This post will deal with the period between the beginning of the new patent system in 1836 and the start of the design patent system. There were relatively few patents issued in this period -- 19 in six years, discounting reissues -- partly because the rules of the Patent Office became increasingly restrictive so that only a minority (30 percent) of applications succeeded, but also because of the weakness of the U.S. economy after the Panic of 1837. Patenting activity was typically pro-cyclical, i.e. it responded to booming demand. When the market was stagnant, inventors and entrepreneurs were less inclined to go to the effort and expense of introducing new models.
These years saw a continuing emphasis on perfecting the cook stove, including the two most important prototypes of the large-oven, four- or later six-boiler stoves that became the dominant type by mid-century. There were far fewer parlor or heating stove patents, hardly any of which featured the columnar stoves which were the Capital District's most celebrated products from this period, still collected by enthusiasts and forming the heart of museum holdings. This is probably because they contained no patentable technical improvements in form or function.
No. 282
Granger, Rensselaer D.
Granger, Rensselaer D.
Troy
Adding Ovens to Rotary Stoves
17 July 1837
Adding Ovens to Rotary Stoves
17 July 1837
Witnesses: Thomas P. Jones, Levi Rice
Granger, like Maynard French, was attempting to piggy-back on the market-leading Stanley rotary stove, marrying Stanley's modified step-stove design and French's raised stove top. Granger applied the well-known "elevated oven" feature (a sheet-iron oven, developed from a traditional Pennsylvania German heating drum, heated by the gas passing through the smoke-pipe) to a rotary, thus providing it with a better and more convenient oven than Stanley's tin reflectors. It "does not interfere with the other ovens or means of cooking, or require any additional fuel for heating it, and ... may be added to stoves of other descriptions." 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 back of the stove and rotated it through 90 degrees so that it did not sit awkwardly above the cooking hob.
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 above a four-boiler step stove. Note how sophisticated elevated ovens -- originally little more than sheet-metal drums -- had become within less than a decade of their widespread adoption:
No. 457
Slade, Caleb
Troy
November 11, 1837
Witnesses: Whiting, Daniel & Cross, Geo.
A peculiar-looking cooking stove for burning coal, with a "common sunk hearth."
No. 576
Eaton, Eben
Troy
January 20, 1838
Witnesses: Hunter, Jno. & Thomas, H.
A gothic parlor heater with a complicated firebox / grate hung on pivots inside the stove, so that the fire could be seen through the mica windows in all four sides. The stove would have had to be free-standing, in the middle of a room or at least some way out from a wall. This idea came to fruition in the 1850s with the base-burner stove, which also had windows all the way round.
No. 813
Robinson, Eli C.
Troy
June 30, 1838
Witnesses: Furnale, Emet W. & Whiting, Daniel
A four-column parlor stove of the kind the Capital District was famous for producing at the time, but which rarely crops up in patent documents because they involved no patentable "improvement." This one was different in function, not simply appearance, which is why it qualified. It had a brick-lined firebox jacketed with warm-air flues to increase the room-heating effect and stop the sides becoming overheated, and a mechanical dumping grate to enable the user to remove ashes and clinkers dustlessly, without having to open the door and poke.
No. 815
Atwood, Anson
Troy
June 30, 1838
Witnesses: Hanby, Samuel & Briggs, James
This device was meant to satisfy a demand that the increasing use of cast-iron cook stoves helped create -- for an appliance that would do the cooking in the summer, when the heat a regular stove transmitted into the kitchen was not a desirable by-product of using it and might even be unbearable. It was an iron (probably wrought, not cast) oven with two compartments, heated by a small charcoal- or anthracite-fueled furnace in front with room for one boiler on it. The flue went through the middle of the oven, "by which improvement the radiation of heat into the room is more perfectly prevented than has hitherto been effected, while it is at the same time applied in the most direct manner to the purpose of cooking." Atwood's invention was sufficiently valuable to be worth reissuing in 1847 as Reissue No. 95, witnessed by the leading New York City stove inventor, maker, and merchant Jordan L. Mott, who may even have been a customer for the design features the patent protected.
Atwood made his first entry into the list of proprietors and managing partners in the Troy stove industry in 1841, owning and running the Empire foundry on Canal Avenue, where he remained until 1846 with a single partner, Spencer Cole, from 1844 to 1845 (Cole probably ran their wholesale and retail side), and another, Isaac Crane, in 1846. James Briggs was a pattern maker, Hanby not yet identified.
No. 820
Treadwell, John G.
Albany
June 30, 1838
Witnesses: Thompson, W. & Thorn, Linton
"The Compound Parlor Dumb Stove." Americans had used heating drums attached to stoves' flue pipes for decades -- they made it possible to warm an upper room from the waste heat of a stove downstairs. Treadwell's patent shows an example using the columnar-stove design popular at the time. Its distinctive feature was that also contained a firebox F, so that when more heat was required the stove became live rather than dumb. See also Blanchard's 1841 patent 2355, below
No. 825
Bucklin, Isaac B.
Troy, West
July 9, 1838
Witnesses: Sheldon, C.D. & Masten, H.V.W.
This was not the only Railway Cooking Stove patented at the time, but (as with Williams's 1836 9350X in Part 1 of this catalogue), it is difficult to see the point of adding complication to a flat-topped four-boiler cook stove by making it possible to "increas[e] or decreas[e] the size of the whole, according to the use intended to be made of it." Patentees did not always explain why their improvement was desirable as well as how it was made and worked. My best guess, from reading other railway cooking-stove patents (e.g. Anson Atwood's, below), is that it made it easier to heat the oven, and use less fuel, when only two boiler-holes were required.
Bucklin's stove must have had some practical value: his patent was reissued in New York in 1840 (witnesses Frederick R. Sherman & Seth P. Staples) "to prevent mistake as to the nature and extent of my claim."
No. 915
Stewart, Philo P.
New York City
September 12, 1838
Witnesses: Serrell, William & James E.
Included here because Stewart moved to Troy the following year to get his stove made and marketed, and lived there the rest of his life. The Stewart became the classic Troy cooking stove, the standard against which all others were judged. I have written a whole blog post on Stewart and his stove -- the man and his life were even more fascinating than the things he made. Here I'll just write about this patent.
Philo Penfield Stewart "of Hudson street, ... stove maker" lived in poverty on the Lower West Side and labored for years to perfect his ideas for a cooking stove that would be better than any other in use. His stove was intended to be used for burning wood or coal or even, in summer, when less heat was required, peat.
Like other cook stove designers, e.g. Eliphalet Nott, he was intent on minimizing fuel consumption and also the wastage of heat from the stove into the kitchen -- something that, in summer, could make it intolerably hot. Stewart achieved this by the unique design of his firebox and grate and by jacketing his stove with removable reflective tinplate cladding on the sides.
(1) In winter the "jacks" were removed and "by using anthracite coal, the warmth may be maintained through the night."
(2) In summer they were put back on, ensuring less fuel consumption and more comfort. In intermediate weather, the housewife could use them or take them off easily, depending on the day.
Other features included:
Other features included:
(3) dustless ash-removal,
(4) a firebox and oven guaranteeing low fuel consumption and uniform baking,
(5) exceptional but simple controllability via a single air-inlet valve,
(5) exceptional but simple controllability via a single air-inlet valve,
(6) removable tin covers for the stove top, to enable the broiling of food, or heating flat irons, without overheating the apartment,
(7) a reflector oven on the hot side plate, and
(8) a removable hot-water reservoir on the top.
The Stewart stove was unusually thoughtfully designed and precisely manufactured so that it could do a great deal of work with a small amount of fuel, and occupy a limited space in the kitchen. Its two pages of drawings, even without the key to all of the detail they contained, demonstrate how comparatively sophisticated it was.
The Stewart stove was unusually thoughtfully designed and precisely manufactured so that it could do a great deal of work with a small amount of fuel, and occupy a limited space in the kitchen. Its two pages of drawings, even without the key to all of the detail they contained, demonstrate how comparatively sophisticated it was.
RX 6
Spoor, Abraham D.
Troy
Grate / Anthracite & Other Coal [Parlor] Stove (8084X Reissued)
March 15, 1834 Coxsackie / Reissued December 4, 1838
Witnesses: Adancourt, F. & Adancourt, C.L.
I have squeezed this patent in because it qualifies a bit like Stewart's. Dr Abraham Spoor lived in Coxsackie, 25 miles south of Albany along the Hudson, when he patented this parlor stove in 1834, but by the time he reissued it in 1838 he had gravitated towards the Capital District for the same reason Stewart would soon follow the same path. It had become the best place on the East Coast to design, make, and market stoves, where he could sell his patent rights to local manufacturers [Bosworth & Barton advertisement, "Coal Cooking Stoves," Troy Daily Whig 22 Sept. 1835 onwards]. I have also included it because the patent record is full of cook stoves but notably short of the parlor stoves that the industry was producing at the same time.
Spoor's "celebrated parlor stove" [Bosworth & Barton ad.] was an attractive square appliance with mica windows to allow a sight of the fire, a mechanical shaking, rotating, dumping, and dustless grate to make the burning of anthracite easier and cleaner, decorated plates, and brass knobs at each corner with an elegant urn in the center of the flat top. Its unique design feature was the "reverberating" or "revolving" downdraft flues at all four corners of stove:
The advantages obtained by this arrangement are a great saving of expense in the construction and increase of durability of the stove, as well as economy of fuel and labor in the use of it, for as the fuel does not come in contact with the external plates, and the surface of this stove is large in proportion to other stoves intended to consume the same quantity of fuel, no part of its external surface is made so intensely hot as to become oxidated, warped, or cracked, while at the same time the heat communicated to the air of the apartment is milder and much more agreeable to the sensation, less liable to crack and warp furniture or char the floating particles of combustible matter and cover the walls and furniture with a black dust, and, moreover, the fire can be better adapted to the state of the weather.
No. 1120
Atwood, Anson
Troy
April 10, 1839
Witnesses: Coote, Clement T. & Thorn, Linton
A four-boiler flat cook stove with an elevated oven supported on two flues. Atwood's claimed improvement was "Combining an Elevated Oven Therewith (i.e. with a railway cooking stove) in a Manner Which is New and Convenient." The advantage of being able to move the entire front and top part of the stove on casters was that "a direct draft may be produced under the whole of the cooking utensils, or under those merely which occupy the front part, the change being made at pleasure and instantaneously." So perhaps this was the purpose of the "railway" feature: being able to concentrate the heat of the fire on just two boiler holes, if those were the only ones needed. Note the way the boilers sit above the top plate of the stove, as in a rotary, so that the bottoms of utensils placed in them did not protrude too far into the flue space and firebox beneath. Note also the wire bails (handles) on the covers for the holes, a style soon to be superseded.
No. 1157
Buck, Darius
Albany
May 20, 1839
Witnesses: De Groff, Amos T. & Willard, Thomas S.
This was the single most important cook stove patent anywhere in the United States, not just in the 1830s but for decades afterwards, because it was the basis for most cook stoves that followed and improved upon it. It was also managed most assiduously by Buck, his widow Desiree, and their assignees, who forced other makers who wanted to incorporate it to pay them tribute.
As we have seen above, there were numerous competing varieties of cook stoves in 1830s America, particularly step stoves, square or flat cooks, and rotaries, with direct draft flues and ovens either behind the firebox, but not very big or very uniformly heated, or elevated, or even of reflector "tin kitchen" style. Buck's contribution was to perfect a stove with a flat top, four (easily expanded to six) boiler holes, and an exceptionally large oven evenly heated by wrapping it in flues above, behind, and underneath it. This became the standard layout in most of those that followed. Philo Stewart reached the same objectives by a somewhat different route, but was not as influential on the development of the large-oven stove as the American standard model.
I have written an entire blog post on Buck and the large-oven stove, and also the earlier inventors, notably Christopher Hoxie and Jonathan Hathaway, who have a better claim than him to have originated it and the downdraft flue system that was at its heart, so I won't repeat it here. As with Stewart, I'll simply concentrate on the patent itself.
Buck admitted his stove's debts to, and similarities or common features with, its predecessors, but maintained that by combining them it delivered a greater degree of improvement in the amount of oven and other cooking capacity and also economy in fuel and in other respects than they had. The key features were (1) the extension of the oven under the hearth, and (2) the flue system. Products of combustion went from the firebox to the back of the stove right under the top plate with the four boiler holes and over the top of the oven, as was standard in any direct-draft stove. But then they went down two flues E at the back of the stove, behind the oven, and all the way along the bottom plate, under the oven, right to the front of the stove under the hearth, before being reunited in flue P which took them back under and behind the oven to the stovepipe where they exited. The point of this arrangement was to maintain the temperature of the flue gases as far as possible, and to distribute heat evenly around the oven so that there were no cold or hot spots within it. (See also RE174 taken out by his widow in August 1850, shortly before the original patent was due to expire, and extending its validity as well as strengthening its claims -- the drawings are easier to read than the originals, and spell out the stove's internal arrangements more clearly.)
It does not really matter whether Buck's innovations were actually innovative or that his stove's unique design features actually delivered the performance improvements he said they did. He and his heirs and assignees were able to maintain their claims at law, and their decision to monetise their intellectual property not simply by using it in Buck's own stove-making but also by licensing it to other makers helped large-oven stoves to conquer the American market within the decade.
No. 1260
Nott, Eliphalet
Schenectady
July 26, 1839
Witnesses: Jones, Thomas P. & Foote, Clement T.
This was Nott's last stove patent, and represented the fullest development of his anthracite heater as part of an enormous space-heating installation with lofty classical columnar downdraft flues bracketing his original Gothic core.
No. 1281
Smith, Elihu
Troy
August 9, 1839
Witnesses: Seymour, Walter W. & Niel, Jas.
Smith's "Troy Union Cook Stove" looked like a sort of step-stove combining a lowdown firebox with two boiler holes over it and a large elevated oven behind it, with another two boiler holes on top. The description explains that they were actually two separable modules, and could be used independently, because the oven part could also have its own fire. The point of this was to deal with the problem of how to use / what to do with a stove in summer, when you did not need all of its capacity and did not want too much heat in the kitchen. The rear section of Smith's stove -- "the cooking or summer apartment" -- would do enough work by itself, with a small fire.
[Testimony of Smith and Geer in Report of a Trial, for Violation of the Patent Right of the "American Air-Tight" Cooking Stove, in the Circuit Court of the U.S. within and for the district of Massachusetts. Elias Johnson and David B. Cox, Plffs. Peter Low and George W. Hicks, Defts. (Boston: Damrell & Moore, 1848), pp. 43-44, 55-58; copy at Historical Society of Pennsylvania.]
Cf. Treadwell's 1838 patent no. 820, above.
The design of this stove is to furnish, under the appearance of a pedestal or another analogous device surmounted by a statue, all the advantages both of a well-constructed dumb or radiator stove and a parlor stove in which fire can be made when an increased temperature is required, or when there is not any in the kitchen or other apartment below that in which the dumb stove is situated. ... [It] has less the appearance of a stove and is more ornamental than any other which I have ever known. The statue, besides being elegant in its appearance, forms a constituent part of the instrument, and exposes a large radiating surface...
No. 2357
Jenks, Otis
Albany
November 16, 1841
Witnesses: Russell, D. & Osborn, W.S.
An Open-Grate Anthracite Parlor Stove, or "Franklin." A heating stove with lots of baffles in the flues
No. 2404
Robinson, Eli C.
Troy
December 30, 1841
Witnesses: Wilson, Horatio O. & Whiting, Daniel
"[P]roviding a movable oven to a stationary stove, so constructed as to allow the fire and heated air to pass through the flues of the oven in whatever position, within the limits prescribed for its movement, it is placed, and then through a stationary stove pipe to the chimney." On the rotary stove, the oven would then be able to rotate with the stove top. Why this was thought to be a better design than the one adopted by other makers, where the oven and stove pipes were fixed and only the top rotated, is not explained.
No. 2607
Atwood, Anson
Troy
May 4, 1842
Witnesses: Jones, Thomas P. & Cunningham, A.F.
A flat cook, for wood or coal, with the firebox alongside the oven rather than in front of it. There were the usual flues wrapping around the oven, and everything was controlled by a damper -- the stove could have a direct draft, e.g. when lighting up, or the priority was to heat the boiler holes, in which case the flues around the oven would be closed off. Atwood's distinctive features in this stove were an air-warming chamber between the firebox and the oven, into which it fed hot air, and from which "the vapor from the articles that are being cooked [was allowed] to escape." This was another of the many responses by inventors to concerns about the cooking qualities of unventilated iron ovens. "When additional cooking is required, a tin kitchen, or roaster, is to be placed against the side E, of the fire chamber." There is little original about this patent, which is one reason why it's valuable -- it shows the flat cook as an evolved, practical stove type -- simple, low-slung, and large enough for an ordinary household.
No. 2627
Easterly, James
Troy
May 16, 1842
Witnesses: Phillips, Henry & Cass, William
A reminder that there was still a demand for more efficient open fireplaces and that stove makers supplied it too. Easterly's iron fire insert had an insulating air gap between its side plates, protecting the jambs and surrounding wood work from (some of) the risks of fire.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments will be moderated to prevent spamming, phishing, and advertising. If you wish to do any of these things, please don't waste your time and mine.