. 1844, p. 1; The Worcester Almanac, Directory and Business Advertiser [Worcester: Henry J. Howland, 1845], p. 99). Beriah Douglas, b. 1794, was a Yale graduate, medical doctor (and dentist), and the father of Senator Stephen A. Douglas.
Granger,
Chester. Pittsford, VT. Stove, Cooking. 9875X. 1836. Class 126/1R
Granger
took out his rotary stove patent after Stanley's had been voided as a
result of the judge's decision in the Hewitt case. The text is
a long, detailed, and complicated description, not helped by a
drawing providing no information about the stove's internal structure
and workings. In essence it seems to be a closer imitation of
the Town patent than of Stanley's, lacking the former's impractical
lever action to raise and rotate the turntable, but also the latter's
rack and pinion to move it easily. Instead it had roller
bearings, which were supposed to make it possible to turn the hot
stove top by hand, presumably using the grip on the right hand side. Otherwise, and like Town's, it's a very standard flat cook
stove, with sunk hearth and a side door for feeding wood into the
firebox, plus a small integral oven behind it. This seems to be closer to the kind of rotary described in the 1839 Hewitt advertisement than Town's patent was, though Hewitt relied on the latter for legal protection, probably because it was earlier and the story of its invention in the previous decade added to its value.
Chester
Granger (b.
1797) came to Pittsford from the Salisbury, Connecticut, iron
district in 1826, to join his
father Simeon who
had bought a blast furnace producing pig iron and stoves, which was
where the first Conant stoves had been made in 1819. In 1829
they built a foundry for stove-making near the blast furnace. The
Grangers were important local
citizens -- the community that grew up around their works, a mile out
of town along Furnace Road, is still called Grangerville.
Simeon died in 1834, and Chester took over as the leading member
of the
family partnerships that continued to run and develop it until
after the Civil War. Chester was remembered at the end of his
long career as an ironmaster, bank director, and railroad promoter as
"a man of energy, public spirit, and sterling integrity, and
many a poor person can testify as to his private charity and
benevolence." As in the case of Elisha Town, it is
unlikely that Henry Stanley would have spoken as kindly of him, and
certainly not in 1836.
Granger's stoves were advertised and
sold, for
example in Brattleboro and vicinity in the 1837-1838 seasons,
but it's not clear that his patent rotary and the "celebrated
conical stove" were one and the same; it is however possible
that the curious raised collars like Stanley's forming the boiler holes on the top
of the stove gave it its name, to distinguish it from all of the
other rotaries thronging the market. It seems to be the stove design either used or copied (but without attribution) by another Vermont manufacturer, William Blake, at the same time; or it might, of course, have been copied from him.
 |
| Burlington Free Press 21 Oct. 1836, p. 3. |
Granger, Rensselaer D. -- Troy, NY -- Stoves, Adding ovens to rotary Pat. No. 282 July 17, 1837
Granger's was an obvious modification of both Stanley's and Maynard French's, with Stanley's step-stove design and French's raised but flat top rather than Stanley's individual caps or collars for each boiler hole. But its principal claim was that it applied the well-known "elevated oven" principle (a sheet-iron oven heated by the gas passing through the smoke-pipe) to a rotary, thus providing it with a better and more convenient one than Stanley's reflectors. Granger's plan to support the elevated oven on two smoke-pipes, one in the middle of the top plate and the other, conventionally, at the rear of the stove, was improved on by Stanley himself, who moved the oven to the rear of the stove and rotated it through 90 degrees so that it did not sit awkwardly above the cooking hob (see the Ford Museum's Stanley).
Granger obviously continued working on this feature too -- his next patent, No. 2308 in 1841, was for an improved design of elevated oven, arranged like Stanley's but only requiring a single flue pipe to support it. Note how sophisticated elevated ovens -- originally little more than sheet-metal drums -- had become within less than a decade of their widespread adoption:
Mott was the most experienced and also the largest stove manufacturer in New York City. This was a modification of his ordinary anthracite cooking stove with the addition of a three-boiler rotating top instead of the usual flat one. It had a large downdraft-flue oven at the back of the stove in the usual place behind the fire, and one curious feature: the top plate could be completely enclosed in a metal dome or cover.
This was designed to meet one of the objections to cooking stoves from middle-class urban consumers (Mott's main clientele), the fact that steam and smells from cooking normally just vented into the house rather than, as in open-fire cookery, being borne away up the chimney. This was thought to be unhealthy as well as too reminiscent of the smelly atmosphere with which poorer households without a separate dining-room and parlor, and therefore doing most of their living in their kitchens, were forced to put up. In a stove of Mott's design, some of the heat, and most of the steam and smells, went up the smoke flue. The value of the rotating top in this arrangement was that it enabled the cook to bring the pot she wanted, or needed to work with, in front of the access door in the dome.
This stove does not seem to have been designed for its user's convenience -- the patent is silent about how, apart from by brute force, the top was supposed to be rotated -- but it's reasonably safe to assume that most of Mott's customers would have been able to leave this, and coping with cooking in and under the dome, to a hired cook, while they sat in the parlor or dining room and appreciated the absence of cooking smells and their own refinement.
Heermance,
Garret G. -- Poughkeepsie, NY -- Stove, Cooking Pat. No. 852 July 24,
1838
This was a combination of features from Spoor's and Gill's circular stoves and Mott's cooking stove, but with his own unique additions. It was lever-operated (qqq) and the oven occupied the space above the rotating top, under something like Mott's dome and with the same purpose, conveying kitchen "effluvia" into the smoke flue. One obvious disadvantage of this design was that it was either a four-boiler stove top or an oven; it could not be both at the same time. It must also have been extraordinarily heavy and inconvenient to use. Heermance's stove came in larger or smaller sizes and in anthracite or wood-fired variants.
Ketcham,
Micah -- Boston, PA -- Stove Pat. No. 1,159 May 25, 1839
Ketcham's stove patent drawings (four pages) and text really need to be read to be appreciated. His was a four-boiler, wood-fired flat cook with a rotary top, and of fairly ordinary form, except that he made it much more complicated than any other inventor through the addition of a feature others had used before him -- a firebox on a rack and pinion, so that the fire could be brought closer to or lowered away from the pot cooking directly above it as a way of giving more control of cooking temperature. Other rotaries, like Stanley's, achieved the same objective more simply, by moving the pot closer to or further from the heat of the fire. Ketcham also included other refinements in his quest for precision -- dampers and air inlet controls.
Ketcham was a New York state native and a collaborator in the stove business in Boston with William A. Wheeler, a Worcester iron founder. Later the same year they took out a stove patent together, No. 1419, for what was in most respects a standard four-boiler step-stove, but with the same rack-and-pinion grate. It's reasonable to assume that these stoves were made and sold, but their unique design feature did not catch on. Other inventors and makers achieved the same objective of temperature variation more simply but adequately, with airtight construction and draft dampers.
Stanley's original rotary stove had had no very satisfactory conventional oven, a defect Rensselaer Granger had addressed in his own 1837 patent by applying the already well-known elevated oven to his rotary, a device he had improved on further in 1841. In response Stanley had added an elevated oven to his own stoves, as shown in the Ford museum's example, and improved it here by making its heat more controllable with the inclusion of three rotary dampers enabling the cook to direct all, some, or none of the hot gases going up the smoke flue around the oven. This patent enabled the user to control all three dampers with a single lever, visible on the Ford stove, a simple mechanical linkage removing the need to move each one separately. This small but useful improvement demonstrates the same thing as his original rack-and-pinion rotary top: the way that his mechanical engineering background made his stoves different from and better than other makers'.
French,
Maynard -- Cincinnati, OH -- Stove, Rotary-Top Pat. No. 2,666 June
11, 1842
This was an improvement of his own 1836 patent, redesigned to remove two of its weaknesses which were evidently similar to those afflicting other rotary stoves except Stanley's:
In my stove as originally patented, there was a wide rim cast on the rotating plate, and the lower edge of this was received into a circular groove cast on the upper side of the stationary top plate; but this arrangement was found to be objectionable, on account of the friction, which frequently rendered the motion of the top plate very difficult; but by my present arrangement [balancing the top plate on a centre pivot, as in Stanley's original design], and which I have had under trial for nearly two years, I have found that this objection is completely obviated, the revolution being quite easy, while the juncture of the two rims is sufficiently close to prevent the escape of smoke, or gas, into the room.
By this time French had moved from Albany, but he assigned (sold) his patent to his ?brother Ira back in Rochester, NY. This patent, like Rensselaer Granger's elevated ovens and Stanley's 1842 and 1845 patents, provides useful evidence that all of these men were professional stove makers who stuck with and improved their products over several years on the basis of practical experience of design and manufacturing problems and comparison with market rivals.
Hart,
Albert D. -- Pittsfield, MA -- Stove, Cooking Pat. No. 3,164 July 8,
1843
This stove looks primitive, pointless, and impracticable, and the text of the patent does not explain its construction or function at all well either.
Stanley, Henry -- West Poultney, VT -- Rotary-Top Stove Pat. No. 4238 25 Oct. 1845
This was the mature, final form of Stanley's Rotary. By this time he had lost control of his own foundry, and this stove was probably made and sold by other manufacturers who had bought the assignment to his patent as well as, or instead of, by Stanley himself. Stanley had abandoned his original design for the top: instead, he had adopted Maynard French's 1836 pattern and, somehow, made it work, after French had done quite the opposite and taken Stanley's centre-pivot idea. He had also completely redesigned the body of his stove so that he now supplied what the market for "flat cooks" demanded -- a large oven D behind the fire, with downdraft flues G (though these were of his own, fairly distinctive design).
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Advertisement, Foster & Co., Worcester, MA, Barre (MA) Gazette, 13 Nov. 1846, p. ##.
This shows Stanley's cranked rack-and-pinion mechanism, though the patent does not. |
Jordan L. Mott, New York City. Cooking Range, Pat. 4,248, 1845.
Jordan Mott's cooking range, the first with a rotary top ever patented, combined some features of other designers' (two large, low-level ovens and two distinct working spaces either side of the fire; the drop-down doors) with the rotary top from his and others' cooking stoves at the time, which enabled the cook to bring any one of the four cooking holes near to hand for working, and directly over, or further from, the fire, to control cooking heat. There was a single big cooking hole over the left-hand oven, for a very large boiler (most likely for domestic water heating). There was also a space behind the fire "for water back for heating water for bathing and other purposes." In addition, the range had Mott's patented fuel-feed door above the fire, for ease and safety in refuelling.
Mott explained that his stove-derived layout, with each oven wrapped in damper-controlled flues, and the rotary top, allowed for larger ovens in a more compact, convenient, and user-friendly appliance: "As ranges are usually set within the fire-place, there is no way of removing the boilers from the top except over the front, which has been very inconvenient and by some persons almost impracticable with those heretofore in use, particularly when boilers are set in the rear, or when the breast of the chimney is low."
Mott's experienced attention to practical details of manufacture and use showed throughout his comparatively short, concise description. "The sides and back of the fire-chambers against which the linings rest, are so made that a section of each can readily be removed when defective by burning out and its place supplied at a small expense. In the top plate of the ovens I usually make depressions from one half to one inch in depth to receive sand, ashes or other bad conductors of heat, which serve to equalize the heat in the oven by preventing the top baking faster than the bottom."
Mott's range was the product of a stove maker rather than of a specialist range-builder. Unlike those of most of his competitors, Mott's range was factory-built and (probably) partially assembled, then shipped and installed as a unit. It was not customized and then built in situ. It dispensed with the inconvenient oven behind and above the stove, and it was built with the user in mind. (For more about ranges, see this post.)
Mott,
Jordan L. -- New York, NY -- Stove, Cooking Pat. No. 7,347 May 7,
1850
The principal interest of this patent is that it shows the mature form of Mott's rotary cooking stove, with a centre-pivoted top not unlike Maynard French's 1842 version, and no longer encumbered by being covered with a steam-, smell-, and heat-containing dome. Mott's new patented features -- a hinged support for the drop-down oven door, a redesign of boiler-hole covers to make them more durable -- were, he stressed, equally applicable to other cooking stoves.
Mott,
Jordan L. -- New York, NY -- Stove, Cooking Pat. No. 7,366 May 14,
1850
Similar to the above -- none of Mott's patented improvements was specific to a rotary stove, and some could even be used on parlour and other stove types. But the drawings show the stove's decorative exterior as well as elaborate mechanical construction, and the description of his (non-patented) rotary top, running in (not on: friction would have been excessive) a thin bed of sand, points to one of the rotary's weak points: what happened to its air- and smoke-tightness and basic functionality if the top warped because of excessive overheating? The sand joint was Mott's attempt at an answer, before he abandoned rotaries altogether, as most makers already had.
Benjamin Wardwell, Fall River, MA, and Ephraim A. Barstow, Providence, RI. Cooking Range, Des. Pat. 513, 1852.
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| The photographs of the blackened cast iron plates do not reproduce very well in the online patent records. The two plates on the left are the top of the oven (with oval smoke pipe exit) and the top plate above the firebox (with circular boiler holes within a raised circular rim). The squiggly lines trace the profiles of particular plates. |
This was the very first range design patent (for design patents, see my article "'The Stove Trade Needs Change Continually'," Winterthur Portfolio 2009, esp. pp. 376-85). By 1852 about 80 percent of heating and cooking appliance patents were for designs rather than improvements, i.e. ornamentation and external appearance rather than construction and function. Wardwell and Barstow's decision to go down the cheaper, easier Design Patent route, makes perfect sense. It was simple to establish patentable originality, and by the 1852 one could even submit a photograph of the object you wanted to patent rather than the more expensive technical drawing, possibly supplemented with a model, required for an "improvement."
As we can see from some of the above patents, range inventors were already struggling to establish minor patentable differences between their designs and their competitors'; and by the early 1850s the market for ranges was becoming large enough for it to be worthwhile to begin to distinguish one's products from other near-identical products on grounds of their appearance rather than their functionality. As ranges began to be foundry-made products rather than customized installations artisan-built on site, it also became more possible to think of them as, at least potentially, well-finished consumer durables that householders would buy because they would look nice in the kitchen rather than simply because they would do the job.
Wardwell & Barstow's range was very similar in layout to Pond's 1851 patent, save for one key feature about which the patent was silent: the rotating top plate, enabling the cook to bring boiler-holes to the front for lifting pots on and off, stirring, etc., without needing to reach across the hot iron range top to the rear holes. The patent was silent, because the feature was unpatentable even in the context of an "improvement" patent, as the rotating-top stove was by then such a long-established (though passé) type. But this feature was, according to the advertisement below, "acknowledged by all that have seen it to be the grand desideratum for a Side Oven range," probably because the space around the top plate in a range of this layout was so cramped. Apart from that, both were foundry-made products designed to be installed into a relatively small fireplace opening, and probably bought semi-assembled.
The patentable matter that distinguished their range from Pond's and others had nothing to do with its key working feature but was simply the decoration of the well-finished plates: "a wheat sheaf surrounded by a running vine" on the larger fireplace, oven, and warming chamber doors, and "a truncated pyramidal, lozenge shaped projection from which spring in opposite directions two lance heads. In line of each of these lance heads there is another lance head in a reversed position, the whole being in a sunken panel and surrounded by a cordon of mouldings" on the other side and front plates. We can see these more clearly in their advertisement than in the patent application:
This is a bizarre, unique patent for a type of stove -- one in which the oven rotated, like the drum of a washing-machine, not the top, which was conventional -- about which its inventor was predictably enthusiastic ("the utility and superiority of these rolling ovens are beyond question"), though he was honest about previous versions' disadvantages, principally very high fuel consumption.
The real problem with all stove ovens that he was addressing -- uneven heating where one side was next to the fire and the others were all cooler -- had been dealt with fairly satisfactorily by many stove designers over the past forty years through a combination of some insulation (an air gap, or fire brick) between the firebox and the front of the oven, and wrap-around flues to ensure reasonably even distribution of heat. Cooks also accommodated themselves to their ovens by, for example, moving loaves from the top to the lower shelves in the course of baking. So this looks like an answer to what had become a non-question.
One possible explanation for the rotary oven type and its non-survival is that Hill's claim for its superiority was qualified: it was for "when continuous baking is conducted." So perhaps this stove type was for a narrow but particular market -- commercial and institutional bakeries, rather than ordinary kitchens -- which would explain its non-appearance in museum collections or stove makers' catalogues, which were directed at the normal domestic market. In any event, even supposing that this was a real stove, made, sold, and used, rather than just another "paper patent," it did not catch on, and had no imitators.
