The Franklin Stove:
An Unintended American Revolution
By Joyce E. Chaplin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
My primary complaint about the book is that I had to resort to the internet to understand how the titular object worked, even after several readings of the description in the book.
The Franklin Stove is a book that manages to be a history of indoor heating, scientific history of heat, a social history of Colonial-era North America, a biography of Franklin, and a polemic on climate change. The Franklin stove, what we now might think of as a type of fireplace, was an invention to provide more effective heating to homes. A better heating system was an issue due to the triple confluence of the Little Ice Age, dwindling North American forests due to colonial exploitation, and a rising expectation of the standard of living. While somewhat popular in the colonies, it also be popular in Europe.
Franklin would tinker with its design his whole life, and published notable scientific research on heat and smoke as part of his investigation. Some of his later designs, never commercially produced, are amazing, in effect replacing the fire with ornamentation. But the whole thing became a vestigial technology, owing to the shift from wood to coal for heating, and of the stoves only a single one remains.
The book’s conceit is since the stove arose out of an event of climate change (the Little Ice Age), studying it can provide insight into how to address our own problem with climate change. This is so strained you could use it to drain pasta. But it is fun. Not the climate change, that’s terrifying. But if you like any of the topics this book covers, (or several like me) it is is highly readable because of how much material it packs in.
It is about Franklin’s paradigm about the people and material of the world. This includes the resources of the Americas and how they were used (wood and fire respectively), but necessarily spills into his views on slavery and the tribal nations. The take is illuminating, an sympathetic exploration of how Franklin came to think what he did while also not offering apologies for the ugly bits. But it is about how he was wrong, in terms of polity and morality.
It is about Franklin’s place in the scientific community of the era, how he was received, and a study of fraction of his prodigious output in that regard. But it is also about the politics of those ideas, and the politics of the invention. It is about the design, manufacture, marketing, and redesign of the stoves, how they were popularized, improved upon, or copied.
Rather than climate change, I see this as a book about fuel, about how we get the energy to operate society, particularly in the ways that it the consumption of it operates invisibly. The book has a lot of interesting things to say about that, but then veers anthropogenic global warming in less of a pessimistic way and more of suicidal idealization way. And it is about the limits of imagination. Franklin was a genius who offered up and acted upon many insights, but seems to have gotten to the right answers, then drawn the wrong conclusions. It is sobering but also fascinating to see how that pieces itself together.
The book cannot stay on a single topic for more than three pages and I think that is wonderful. It is not discursive but holistic, ready to resume any fact from a new direction at any time and reorient itself to some new revelation. I do not know who the audience is supposed to be, and I think that is besides the foolish being turned off by the climate change discussion, but I do think that I am in it.
My thanks to the author, Joyce E. Chaplin, for writing the book and to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 