The Great Partnership:
Ezra Ripley and Nicholas Swart Vedder, Troy, NY Stove Designers, 1836-1864
The recent appearance of another attractive "Severe Airtight" stove in a Facebook Antique Stove Collectors' group has encouraged me to draw together the work of its two designers, in what may be the first in a number of new posts cataloguing the output of some of the most influential and creative men (and they were all men) in the American stove industry in its first golden age.
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| Top view with 6" boiler hole covered |
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| Top with cover removed |
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| Hearth showing ash pit and circular draft control |
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| Front View -- dimensions 26" wide x 21" deep x 28" high |
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Side view
[All photos used with owner's permission] |
The "Severe Airtight" was conceived as Design Patent 426, issued at the end of November 1851 to Ezra Ripley and Nicholas Vedder of Troy, New York, with its sister city Albany ten miles south the most important center of stove manufacture, innovation and design in the United States at the time. It marked the formal beginning of a partnership between these two pattern makers that lasted for the next dozen years. In the nine years of the Design Patent system up until then, 23 men from Troy had taken out 74 stove design patents, and 22 of them were Ripley's. He had no serious local competitor except, perhaps, James Wager, with 9 (see this blog post for Wager).
The Severe Airtight was a parlor stove of the kind popular since the mid-1840s, carefully manufactured to minimize air leakage at its joints and enable the rate of burning to be regulated by a single draft control in the front hearth and (perhaps) a damper in the chimney. The fuel feed door was on the right hand side, and the stove was wide enough to take a c. 15" length of firewood. The design was in the popular "Gothic" style, with a plain, chaste surface decoration of pointed arches, columns, and diamond and other patterns.
The Design Patent drawing included above is a poor photographic reproduction, but the original (if it survives in the U.S. National Archives) would have been a very fine large-scale (1:2 or 1:3) drawing on durable but almost transparent paper. It shows the one crucial part of the stove that has not survived 170 years -- the decorative urn and finial that sat in the center of the boiler-hole cover on the top plate, and probably served as a room humidifier, filled with water and perhaps scented herbs -- and also includes other information helping us to put the stove design into its context:
- It notes that the design has been assigned to (purchased and/or commissioned by) a local firm of stove makers, Low & Hicks, who thereby acquired the designers' intellectual property rights for the patent's full period of seven years. This was a normal way of doing business for stove pattern makers. Unless they were also manufacturers themselves, they either worked on commission or developed designs in a speculative way and then sought makers to buy the right to use them. Assignment data is quite common in design patents and usually signifies that the pattern makers are working on commission; assignments issued after the patent had been granted would have been recorded separately, in one of the Patent Office's enormous Assignment Books which have not, unfortunately, been digitized yet. (The Low & Hicks partnership existed between c. 1847 and 1855. Peter Low had entered the stove business as a sole trader in 1830; George W. Hicks remained in it until 1858 after their partnership broke up, at first as a sole trader himself and then with Edward J., his ?son; Edward J. continued with a new partner, Gordon G. Wolfe, until 1877, i.e. this was a well established local firm. All data from this spreadsheet.)
- The other names on the patent are those of its witnesses. Sometimes there are separate witnesses for the drawings and the text, but not in this case. Assignee and witness names are data worth collecting for understanding the networks of local business relationships in which mid-century entrepreneurs were embedded. It would not be difficult to cross-refer names with local directories, newspapers, and censuses, but the exercise would only be worthwhile if done on a large scale. The witnesses in this case -- E.L. Brundage and A. Snyder -- included the man who probably made the drawing and filed the patent. Brundage was a draughtsman and patent agent, providing valuable specialized services to the local stove-design community.
