The Naming of Stoves
August 2006 (edited & updated [a bit], August 2012, November 2013)
See also the underlying spreadsheet.
And, for a properly-formatted text version, with footnotes, see here.
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Advertisement for the "Name Book," The Metal Worker 20 Jan. 1877, p. 29 (and weekly thereafter). $2 is about $50 in modern money, or ten times as much if we allow for the increase in American wealth since then -- i.e. $2 represented as much of average annual income then as $500 does now. This was a costly product and a business tool. |
One of the features of the US stove industry of the mid- to late-19th century was its extraordinary variety of products, and the large number of companies making them. The stove industry did not experience much in the way of concentration – in the early 1870s, the largest of the c. 210 firms making stoves in the US only possessed a 2.4 percent market share, i.e. the industry approached a condition of pure competition. It was not even very strongly geographically concentrated – though three states (New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with 29.6, 17.5, and 17.2 percent respectively) dominated the industry, stoves were produced in all of the northern and border states and some of the southern (see Table 1 in “The Stove Industry in 1874”). Troy (10.3 percent), Philadelphia (8.3 percent), Albany (7.9 percent), Cincinnati (7.4 percent), New York City (5.3 percent), St Louis (5.1 percent), Pittsburgh (4.8 percent) and Boston (3.4 percent) were responsible for more than half of the output (see Table 2 in “The Stove Industry in 1874”), but none of them were securely dominant even within their own region – rather, stove manufacturers sold into a national market.
There are many reasons for this pattern of dispersion and diversity, but one of its more obvious consequences was the extraordinary proliferation of models of stoves. Companies rarely concentrated on a single type of product. Rather, all but the smallest seemed to feel driven to produce a full line of cooking and heating stoves, ranges, and furnaces, for consumers from the comparatively poor to the wealthy and the institutional (storekeepers, churches, schools, hospitals, hotels), the rural to the metropolitan, and dependent on a variety of solid fuel sources (wood, anthracite, and bituminous coal).
[Note: This was probably because (a) the market for “stoves” was in fact very heterogeneous, and (b) stoves were mostly sold through independent retailers. Therefore, if a company wished to be able to supply a retailer with the “assortment” required to satisfy their customers’ many different demands for cooking and heating appliances, it had to be capable of producing a wide variety of stove types. This was particularly important for the larger firms whose ambition was to establish enduring and exclusive business relationships with a single retailer who would become their agent in a particular town – a good way of rationalizing the distribution system and also mitigating the effects of price-comparison shopping by consumers, who could no longer compare goods made by different firms in the same store. The only way to persuade retailers to enter into an arrangement like this was by being able to offer them a full line. Surviving stove catalogues from the early 1850s demonstrate that this “full line” strategy was already commonplace by then, barely a decade after the industry’s emergence -- see e.g. Rathbone & Kennedy, Circular (Albany, 1854).]
The industry was also developing very rapidly in the mid C19th, so there was a considerable amount of continuous innovation reflected in the introduction of new models and even whole new classes of product (notably the base burner), but its products were consumer durables in more ways than one: though older models of stove might be superseded, they remained in use, generating a worthwhile ‘after-market’ demand for spare parts. The result was that companies’ product lines were constantly growing and changing, but they could not afford to abandon support for older models – the assurance that such vital household equipment could be kept in repair was a key part of the implicit bargain between producers, distributors, and consumers.
The need to distinguish one company’s products from a competitor’s essentially similar stoves; to distinguish a company’s newer from its own older models; and to provide a reasonably foolproof means of identifying stoves, so that spare parts could be ordered with confidence by customers hundreds or even thousands of miles away, years after the original sale – all resulted in another of the features of the stove industry, the extraordinary proliferation of stove names. Stove companies – almost all of which were proprietary enterprises – changed their own names with great frequency, as partnerships were formed and re-formed. Few of them were large enough, or had begun to attempt, to establish name recognition and a brand identity. Instead, they churned out one new stove name after another in the attempt to give their products some distinctiveness. By the early 1870s, it was clear that the naming process was out of control, resulting in confusing plagiarism, as obvious or attractive names were adopted and recycled by competing firms, and increasingly desperate, inappropriate, and meaningless choices were made too, all in search of an edge in the market and some differentiation from the competition.
[Note: Many of them also produced at least some goods which were actually identical to other manufacturers’ – particularly if both had bought their patterns and/or the assignment of a design patent from a specialized stove pattern maker. The extent of this practice can be traced in two publications from the 1880s and early 1890s -- Northwestern Stove Repair Co., Catalogue for 1887-88 of Northwestern Stove Repair Co. Stove Repairs (Chicago, IL: The Company, 1887); and J. Elliott O'Rorke, O'Rorke's Stove Repair Key: Giving the Names of all the Principal Stoves Manufactured in the U.S.; Manufacturers' Names and Numbers; Also Describing the Marks on the Various Repair Castings, with a List of the Various Stoves Each Casting Will Fit, etc., etc. (Peoria, IL: O'Rorke Stove Repair Co., 1892). These provide chapter-and-verse detail on the consequences of manufacturers’ reliance on the same few designers and pattern shops, particularly Nicholas Vedder’s in Troy, New York. The result was that many apparently different stove models were essentially identical -- different in name and perhaps in quality of manufacture, but not otherwise. I have written about this (a bit) in “’The Stove Trade Needs Change Continually,’” but these two catalogues provide the first evidence I have come across of the extent of the practice. It was the stove trade’s dirty little secret, which explains why details about it were published not by makers themselves, but by those they denounced as “pirates” – firms specializing in making and selling cheap spare parts to fit hundreds of different stove models, who deprived manufacturers of the profitable after-sales market they might otherwise have expected.]
At precisely the time when the thicket of stove names began to submit to some rationalization – through the adoption of brand names by some of the larger firms, and the publishing of a “name book” by the National Association of Stove Manufacturers (founded 1872), so that companies should not name a new stove after a competitor’s -- the stove manufacturers of Albany and Troy compiled a directory of names of the stove models they had in current production, or for which they would supply spare parts from stock (which might include discontinued models produced by a company’s predecessor, from which it had bought the works, patterns, and business goodwill).
[Note: The first was produced at the end of 1876. Only 150 manufacturers replied to the NASM Secretary’s seven repeated requests for information, but these supplied 4,725 names – “New Publications: Josiah Jewett [Sec.], Names of Stoves, Ranges and Furnaces,” The Metal Worker 6:23 (2 December 1876): 6. The average of 31.5 model names per respondent is exactly the same as the Albany-Troy average, arguing for its representativeness. The NASM’s Name Book was reprinted by the stove collector Clifford Boram some years ago, but no longer seems to be available. A firm of New York stove dealers produced their own version in 1885 -- W.B. Betts and T.J. Rader, compilers, The Stove Index, Containing the Latest and Most Complete Index of Stoves, Ranges, Furnaces, Etc., Etc., Manufactured Throughout the United States, For Which Repairs Can Be Had, with Description and Names of Manufacturers, and Their Successors. Compiled for the Use of the Trade (New York: Betts & Rader, 1885).]
No copies of the NASM’s successive editions of name books seem to survive, so this 1875 list from almost a fifth of the industry is the best approximation we have. These two cities’ 27 active firms supported 850 different models among them. For each model, one must also understand that there would have been different sizes, different model years (so it was necessary, in ordering a spare part, to specify when it was bought, or the model year stamped on it, or the patent date equally prominently displayed on the casting), and a range of optional extras in what was essentially a modular product (e.g. one could buy a stove with or without an add-on water boiler). These 850 different models therefore represent only the beginning, not the end, of the profusion of product types that Albany and Troy firms manufactured, or had manufactured in sufficient quantities to be worth supporting with an ongoing supply of spares.
[Note: “Albany and Troy Stoves: Alphabetical Index of Manufacturers, and of the Stoves Made By Them,” Metal Worker 3:21 (22 May 1875): 3.]
These 850 different models were classified fairly simply as Coal Cooks, almost all of which would also burn wood; Wood Cooks, for wood only; Parlor Cooks, for wood or coal, combining the functions of a room heater with a small cook stove; Elevated Oven stoves – an early pattern, often called ‘step stoves,’ but still popular among rural users, and generally wood-fired; Coal Heating stoves, which might also burn wood; Wood Heating stoves, which might also burn some coal; Base Burners, a special variety of coal heating stove; and Tailor & Laundry stoves, stoves so designed and modified as to maximize the amount of water they could heat and/or the amount of space they provided for the heating of sad irons.
There was no clear and unambiguous connection between a company’s size and the number of models in its repertoire: in general, the smaller the firm, the fewer the models, but there were some quite small firms (e.g. Marcus L. Filley’s Green Island Stove Works – 63 models, and annual production capacity of just 900 tons) which were almost as prolific as the local giants. This may simply have reflected the proprietor’s and his customers’ conservatism, as some of the products he still supported were decades old.
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There is a book, or at least an art-historical article, to write about the decorative schemes and motifs adopted for the “dress” of cast-iron stoves. There might just be one in stove-naming practices too. It is reasonably clear what manufacturers were attempting to communicate by their choice of words: that their products partook of one or a number of desirable characteristics distinguishing them from the competition. The problem was that – just as with the inflated claims in stove-company advertising – all competing firms recycled the same limited stock of adjectives.
[Note: And I have since written it. “’The Stove Trade Needs Change Continually’: Designing the First Mass-Market Consumer Durable, ca. 1810-1930,” Winterthur Portfolio 43:4 (Winter 2009): 365-406, or http://dro.dur.ac.uk/7739/1/7739.pdf if you don't have access to JSTOR.]
Stove-naming practices make a number of claims on products’ behalf, which are, in alphabetical order, that they are: beautiful (something about which manufacturers were endlessly sensitive, because the aesthetics of having great lumps of blackened cast iron in a domestic setting were often questioned, and not just by visiting British literary celebrities from Dickens to Oscar Wilde); had classical associations; were economical; were excellent (everybody’s stoves are the best); were feminine (men might buy them, but women used them); reminded one of flowers or plants (another way of denying the products’ nature); were geographically associated either with the place of manufacture or the principal market; were historically grounded; were labor-saving; were light (glinting with nickel-plate, and brightening homes with the flickering gas-burning flames from their mica windows); were modern (new and improved); were patriotic; big and powerful; solid; and above all warm. There are probably plenty of other recurring motifs here that I haven’t noticed yet.
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