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| Albany in the 1850s, showing busy river traffic and the Erie Canal entrance. |
The towns of Albany, Troy, and to a much lesser extent Schenectady were the most important centres of innovation, design, and production of American stoves in the industry's "Golden Age" between its emergence in the 1830s and its maturity after the Civil War. The Hart Cluett Museum in Troy and the Albany Institute of Art and New York State Museum in Albany have the finest public collections of its products. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy and the New York State Library in Albany hold the most voluminous company archives illuminating its inner workings. And the work of Tammis K. Groft at the Albany Institute did more than anybody else to draw the industry and its products to public attention in the exhibitions she organized forty years ago and with the catalogue Cast With Style: Nineteenth-Century Cast-Iron Stoves from the Albany Area (Albany: Albany Institute of History & Art, 1981, rev'd ed. 1984) that she wrote. This was what first introduced me to the stove industry and its forgotten importance a few years later.
I have written, and even formally (i.e. not just here or elsewhere online) published, plenty about the stove industry already using these local resources, but I've decided now to compile something that's long overdue: a guide to one crucial source for the early history of the industry that I have been developing for years, but that's been hard to share.
This is the record of inventive activity contained in U.S. patents for invention and design. In many cases the patent is the only primary source we have for knowing what products looked like, how they were made, how they were supposed to work, and what problems they were supposed to help makers and consumers solve. This is because examples of most of the stoves themselves have not survived until today, and few of the industry's hundreds of inventors, designers, entrepreneurs, and even companies left any archives at all.
Behind the patent itself, in the US National Archives, there may sit files of correspondence, particularly for the most commercially significant and heavily litigated ones, but online and in the public domain all we can find are the bare bones -- the patent drawings and explanatory text. To understand the evolution of the products, though, these are the most important sources.
They are easy to look at but quite difficult to find. This is because the most user-friendly interface with the USPTO's online holdings, Google Patents, can only -- and not always reliably -- locate patents that were printed by using a word search (e.g. for an inventor's name). This means that all early manuscript patents are even harder to discover, and impossible if you don't know their number. The USPTO's own search interface has no such limitations -- it can find everything that's there -- but not by a full-text search for any pre-1976 holdings (Google Patent will reach more than a century further back). So to find old stove patents, you also need to know their numbers. And where can you get those? Where is the key?
There is a key, and it was published almost 150 years ago -- a tabular compilation of the most important details of all US patents between 1790 and 1873, filling three fat, crammed volumes. All of this information was scanned and digitised a couple of decades ago by ProQuest and is readily available to anybody with access to a library holding a subscription. I used it to start building my own database in the early 2000s, and carry on improving it. But my database isn't easily shareable -- the key fields are easily translated into spreadsheet format, but the notes I have added that describe each patent don't fit. So the public key that I have provided is not as much use to any e.g. stove collector looking for a particular model as the private version of the database is for me.
So what I will do here is the same as I've done in several blog posts already, notably the last one on Ezra Ripley and Nicholas Vedder -- produce a catalog with an entry for every patent that gives the information needed to find it online, and also a (usually brief) description taken from my database that expands on what was provided in the 1873 volumes and will help any reader to decide whether it's worth following the link taking them to the original document in the USPTO files.
But there are so many New York Capital District stove patents -- 1,278 between 1810 and 1873, vs 5,752 from the rest of the United States, i.e. 18 percent of the American total -- that it is quite impractical to even consider doing the lot. So I will concentrate on the early years, up until the 1850s, during which all of the fundamental stove types emerged, and the Capital District's importance was at its peak. This was particularly the case with respect to patents for designs rather than functional "improvements": in the 1840s, 45 percent of all U.S. stove design patents were issued to Capital District residents; in the 1850s, when other production centers began to do more of their own work rather than commissioning it from Albany and Troy, they still contributed 38 percent of the national total. Comparable figures for improvement patents are just 12 percent in the 1830s, 17 percent in the 1840s, and 14 percent in the 1850s, though in terms of those that were fundamental to the way stoves were built and worked Capital District patents were disproportionately important. So, to a large extent, the history of Albany and Troy stoves in these decades is the history of American stoves, full stop.
Note: From the early 1850s on there is another category of source material that will provide anybody interested with a good way of seeing the industry's huge product range -- the stove catalog -- to which I have provided an online guide in this blog post. Here, for example, is what may have been the very first, and certainly the oldest to survive in an online version: Albany designer Samuel Vose's Illustrated Book of Stoves, 1853 -- a model others soon followed. See the 1854 G.W. Eddy and Rathbone & Kennedy, 1856 Newberry & Filley, 1857 McArthur & Co., and 1861 Potter & Co. catalogs.
Before the Great Fire: 1810-1836
In December 1836 the US Patent Office in Washington, DC, burnt down, and most of the records of the first 46 years of the American patent system were destroyed. Holders of pre-Fire patents were given the opportunity to restore their old ones, a process that carried on for years. A record of all pre-Fire patents was also reconstructed, and patents were given a serial number with the suffix "X". But most of these records consisted of nothing but the barest details -- a short title, a date, and the names of patentees and of the towns, cities, or counties from which they had lodged their applications. They are still worth reporting here, because they give an indication of the slow increase in the frequency with which Capital District residents began to take an interest in stove innovation.
Stoves were quite new and uncommon in the upper Hudson valley in the 1810s, and still mostly imported from southern New Jersey / south-east Pennsylvania iron furnaces throughout the 1820s and into the early 1830s. But they soon became accepted, and the Capital District began to acquire a growing number of merchants, artisans and others interested in using, making, and trading in them, from whose ranks most patentees were recruited. (For the growth of the Albany and Troy stove trade from the late 1820s -- including a running total of the number of firms active in any particular year -- see this spreadsheet; for this phase in the history of the industry, see Chapter 2, esp. pp. 2-3, 16-19, 56, and Chapter 4, esp. p. 19, pp. 23-28, from my abandoned book about the coming of the stove and the rise of the industry dedicated to making it).
In the list that follows, key details for patents that were restored, in whole or in part, after the Fire (sometimes just their drawings seem to exist in the Patent Office online copy; or drawings are associated with the wrong description, but this is usually obvious), are highlighted in bold, whereas those destroyed and not restored are in plain text. In some cases two names are given, with an oblique / between them: these are patents where the drawings and the text have different titles, probably because the illustrations were re-drawn for the Patent Office decades later. In a few instances I will include illustrations, but in most entries there should be enough information in my descriptive text for this not to be necessary, especially as the online version of the original document is only a click away, for anybody who wants to look for him or herself. I have recorded patent numbers in the form e.g. X4368 because this is the way they need to be entered into the USPTO Database's search engine. The proper format would be 4368X.
It will become clear that, had it not been for the work of the Reverend Dr Eliphalet Nott, principal of Union College, Schenectady, this list would have been much shorter and far less significant. I have included his non-stove patents too simply in the interests of completeness, and also to show the breadth of his work and the way his focus shifted from the anthracite stove to a related question, adapting the steam-powered riverboats so important to commerce on the Hudson to run on anthracite too.
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| Eliphalet Nott, from the Union College collection |
Nott's large number of stove patents did not result so much from the value of his work -- only a few of the products that came from his inventions were commercially successful, at least for a period -- as from the way he approached patenting. In the beginning he seemed to be reporting on his experiments in the "Evolution and Management of Heat" as if in a scientific journal, rather than laying claim to intellectual property in particular devices for burning anthracite efficiently. But he was, in fact, very interested in making and selling them, and raising money for his family and college in the process. To this end he prosecuted imitators who infringed on his patents, and in 1833 took out numerous new ones to cover the improvement of individual key features of his stoves that resulted from experience and continuous experiment, the better to protect his market position. Then, in the early/mid-1830s, he also began to attempt to extend his product range beyond the market segment he had created and still dominated (large, ornate, and expensive heaters for the parlors and halls of the wealthy, and for commercial spaces and public institutions) to include cook stoves for which the demand was much greater. In this effort he was less successful, but his idiosyncratic attempts also left numerous traces in the patent record, far more than any other Capital District stove maker of the time. Nott gave his neighbors and rivals a model to emulate.
