The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution
“offers a multifaceted history of Franklin’s invention. Equal parts biography, design history, and environmental history, the book proves its worth by being highly relevant to today’s climate crisis.”
To use technology to solve the twin dilemmas of climate change and resource depletion is nothing new. The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution by Joyce E. Chaplin chronicles a similar situation to the present environmental crisis. Chaplin explores how the famous American inventor Benjamin Franklin developed his eponymous stove to combat the crises of The Little Ice Age and deforestation. As a Harvard academic, Chaplin offers a unique perspective and qualifications to tell this story. Besides authoring two previous books on Franklin, she is a Harvard professor of Early American History and “holds affiliations with the Graduate School of Design and Center for the Environment.” Franklin’s stove promised to save energy and keep people warm.
The Franklin Stove provides a multilayered history of the home appliance. Woven together are histories of design and engineering, environmental and climate science, and a biography of Franklin himself. Set against the background of early modern American history, Chaplin contrasts the use of fire by Native Americans and European colonists. Native Americans use council fires to symbolize kinship and harmony with the environment whereas Europeans use fire as a means of dominating nature. She goes into the etymological history of “bonfire,” tracing it back to “bone fires.” These public acts of political will were orchestrated as anti-Catholic spectacles. Franklin’s Boston was English and virulently Protestant, the memory of Guy Fawkes’ attempted act of terrorism still fresh in public memory.
The narrative shifts from the general to the specific and back to the general. Beginning with a history of the Little Ice Age, this blends into her counter-intuitive history of the Industrial Revolution. After a lengthy exploration of Benjamin Franklin and his stove, the book expands again to a more general history of fossil fuel use, the rise and fall of American steel production, and a larger, more global overview of the current climate crisis. Chaplin’s history of the Industrial Revolution is unique, since it asserts it began, not in England, but in the American colonies, specifically Pennsylvania. The colony’s unique geographical position and resource wealth made it an economic powerhouse. Only later, after coal replaced wood as a common fuel, did England develop its own Industrial Revolution.
Her portrait of Franklin is measured and balanced, weighing positives and negatives against current ideological paradigms. While a renowned inventor, scientist, engineer, and writer, he was also a slave-owner and asserted Native Americans would go extinct because white European settlers would marry early and be more fertile. Luckily the work and Chaplin’s admiration for Franklin as a historical figure does not descend into fawning hagiography or into a tiresome inventory of personal and political sins. It doesn’t excuse his racist writings or his slave ownership, but it also doesn’t swipe away the very real consequences of his invention. The stove did save energy and eventually fell out of favor once coal became the common fuel source. Franklin himself despised the effects of coal use when he visited London and its ever-present soot.
Chaplin states early in the book, “In managing cold by cutting down trees, New England settlers were, among other things, testing a novel hypothesis about climate: humans could change it.” But was this change for the better or for the worse? Unfortunately, politics and economics would conspire to forge the false belief that America had infinite resources. Combined with clear-cutting forests, an emergent economic theory would posit that capitalism can work because the world has infinite resource, thus reinforcing the concept of infinite growth. Eighteenth century humans can be forgiven for adopting that notion. Modern humanity cannot. Unless resource plunder of other worlds can be facilitated by a robust space exploration program, the idea of infinite growth based on infinite resources is both antiquated and delusional.
The Franklin Stove offers a multifaceted history of Franklin’s invention. Equal parts biography, design history, and environmental history, the book proves its worth by being highly relevant to today’s climate crisis. It doesn’t provide any “single bullet theory” to solve the present climate crisis, even going so far as to condemn “single bullet theory” thinking. It does offer a magisterial chronicle of technological change, energy use, and the consequences involved.