Benjamin Franklin set out to conquer climate in the colonial era

The winter of 1740-41 was exceptionally cold and Benjamin Franklin, then a humble Philadelphia printer, wasn’t about to take it lying down. Necessity being the mother of invention, Franklin sought to create a more efficient and economical iron stove for heating the home, one that yielded more heat while using less wood which, at the time, was an expensive and increasingly scarce commodity.

In her new book, “The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution,” Harvard professor Joyce E. Chaplin reveals how this relatively modest invention prefigures the ascent of the United States as a commercial and industrial powerhouse, and helped to transform our expectations around domestic comfort and technological progress.

Over a 30 year period, Franklin would develop five versions of his stove, each increasingly more sophisticated, iterating through new designs to improve its features and make it more attractive to consumers. “This is a project that ran throughout his entire life,” Chaplin tells me. “And it was situated during an earlier period of climate change—the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling that ran from about 1300 to 1850 AD.”

Chaplin’s book is more than a simple history of a clever invention. “The Franklin Stove” looks broadly at how the problem of climate in the colonial era laid the groundwork for our present, where an ever-growing desire for personal comfort has blinded us to the need for careful environmental stewardship. Attuned to the close interplay between European colonists, indigenous Americans, and enslaved Africans, who were instrumental in powering the early American economy, Chaplin seeks to better account for the true cost of progress.

“Franklin’s stove,” says Chaplin, “exemplifies an era of greater confidence in what science and technology could offer human beings.” While modern Americans take for granted that we should be able to easily warm our homes, colonial Americans had no such expectation. At best, they could huddle around a smoky, centrally located hearth to warm up before going back to another part of their chilly domicile. Franklin sought to apply his skills as a scientist and engineer to extend that zone of comfort.

“Franklin’s stove creates an artificial atmosphere that will keep people warm wherever they happen to be inside it,” says Chaplin. “It controls drafts, eliminates smoke, and serves as a kind of controlled sphere that people can live in comfortably, without the chill you’d get if you weren’t sitting right next to the fire. It offers a sense of refuge.”

The stove was a hit—and an early example of a modern consumer good. Shipped in a flat pack for later assembly, the stove found its way not just into the homes of colonial Americans, but also to Europe, where it generated a flurry of interest in Franklin as a scientist. In fact, according to Chaplin, the measurements and observations Franklin made in order to refine his artificial atmosphere ultimately helped him make discoveries about the natural one.

But Chaplin also believes that Franklin’s stove represents a watershed in American culture, the advent of a “new materiality” that prioritized comfort and consumption above all. From this, springs a somewhat misguided faith in the ability of technology to transcend our material limits.

She contrasts Franklin’s conception of individualized atmospheres achieved through the private arrogation of natural resources with that of the indigenous Lenape people of Pennsylvania, who emphasized large, communal fires and were careful not to take more from the land than it could sustainably provide. “They differ in both ethos and practice,” says Chaplin, noting that the Lenape method “brought people together across political boundaries to symbolize a shared commitment,” not “to generate comfort for a preselected group of people.”

“It’s from Franklin’s era that we inherit our techno-optimism,” writes Chaplin, identifying Franklin as “an early incarnation of the charismatic scientific inventor who makes big promises.” But she believes that Franklin and his 18th century peers possessed a quality that may be sorely lacking in their contemporary analogs.

“There’s an interesting blend of confidence and humility that is particular to this era—and I think that we may have diverged from that,” says Chaplin. “They realized that as humans, we don’t understand—and may never understand—the complexity of the natural world.”

The revolution in industry, commerce, and energy that Franklin helped usher in has led us to our current precarious point in history, where we must wrestle with questions about how to balance future economic growth with the very habitability of the planet. Chaplin hopes that by better understanding how we got here, we can formulate a more realistic path forward. “Climate change” is not just a technical problem, writes Chaplin, but also “a social and political problem.”

By adding depth to the popular image of Franklin as an epochal, Promethean figure, she hopes to convey to readers that they should not put too much faith in any one solution—or any one person. While new technologies will likely play a part in our efforts to forestall the effects of climate change, Chaplin believes that we may also find wisdom in the lessons of the Lenapes, who eschewed the privatization of comfort in favor of a more scalable, collective prosperity.

With “The Franklin Stove,” Chaplin provides readers with a comprehensive scientific, political, and economic history of our quest to keep warm, and renders a clearer, more nuanced view of both Franklin as a founding father and the fragile, resource-intensive foundation on which our country’s economic prosperity has been built.