HISTORY OF HOME HEATING

And when it comes to heating, you may be surprised to learn that many people didn’t start converting to “modern” fuels until the mid-20^th century. Here’s where we started:

WOOD:
It goes without saying that wood was the primary heating fuel for centuries. We all love the huge stone walk-in fireplaces, and in the Colonial days they were used for cooking as well as heating. But as we know, fireplaces tend to suck the heat out of the house and send it up the chimney. So on the coldest days, the temperature inside might be barely above freezing. Unless you were well-off, your bedrooms didn’t have a fireplace at all. You might wrap a heated brick and put it under the covers to stay warm—for a while.Many of the big fireplaces had a beehive oven (think pizza oven) attached and outside the house; they are so-named because of the round shape of their tops. This was for baking bread. Very few have survived; you can often see the remnants as a small bricked-over opening in the back wall of the fireplace.

In 1742, Benjamin Franklin invented the cast-iron woodstove, which was placed a couple of inches in front of the chimney flue. It used a complicated combination of baffles and an inverted siphon to send the smoke up the chimney but didn’t sell well until it was improved by David Rittenhouse in the 1780s. To this day, although our woodstoves have gained many enhancements, we can thank our founding father for its conception.

COAL:
In the late 1800s, coal slowly took over as a primary heating fuel for homes. Using a boiler, cast iron radiators delivered steam upstairs (hot water came later). Warm air rises! At about the same time, the first riveted steel coal furnace was designed for hot air. Once in a while, you will see an old house with a large square hole in the floor covered by a grate; I see this mostly in small houses. In larger homes ducts were installed for the same purpose. It wasn’t until 1935 that the first Forced Hot Air furnace was invented—again using coal—with the aid of fans to distribute the heated air through the ducts.

Nonetheless, you still had to shovel it into the stoker bin! Coal was used for cooking stoves, too; twice a day the ash box had to be emptied. The stove needed to stay lit, and it was banked down overnight, for starting a new fire was a real hassle. I read that they needed fifty pounds of coal a day, just for the cooking stove—and of course it had to be carried up from the storage bin.

HEATING OIL:
In the 1840s, a Canadian geologist discovered how to distill kerosene from crude oil; this would be used initially for lighting. Shortly thereafter, the invention of the oil burner lead to the concept of using oil to heat the home. By the 1920s, coal burners were being retrofitted to use oil. But it was a slow process. According to the U.S. Census: “3-in-4 households used coal or wood in 1940”. After that, oil use increased 10% per decade until 1960 before it started declining. Statistically, 85% of residential heating oil sales comes from the Northeast, presumably because of the density of cities with older houses. 87% of homes using oil were built before 1990.

NATURAL GAS:
During most of the 19^th century, natural gas was used for lighting. In 1885, Robert Bunson invented the Bunson Burner, but it had to wait until the 20^th century when pipelines were improved to accommodate home heating. In 1919, Alice Parker received the first patent for a central heating system, again using natural gas. The furnace (primary burner) would circulate heated air to secondary heating tools that delivered the warm air through ductwork into the house. It took several generations of improvements to bring it to common use.

PROPANE:
Many buyers from the city are surprised to learn there is no natural gas to country properties. Why not? In a word, distribution. The same reason they don’t have city water. Running gas lines to low-density housing is just too expensive. Propane is known as LPG: liquefied petroleum gas, a by-product from processing crude oil. It was first used as heating fuel in 1912, but really took off during the ‘40s. In the early ‘30s it started to be used for cooking fuel. Now we still use it for our “gas stoves”, our gas fireplaces and barbeques, as well as heating. The huge white tanks are unsightly, but they can be buried, even today—unlike oil tanks.

ELECTRICITY:
Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the first electric heater in 1883, made from elongated cylindrical bulbs in a fixture with a copper backing to reflect the warmth.

In the Post-WWII period, these evolved into “bar heaters” with bars of coated wire that heated up with an orange glow. They were space heaters and could be plugged in anywhere, though they were certainly a fire hazard.     
Although electricity was used for fans in the furnace since the early 20^th century, it didn’t all come together until much later. In 1935, convection wall heaters were invented using a coal furnace, electric fan, and ductwork. By the late 1940s, what’s known as the “direct exchange ground-source heat pump” was invented, leading to our modern heat pumps.

So you can see, what we take for granted today had a long and complicated evolution, and is still transforming itself in the 21^st century. It’s amazing to think that many of our grandparents still remember the old-fashioned ways of home heating. We’ve come a long way in a very short time.

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