The Stove Industry in 1874: Original "Working Paper," September 2006.

Stovemaking Cities and Towns, 1874, grouped in descending order of annual output:
RED = leading centres with top 25 percent of production (Troy, Philadelphia, Albany);
YELLOW = second quartile; GREEN third; BLUE fourth.
For the original zoomable map of which this is a snapshot, click here.

 

The Naming of Stoves -- Albany and Troy, New York, 1875-1876

This is a bit of a historical relic, almost 15 years old and a product of my very early days (or at least years) of concentrating on the history of American stoves and their makers in the C19th. I had not done much primary source research in manuscript materials by then, nor had I written anything for publication. So I decided to use my personal website to "publish" (there was very little evidence that anybody ever stumbled across it) bits of writing that I felt like doing just to give myself some practice and force myself to think a bit more about the meaning of some of the data I was piling up.

I am only coming back to exhume it now because I have just revisited this topic as I got the opportunity at last to expand the body of evidence on which it was based. I had known even in 2006 about the existence of modern copies of the National Association of Stove Manufacturers' 1876 List of Stove Names and had tried to purchase one from its producer, Clifford Boram, a US stove collector. But for some reason he never got around to replying. So I had to do the next best thing, working with a list of names created by the manufacturers of Albany and Troy, then the main center of stove design and production in the United States and published in the trade magazine The Metal Worker. Now, thanks to the generosity of John Handley, a British stove enthusiast with transatlantic interests who had his own copy of the NASM list, I have been able to add literally thousands more stove names and other details to my 2006 database, and will have to think again about what, if anything, they mean. But my earlier thoughts are probably still a good place to start.

The Great Partnership: Ezra Ripley and Nicholas Swart Vedder, Troy Stove Designers, 1836-1864

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.

Top view with 6" boiler hole covered

Top with cover removed

Hearth showing ash pit and circular draft control

Front View -- dimensions 26" wide x 21" deep x 28" high

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:

1. 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.)
   
   
2. 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.
   
   

Henry Stanley's Rotary Stove and U.S. Patent Law

This started out as an add-on to "Henry Stanley and the Rotary Stove" in August 2016, and was mostly responsible for so messing up the formatting of the original that I took it all down, saved it in draft, and left it there until the last couple of days.  It's probably worth standing here on its own, because its detailed examination of one inventor and his inventions' encounters with U.S. patent law makes better sense that way.  A reasonable rule of thumb for determining whether a stove inventor's work was important and influential is to see if he and it left much of a trace among reported U.S. patent cases, or resulted in much other obvious patent management (notably reissues).  The investment of so much effort and expense in defending and extending a patent was a sure indication of its value.  There was also a huge volume of local proceedings and cases not deemed worth reporting at the time, submerged beneath this visible bit of the iceberg.  But, given that the rest of patent litigation is buried in local court and Patent Office records (which is where the rest of the evidence for management also resides -- extensions, reissues, assignments), contemporary newspaper reports, and occasional surviving publications,  if indeed any trace of it survives at all, it seems sensible as well as practical to focus on what is more readily available and also impressed contemporaries as more significant.

Henry Stanley's Rotary Stove and U.S. Patent Law

Two of Stanley's many stove patent cases were important enough to be officially reported: Stanley v. Hewitt (1835) and Stanley v. Whipple (1839). What they make clear is that Stanley's claim to originality was fiercely disputed right through the 1830s, the period of his greatest commercial success, partly because, like so many inventions at the time, his patent stove was not in fact altogether original, but also simply because it was a sufficiently attractive idea, eminently useful and marketable, to attract imitation and challenge.

Stanley v. Hewitt, a case before the Circuit Court for the Eastern District of New York (the most important in the nation for stove patent cases) in late November 1835, shows Stanley as a novice inventor navigating the uncertainties of the pre-1836 patent system.  Before then patentees did not usually have the services of experienced attorneys or specialised agents at their disposal, as they soon would, and until 1836 patents were granted without being examined professionally for their originality or the extent to which they met the other criteria of the law.  Instead, these matters -- and thus the validity of the patent -- were only settled by jury trial, if they were contested, which the best and/or most valuable, like Stanley's, usually were.  The problem was already sufficiently serious before the patent was two years old for Stanley to publish this notice in local papers:

New Hampshire Patriot & State Gazette, 3 Nov. 1834, p. ##.

Stanley's patent was, according to an advertisement in the Troy Daily Whig in the summer of 1836 by two of his most persistent rivals, local stove makers and merchants Maynard French and Rensselaer D. Granger (see the next post), doing very badly in the courts before Stanley v. Hewitt was decided.  In suit after suit, none of them unfortunately recorded in The Federal Cases, and at a cost to him of between $4,000 and $6,000 in legal fees alone, he had been unable to defend his patent successfully.  [Advertisement "New Rotary Stove Store," 29 Aug. 1836, p. 4].  The Hewitt case gave him at least a partial victory, and established sufficiently important principles that the proceedings were reported in the New York Journal of Commerce and even local papers while it was ongoing, and the judge's decision was published in the leading national technical journals, notably the Journal of the Franklin Institute, afterwards, and thereby entered the lasting record of the making of federal law.

Dr Henry Hewitt, a St Lawrence County, NY stove manufacturer, had been making and selling direct copies of Stanley's stove, recording at least a hundred sales in Vermont alone before being detected and sued.  His was the most flagrant sort of patent piracy, or in modern parlance intellectual property theft: the patterns for casting his stoves were made directly from castings of Stanley's own.  This was not disputed, because it was neither a crucial point in the case nor even clearly unlawful behaviour at the time.  Instead, the argument turned on matters of priority and originality, and the interpretation of what exactly patent law protected.  

Hewitt and his four lawyers, led by Roger Minot Sherman, a luminary of the Connecticut and Massachusetts bar, defended their case by arguing, amongst other things, that the principle of the rotary had been invented by Elisha Town of Montpelier, the Vermont state capital, almost a decade before Stanley, and that he had even had a prototype of it made (see the following post and this older one, for Town).  In addition a Mr Gould (probably the Manhattan stove manufacturer Gould Thorp, whose home and business was just five doors away from Stanley's manufactory and sales depot on the north side of Water Street on the Lower East Side) testified that he had designed and made a stove with an arrangement of raised collars and flues on the top plate for the purpose of conveying heat evenly to all four boiler holes that was similar to Stanley's, and that Stanley and others had used it long before he had included it within his patent claims.  Finally, Hewitt claimed that the fact that Stanley had made and sold his stoves and therefore "given his invention to the public" before filing his patent claim in October 1832 invalidated it.    

Stanley and his three lawyers counter-argued "that Town's stove, whatever it was, was useless, and had been abandoned as such; and that the plaintiff had no knowledge of it when he made his invention and improvement, and that his stove, in all the important improvements by him claimed, was wholly unlike Town's stove."  As for Gould [Thorp]'s design, it was in fact Stanley's idea in the first place, and had been suggested to Gould by him.  Finally, he countered that "all the stoves delivered out before the application for the patent were delivered to be used on trial, and with a view to test the utility of its improvements," i.e. he was testing the product with potential consumers rather than testing the market to see if his stove was worth patenting.  This seems to be quite a claim, given the evidence that they had in fact been on regular commercial sale for months.

As was so often the case in disputes of this sort, the actual history of the invention was lost in a morass of conflicting he said/she said evidence stretched over a five-day trial, and the final judgement rested more on technicalities rather than the resolution of key substantive issues of priority and originality, where Stanley agreed to a non-suit, probably because he was clearly going to lose again.

Stanley appeared to have drawn up his patent application without proper legal advice, and to have claimed more than he should have: that he had invented the rotary principle and the design of the stove top, whereas in fact he should simply have claimed for a novel combination of existing features, some of which (notably the stove top) had even been used by him on other, unpatented stoves since 1828.  Hewitt and his lawyers insisted that Stanley "had so worded his specification that it would not bear that construction [claiming for the combination rather than the separate parts], and that it really claimed the different parts comprising the top and cap of the stove separately and independently of any combination, and that his specification was otherwise defective."  

They won on that point, but Stanley was vindicated on the lesser matter of whether he had invalidated his own claim by trialling stoves in customers' hands: as the judge, Supreme Court Associate Justice  Smith Thompson, who was quite sympathetic to Stanley, determined,

putting the stoves out on trial and for the purpose of experiment and improvement was not such a public use of them as would be considered as a dedication to the public; ... the plaintiff was justified and had a right to test the utility of his invention, and see what improvements might be made before he applied for his patent, [as] this was an article which would be tested by being put into several families, where it might be differently used by different housekeepers.

Though Stanley's patent 7333X was declared and admitted as invalid, he was able to surrender it and resubmit an amended version on the same day right after the trial, 2 December 1835, probably the one listed in the patent records as 9282X which was lost in the Great Fire at the U.S. Patent Office in December 1836 and not restored thereafter.  Despite the equivocal outcome, Stanley and his principal sales agents, Church & Dana of Troy, NY, claimed an immediate moral victory, and resumed their struggle against rivals with renewed vigour.

Delaware Gazette, 6 Jan. 1836, p. 3.

New Bedford Mercury 29 Jan. 1836, p. 3.

After the Patent Office fire, Stanley reinstated a new version of 7333X, almost identical to his new patent 91 which he had taken out at the end of November under the revised patent law of that year and which was probably just a version of 9282X, which he did not bother to restore.  They had both been rewritten to meet the requirements Judge Thompson had sketched out so helpfully, essentially that an original combination of new and old design principles and features was also quite patentable, a long-established interpretation of British and American patent law of which Stanley could have taken advantage in 1832 if only he had sought good professional advice.  His patent agent for doing the rewriting and resubmission/new application was none other than Thomas P. Jones himself, formerly the U.S. Commissioner of Patents, which may help explain why Jones thought the decision partly in his client's favour was sufficiently important to print it in the Franklin Institute Journal, which he edited.  

The significance of Stanley v. Hewitt was that, while the case was pursuing its way through the courts, and until Stanley had registered his revised patent and then tested it at law again too, other inventors were in effect almost invited to find their own ways around it, and rival makers could use their own patents or imitate Stanley's rotary more or less closely but with little risk.  It would take until Stanley won in Stanley v. Whipple (1839), by which time his rotary stove was soon to be superseded by newer designs, before his intellectual property was really secure, or at least as well protected as statute and case law then provided.  In other words, for the entire period during which Stanley's stove enjoyed technical advantages over much of the competition, which his novel production and distribution methods probably increased, and right through the stove boom of the mid-1830s, he was never able to capitalize fully on his intellectual property or escape his imitative competitors.

There is extensive correspondence between John R. Conant of the Brandon Iron Company in Brandon, VT and Henry W. Miller, a stove dealer in Worcester, MA who was a big customer, between March 1835 and July 1838.  This is all transcribed and annotated in this new post.  Though it does pay some attention to the strengthening of Stanley's legal case in 1836, probably as a result of the Hewitt judgment and his revised and new patents, Conant carried on making and selling his own rotaries in direct competition with Stanley's, and reassured all of his customers that he and they had nothing to fear and he would even indemnify them against costs if there was any legal challenge.

C.W. & J.A. Conant, "Stoves" [12 Oct. 1835-] Vermont Telegraph 25 Feb. 1836, p. 4 (and other near dates).

As for Hewitt, he carried on merrily in business, depending for his legal foundation on joining with some of Stanley's other pirate competitors in the purchase of Elisha Town's rival 1834 patent in 1836, and threatening anybody infringing on his rights (such as, presumably, Stanley) like any legitimate manufacturer.

Henry Hewitt, "New Rotary Cooking Stoves!!" St Lawrence Republican 15 Jan. 1839, p. 2.

Stanley v. Whipple, 1839

Stanley and Emor Whipple of Cincinnati had agreed in October 1832, i.e. well before Stanley's original defective patent had even been granted, that Whipple would pay Stanley a $5 royalty for every stove he made and sold in the Cincinnati market (an area much larger than the city itself, but not precisely delimited).  This was about half of the profit (c. $9 per stove) that, according to testimony in Stanley v. Hewitt,  Stanley realised on stoves sold through independent wholesalers in 1833-1835 rather than directly by his own family firms.  But presumably it was worth taking less money in order to expand his market quickly into a region that he did not expect at that time to be able to supply immediately from Vermont.  

Whipple made, advertised, and sold the Stanley stove for years, approximately 3,000 of them.  He even published, in 1834, his own local version of the Stanley firm's guide for users of its stoves.  But what he did not do was pay the royalty, apparently confident that the patent would not be sustained, even after Stanley had in 1836 remedied the defects that Justice Smith Thompson had pointed out to him.  

He miscalculated; this time, represented by the leading Cincinnati lawyer Salmon P. Chase (future Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court), Stanley won outright: his "good" patent in 1836 meant in law that Whipple's agreement with him in anticipation of the "bad" patent of 1832 stood, and was enforceable.  This does not necessarily mean that Stanley succeeded in collecting any or all of his money -- the report stretches no further than the judgment itself, not its outcome -- but it does mean that his patent had finally been validated in a federal court, and the risk and perhaps price of violating it had been increased sharply.  

The pity of it was that this deliverance came too late.  By the end of the 1830s the heyday of the rotary stove was almost over, and new, cheaper designs of large-oven, four-boiler cook stoves with downdraft flues and no complicated mechanical features (Hathaway's, Buck's, and their numerous imitators') would soon sweep it from the market.

Stanley and his brothers' firms became insolvent in the early 1840s, and they lost control of their Vermont foundry, upstate New York iron furnace, and New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore manufactories and wholesale/retail establishments.  But his career as a stove inventor was not over, and one of his later new designs was also sufficiently important to lead to a reported patent case three decades later. 

Ruggles v. Eddy et al. (1874)

Morning Herald (NY), 2 November 1839, p. 4.

On the 4th of January 1845 Henry Stanley patented a smart style of very efficient columnar heating stove which he called "Stanley's Coal Burner," number 3876, an earlier (unpatented) version of which he had been selling since at least 1839.  (I have no idea why he called this a "Patent" stove too, when it was not -- this was an offence under the Patent Act; or why he took a further six years to actually patent it.  Patent Office archives might contain some clue.)  By 1853 he no longer had a foundry of his own, so continuing to monetise his ideas depended not so much on making and selling products of his own design (his original business model), but more on selling ("assigning") his patent rights to other manufacturers.  As his relationship with Whipple demonstrates, he was not new to this game.  But assigning for cash was probably more secure than doing so for a royalty payment.  The unexpired term of his patent was bought by Henry Jenks Ruggles, a Poultney native born the same year as Stanley himself.  Ruggles and Stanley had a business relationship stretching back years: he had started at the Stanley foundry in 1832 as a clerk, advanced to manager and overseer, and in 1844 bought the foundry and patterns after the Stanley brothers' brush with bankruptcy in 1842, and continued it in his own name, even inventing and patenting stoves of his own in 1851-1852 (patents 8472, 8535, and 9436).  Ruggles passed it in turn to his lawyer son Horace, then pursuing a career in New York, in July 1858.  

On the face of it this was a strange decision by Ruggles père, given that the patent was shortly to expire and become almost valueless.  However on Christmas Eve Stanley exercised his right as patentee and applied successfully to extend its term for seven years, i.e. until January 1866.  Thinking (or so he said) that the extended term was not part of the original assignment to Henry Ruggles, he assigned it to his son John on 4 January 1859 (its first new day of validity), who assigned it in turn to two Troy stove makers, Charles Eddy and Jacob Shavor, that March.  

Eddy and Shavor did what they could to maximize the value of their acquisition by reissuing it in their own names the following year, not just once but three times: Reissues 944 (10 April 1860), 958 (8 May), and 1078 (13 November), during the course of which the text of the patent grew from two to five pages, and their claims on its behalf extended far beyond the original.  Henry Stanley knew what was going on, and may even have participated even more actively than is indicated by his witnessing Reissue 958.  

This sort of aggressive patent management demonstrated very clearly that the old patent did indeed have value -- not necessarily just for production directly from it, but probably also as part of a patent portfolio for deployment in the litigation battles highly competitive stove makers fought with one another in the base-burner section of the market.  Base burners were a new design of columnar heating stoves experiencing rapid innovation and commanding very high prices -- the most prestigious items in any self-respecting stove maker's product line.  If the old Stanley patent contained (or could be made to contain...) the first claim to useful features for incorporation into a base burner, Eddy and Shavor would be able to prevent any of their rivals from using them too, or charge them for the privilege, or bargain with them for permission to use their patents without charge or suit.

Horace Ruggles did not take this challenge lying down.  He proceeded against them in May or June 1859, i.e. within a couple of months, but gave up after he failed to win an injunction because of doubts about whether the title to the patent was indeed still his.  Eddy and Shavor's three reissues in 1860 may have been motivated in part by their desire to strengthen and extend their claim, including the new features.  

The claim remained undisputed until 1871, when Horace, now running the family business with his brother after their father's death in 1869, resumed his legal action and flushed out the information that they had produced and sold 10,097 stoves from their patent in the eleven years they had owned it.  Horace seems to have been an example of the third way of monetising intellectual property, other than using it or selling it to other users.  For him, it was just an asset to be used for profitable lawyering.

The litigation between Ruggles, Eddy and Shavor dragged on for years, until the defendants changed their argument at the very last stage.  After losing at all of the earlier hearings they now claimed that they had in fact "made an alteration in one of the devices contained in the Stanley stove, which withdrew the stoves made by them from the operation of the Stanley patent," after eleven profitable years under its protection.  

Judge Blatchford ruled against them, not so much because he disbelieved their last-minute statement of different facts than those they had agreed to in all of the previous litigation since 1859, but because of the gross unfairness to Ruggles as rightful owner of the original patent that would have resulted.  This was not the end of the litigation, but as the subsequent stages were not reported it is not clear who won in the end, or how much (if anything) Ruggles finally collected.  The answers to these questions will lie, if anywhere, in the archives of the U.S. judicial system and perhaps of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.  But, even in incomplete outline, the story of Henry Stanley's 1845 heating stove patent, which remained a property worth owning and going to law about until a very few years before his death in Brooklyn in 1878, illustrates the ways in which stove makers and others attempted to work the maturing patent system in their favour in the three decades after he invented  it.

The Pleasures of the American Winter

"Table-Talk," Appletons' Journal of Literature, Science and Art vol. 4, no. 90 (12 Dec. 1870), p. 742, 

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Tal9AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA742

HAWTHORNE, after spending a winter in Rome, declared that thereafter he would, if possible, pass that inclement season in some part of the globe where it is recognized as a legitimate institution. Hawthorne has not been the only traveller who has descanted upon the discomforts of winter when experienced in a climate where frost is but an irregular and uncertain visitor.  Olmsted, in his account of his winter travels in Texas, describes feelingly some of the sufferings underwent from the cold "northers," against which the imperfectly-constructed houses afforded a very inadequate protection. Winter, indeed, is only an affliction in places or with people where or with whom there is no suitable means for guarding against its rigors. To well-fed, well-housed, well-clothed people, winter is as delightful as any other season of the year. Its pleasures, of course, are essentially different from those of summer, but they are no less vivid and no less genuine. Not to mention those out-of-door sports, such as skating and sleighing, that are unexcelled by any of other seasons, it is within-doors that the winter supplies us with some of its best delights. In summer the hill-top, the brookside, the garden, the porch, the open window -- all places, in fact, that afford us quiet and pleasant air, have equal claims upon our affection; but it is only in winter that we come to understand the full significance of the word home. When the storm is shaking our casements, and the night is black and dangerous, then, within the drawn curtains and around the blazing fire, we discover how secure, and glowing, and peaceful, and rich in affections, are "hearth and home." Just as in spring the first blossoms give us delight, so in winter does the fire when first lighted give us singular pleasure. Perhaps of all our boyhood recollections those of the old winter's fireside are the keenest and the most delightful. When the first snow-fall comes this season, let the reader take down his copy of Whittier's "Snow-bound," and read the poem by the brisk blaze of crackling logs, with the sound of the outward blast reaching his ear in melancholy menace, and see what a relish the old-fashioned picture will have for him. By the brisk blaze of crackling logs! Alas! if he reads it at all, in all probability it will be over the hot air of a register, or by the burnt iron of a stove. Firesides and hearthstones are things of the past, and with their departure have gone nearly all the best charms of a winter-home. Modern life is surrounded with a good many conveniences, but every innovation in our households seems to signalize the death of some treasured pleasure. Your furnace, no doubt, diffuses an even warmth through the house, but, in shutting up the fireplace, it scatters the household and breaks up the old-time family-circle. It drives out of the home an artist who was wont to paint delicious pictures on your walls, and tint the cheeks of your dear ones with a rare glow. It excludes a friend whose bright, sparkling chatter once entertained you many a long evening, and whose blaze and glow rarely failed to fill your heart with cheerfulness and gratitude. There are a few old-fashioned people who cling to wood-fires, but many of the younger generation remain ignorant of what was once the greatest charm of a winter-home. "Coal," says Ik Marvel [Donald Grant Mitchell, Connecticut essayist 1822-1908], "may have its uses in the furnace, which takes off the sharp edge of winter from the whole interior of the house, and keeps up a night-and-day struggle with Boreas for the mastery, but a country home without some one open chimney around which, in time of winter twilight, when snows are beating against the panes, the family may gather, and watch the fire flashing, and crackling, and flaming, and waving, until the girls clap their hands and the boys shout in a kind of exultant thankfulness, is not worthy the name."

Back Again ... The Naming of Stoves (2011)

Golly gosh, how quickly time passes when you're enjoying yourself (in my case, just getting sucked into the rhythm of the teaching term).  That, at least, is an excuse for leaving this blog alone for weeks on end.  I can see why so many blogs die -- it seems like a good idea to start one, doesn't cost anything apart from time and thought, and it's the middle of winter and the university vacation, so there's plenty of the former and not a lot better to indulge in than the latter.  But then you start wondering -- Why bother? What's it for?  Who's it for, apart from yourself?  So you give up.  Then again, how different is this from writing academic history?  I've often used a particular simile for the experience of publishing essays and articles (books, at least, get reviewed) -- you work at them for months on end, perhaps longer; eventually they appear; but then you throw your babies over the cliff and never even hear a bounce.  It's depressingly common (in my experience, at least) to publish something that's good in a decent journal and to get no real evidence that anybody, apart perhaps from the editors and the peer reviewers, ever read it.  But that doesn't stop me writing it, so maybe I should spend the odd late-evening hour with A Stove Less Ordinary again.

Anyway, no matter -- I shall cast a bit more bread upon the waters, and maybe some of it will come back after not too many days.

* * *

I put something rather boringly informative about this subject on my old website years ago, near the start of my current obsession -- "The Naming of Stoves" -- but there's plenty more to say.  Here's one of my favourite pieces:

"Their High Noses," Chicago Daily Tribune 17 Dec. 1877, p. 8 [reprinted from The Detroit Free Press]

"He wore shep-skin (sic) mittens, had his pants in his boots, and he covered his horses with old pieces of rag carpet, and entered a hardware store and asked to look at a sheet-iron stove. {hjh comments: this means it was cheap, and he's poor -- the customer cannot afford cast iron} He was shown several patterns, one after the other, but none seemed to exactly suit his ideas.

'I have shown you every style of parlor stove on sale by any house in Detroit,' said the dealer as they stood before the last one.

'Yes, I s'pose so, but none o' them quite fills the bill,' was the dubious answer.

'Why not!  Aren't they big enough, tall enough, handsome enough, or what is the trouble?'

'Waal, I'll tell you,' slowly replied the would-be customer. 'The ole woman she takes a story paper, and her head is chuck full of such names as Evangeline, Eunilena, Maud, Arabella, and Riverbell.  The gals they read Shakespeare, and they are all the time talking about Hamlet, Claudius, Petruchio, Romeo, and so on.  I'm kinder postin' up on astronomy myself, and I'm all the time thinkin' about Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter.  Now, you haven't got a stove in the lot with a more romantic name than 'Ajax,' and just imagine folks like us sittin' round a stove with a plug name like that!'

He thought he'd look further, and, as he unhitched his team, he called out:

'Whoa, now, Lady Estella -- stand around there, Othello!'" 

* * *

Now, what's the significance of this?  It works, for me, on several levels -- for example, as an ironic and patronizing commentary on something real and, to me, attractive: the desire for education and self-improvement in Victorian America, and the lack of distance there then was between "high" and "popular" culture (see, for example, Lawrence W. Levine, "William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation," American Historical Review 89 (1984): 34-66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1855917 if you are lucky enough to have access to this wonderful resource through a library).  

But it's also, more prosaically, about the way in which the name of a stove was an important part of what distinguished it from all of the other thousands of models in the market, most of them very similar to one another in appearance, layout, and functionality.  Alongside of the design and all of the practical selling points that dealers drew to buyers' attention, the name was a part of the total package of useful and attractive features that consumers purchased. 

Manufacturers' desperate search for novelty and what they thought of as appropriateness in a stove name led them to some bizarre inventions.  The resulting proliferation of names was part "of the romance of the stove industry.  Salesmen and retailers had dwelt lovingly on such products as Pearl, Darling, Rapture and Clementina.  Their suggestions, 'Clementina has too square a base,' or 'Bolt the legs on Darling,'  were made with a certain affection and reverence. 'Rapture must have a new cast iron elbow.'" [Melodia and Walter S. Rowe, The Story of Estate: Another Chapter of the Romance of Business in the Land of Opportunity  (Hamilton, Ohio: Hill-Brown Print. Co., 1937), p. 31.]

There's a nice explanation of the importance of attractive names to consumer acceptance of new products in Kimberley Webber's essay "Embracing the New: A Tale of Two Rooms" in Patrick N. Troy, ed., A History of European Housing in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge U.P., 2000), pp. 86-106.  Webber is writing about the takeup of American (or American-style) stoves in place of the British settlers' original open fires in late nineteenth-century urban Australia, as (wood) fuel became more expensive and in short supply -- the same catalysts that had stimulated Americans from Pennsylvania northward to adopt cooking stoves over the previous half-century.  But there was more to this change of habit than just the stimulus of cost:

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the new importance attached to homemaking and meals in Australian family life encouraged households to move away from the open fire to the cast iron stove because the latter enabled food to be cooked on top of the stove while pastries and other dishes were baking within. But it was not sufficient for the cooking stove to simply do the job: it must also look the part, and thus this pre-eminently industrial object needed to be domesticated. 'Romancing' the stove was achieved, first, by the application of romantic names to different models, and second, by replacement of the aesthetic of the factory with that of the parlour. (sic)

Of all the industrial products targeting at the domestic market in the nineteenth century, the cooking stove outstripped all others in the sheer range of models available and the ingenuity of their names. Rathbone, Sard and Co. (a major American manufacturer who exported their stoves to Australia) {of Albany, NY and Aurora, IL -- hjh} listed seventy-one different models in their 1890 catalogue, each available in at least four different sizes. Their foundry was therefore producing parts for 284 stoves. The names given to stoves were quite extraordinary and as far removed from any suggestion of industry as possible. For example, an 1887 catalogue from McLean Bros of Melbourne listed the Ascot, Derby, Gipsy Queen, St Leger, Steuben, Uncle Sam, Empress and Enchantress; and an 1895 catalogue from Anthony Hordern's included the New Matron, Dover, Criterion, Orient, and Electric Light.  Names never refer to any quality of the stove or distinguish between different capacities. Rather, this most banal of products required associations with the exotic, the patriotic or the classical in order to be desirable. [pp. 90, 92 -- there is a nice ad. on p. 91, http://books.google.com/books?id=WTYYYrLKn1MC for a Limited Preview and search for "romancing".]  

2 March 2011, minor edits 8 July 2021!