The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution

by Joyce E. Chaplin

The surprising story of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous invention—and a new take on the Founding Father we thought we knew.

The biggest revolution in Benjamin Franklin’s lifetime was made to fit in a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flatpack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the era's most iconic consumer products, spreading from Pennsylvania to England, Italy, and beyond. It was more than just a material object, however—it was also a hypothesis. Franklin was proposing that, armed with science, he could invent his way out of a climate a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters sometimes brought life to a standstill. He believed that his stove could provide snug indoor comfort despite another, related a shortage of wood caused by widespread deforestation. And he conceived of his invention as equal parts appliance and scientific instrument—a device that, by modifying how heat and air moved through indoor spaces, might reveal the workings of the atmosphere outside and explain why it seemed to be changing. With his stove, Franklin became America’s first climate scientist.

Joyce E. Chaplin’s The Franklin Stove is the story of this singular invention, and a revelatory new look at the Founding Father we thought we knew. We follow Franklin as he promotes his stove in Britain and France, while corresponding with the various experimenters who discovered the key gases in Earth's atmosphere, invented steam engines, and tried to clean up sooty urban air. During his travels back and forth across the Atlantic, we witness him taking measurements of the gulf stream and observing the cooling effect of volcanic ash from Iceland. And back in Philadelphia, we watch him hawk his invention while sparring with proponents of the popular theory that clearcutting forests would lead to warmer winters by reducing the amount of shade cover on the surface of the Earth. As the story of the Franklin stove shows, it’s not so easy to engineer our way out of a climate crisis; with this book, Chaplin reveals how that challenge is as old as the United States itself.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science

480 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 11, 2025

About the author

Joyce E. Chaplin (born July 28, 1960, in Antioch, California) is an American historian and academic known for her writing and research on early American history, environmental history, and intellectual history. She is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of 2019. In 2020 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Reviews

[Brendan (History Nerds United) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I didn't read the blurb for this book well enough, but it was not at all what I was expecting (in a bad way).

The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution by Joyce Chaplin is really not about any of the words in the title and subtitle. It is more of a treatise on climate change, environmentalism, colonialism, indigenous relations, and slavery. None of these subjects are handled with any real subtlety. I will say this for Chaplin, I know exactly what she thinks about a lot of things.

The major problem is of course that what the book seems to be about is not what it's about. Franklin building any type of stove doesn't happen until about page 86 of a 300 page book. Even worse, Franklin himself is not given any depth. He is a tool used to illustrate what Chaplin wants to hammer home to the reader. Say what you will about Franklin, good or bad, he was an interesting person. That character is not captured within this book.

(This book was provided as an advance copy by the publisher.)

[Ezra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scientists realize that the climate is changing. They believe that humans can be responsible for climate change, and they begin coming up with solutions to the problem.

Sounds familiar, eh? But it’s not our current global warming crisis. Nope! It’s the 1700s, and it’s a global cooling called the Little Ice Age!

Benny-Boy Franklin lived during the Little Ice Age, and he and other early scientists believed that humans could make the climate warmer by cutting down trees! But in the meantime, it was cold as the dickens, and wood was scarce in Europe, and growing increasingly scarce in the American colonies. So Benja Frank invented his Franklin Stove to provide better indoor heating and to conserve fuel.

But this book isn’t just about Franklin’s invention. It’s about how different groups of people view the world and its resources (like the Native Americans and the European colonists). It’s about how individuals and governments try to address the problems of climate, with lessons to be learned for the climate crisis we face now.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Franklin Stove, and I highly recommend it to both history lovers as well as to people concerned about the climate today!

Thanks to Brilliance Audio through NetGalley who allowed me to listen to the audio version of this book. The narrator, Cynthia Farrell, did an excellent job!

[Randy Watts · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book gives some information on Franklin's stoves, but mostly it is an indictment of Franklin for the removal of native Americans from their habitat (started 100 years before his birth and continuing for 100 years thereafter), slavery and global warming. I consider myself "woke" but this book pukes "woke" to the point of annoyance and distracting from any academic value relating to Franklin's stoves. The stoves were not a success, very few were built and those not damaged by use were scrapped their owners - a point not addressed by the writer. Franklin's research efforts pale in comparison to what would be expected by a grade school science fair project today, another point missed by the writer. Rather than reading this book do a Google search for "Franklin Stove" and you'll be better informed.

[Gerry Connolly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joyce Chaplin reintroduces us to the scientific side of Benjamin Franklin in The Franklin Stove. During the little ice age of the mid 18th century most homes were warmed with inefficient and smokey fireplaces fueled by wood. As forests and woodlands were depleted wood stockpiles got expensive. Franklin designed a stove that more efficiently burned wood, and subsequently coal, and vented smoke outside the warming room. He assiduously studied heat exchanges and calculated atmospheric dynamics between rising heat and its distribution throughout the interior of the home. Ultimately he designed five model stoves that were used in America and Europe. His studies were widely replicated by other scientists and reprinted in scholarly journals. Of course Franklin was an autodidact who studied electricity, the Gulf Stream and myriad other phenomena. Chaplin curiously superimposes a distinctly 21st century sensitivity to Franklin’s views on slavery and gender, while helpful reminders of transgressions ,fails to account fully Franklin’s evolution on both. A book on a stove that illuminates the curiosity of a scientific mind.

[Léonie Galaxie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joyce E. Chaplin has produced a remarkable work of historical scholarship that transforms the story of a simple heating device into a profound meditation on technology, environment, and human society. Through her richly textured examination of Benjamin Franklin's famous stove, created during the mid-eighteenth century's Little Ice Age, Chaplin demonstrates how even the most seemingly straightforward innovations carry complex social and environmental implications.

What makes this book exceptional is Chaplin's ability to weave together multiple historical threads—technological innovation, environmental change, labor systems, and colonial expansion—into a coherent and compelling narrative. Her documentation of the "brilliant theories and innovations" that led to the stove's creation showcases Franklin's genius while simultaneously revealing the broader context that made such innovation both necessary and possible.

Chaplin's greatest achievement lies in her unflinching examination of the human and environmental costs embedded in technological progress. Her analysis of how the stove's production relied on slave labor and tribal lands, and how its eventual use of coal created new environmental challenges, provides essential insights into how innovation intersects with systems of exploitation and environmental degradation. This nuanced approach transforms what could have been a simple story of invention into a complex exploration of progress and its consequences.

Perhaps most importantly, Chaplin draws meaningful connections between Franklin's era and our own climate challenges. Her insight that "techno-optimistic" solutions, while potentially effective in the short term, may carry "unintended, and potentially harmful, consequences" offers crucial wisdom for contemporary debates about climate technology and environmental policy. This is historical scholarship at its finest—rigorously researched, beautifully written, and deeply relevant to current challenges. Essential reading for anyone interested in how technological innovation shapes society and environment across time.

[Dellastarr · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enjoyable read!! REALLY!! Who'd have thought reading about a stove was so much more than that. About Franklin, the Revolutionary period, colonial climate issues. Fascinating, engaging read!!! I love nonfiction!

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's rare that I don't finish a book, but "The Franklin Stove" falls into this unfortunate category. The book isn't bad, but it's so repetitive and digressive that I felt like I'd heard it all a half-dozen times by the time I'd reached the midway point. And thus, it's done.

The book's entire set of observations is laid out in a very long introductory chapter, a chapter which is completely unnecessary and could (and should) be incorporated into the chapters themselves. The author makes the points that Ben Franklin's famous stove was one of the earliest attempts by anyone to control the inner atmosphere that we inhabit, and through that effort Franklin also did some of the first published research about both localized air flow and air flows across the greater atmosphere outside. These are pretty remarkable achievements and, as the author rightly points out, rather unknown compared to Franklin's many other achievements. This is also tied in with the earliest sensitivity to over-use of a natural resource (wood) as Europe's and America's populations increased and people sought greater comfort (warmth) and material goods that required burning more fossil fuel. The Franklin Stove was unquestionably more efficient than fireplaces and fireplace insert, and it burned cleaner, thus reducing harmful, annoying soot.

A short book that covered that topic would have been great. Instead, this book rambles on about slavery, iron production, the American Revolution, and many other topics. And a lot about the Little Ice Ages of the 17th and 18th centuries, which made figuring out a way to heat more efficiently such a priority. Some of the author's conclusions and connections are interesting, and others are pretty speculative. All of them are written over and over, as if we are 5th graders that need to have a point drummed into our heads through repetition.

I found the author's repeated reference to the various forms of fuel and heat that were present at the start of the 18th century and which evolved during the ensuing decades to be tedious. She writes, over and over, about food as fuel for human heat, which she said Franklin wrote about as a complement to fire or peat or coal as an outside heat. Fair enough -- so say it once or twice. But then she takes this into the realm of slavery and writes (also a dozen times or more) about the slave labor driving the economy in the North as well as the South at the time. (Franklin owned two household servants into the 1760s, for example, until his wife insisted they be freed.) But the fact that an iron foundry that made the pieces of a Franklin stove might have used slave labor doesn't seem to me relevant in any way to the stove, nor the problem it was trying to solve. But the author seems to think it's a flaw of the invention that its inventor didn't somehow use the stove to end slavery.

Same thing with her comments on the colonial settlers' treatment of Native Americans in western Pennsylvania and other areas they were encroaching in Franklin's lifetime. The author seems to feel that because Franklin, as a successful printer in Philadelphia, read and printed treaties between tribes and colonial leaders, he should have been sensitive to when those treaties were abrogated, and he should have somehow made it clear that he opposed the taking of Native lands, stripping of trees, etc. Her interesting point is that the colonialists saw the Franklin Stove and other comfort innovations as important for their civilization and also as a way to differentiate themselves from Indians, who they saw as living only in huts or tents heated with fires. They didn't care if the same technology could improve Indians' comforts, nor did they look at how the Indians were living and see if they could glean some valuable insights about working with nature's bounty, rather than stripping it for short-term needs. But that point isn't really relevant to Franklin's invention, nor did it need to be written every 20 pages or so.

Basically, this is one of those books that's a 5,000-word essay that's been pumped way beyond, in order to justify the price of a book. It would be much more digestible as a "National Geographic" article, and it could contain 80% of the content.

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Benjamin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A climate change book that supplemented itself with some history. This book should not have Franklin Stove in the title if it's plot would focus so little on the device. A nice double entendre like 'Heating the World' would have been a much better choice. The book even takes a swipe at originalist interpretation of the Constitution while discussing Benjamin Franklin's will and wishes for the 200 years following his death. The book is a set of talking points cobbled together clumsily using the thread of a Colonial era technological breakthrough to draw in unsuspecting readers. Once inside, the author beats said talking points to death, much as a Colonial maid might beat the dust from a rug. And if you didn't like that simile, you'll hate this book.

This honest review is provided in connection with my receipt of an ARC copy through NetGalley provided by the generous staff of Brilliance Publishing.

[Lois · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to Net Galley for allowing me to review this book. I selected it because of my interest in Benjamin Franklin as a patriot, scientist, inventor, and writer.
This book describes how Mr. Franklin invented, reinvented, and refined the Franklin Stove. It is well referenced with over 100 pages of notes. I appreciated how the author intercalated the events of the 1700s with Franklin’s story. The opinions of Franklin’s contemporaries, scientists and political figures were also interesting. The discussion of fuel consumption remains a timely topic. I was a bit distracted by many comments that were in parentheses. I also found the discussion of climate change a bit heavy handed. None the less, this is an enjoyable and interesting read.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author is a historian and climatologist. Her perspective on this time in history brings insight into the development of the many ways in which Americans attempted to heat their homes. She also provides context around the relationship between the colonists and the native tribes. The fact that it was a Little Ice Age was very pertinent to the frenzy to build a proper indoor stove. There is some engineering information about the design of the various stoves built at the time and scientific concepts about the air flow and such.

[L. Val · Rating 4 out of 5]

Expected to learn about the famous stove designed by Benjamin Franklin. Got that and a detailed account of how, when, and where humans shifted their energy economy from organic wood to non renewable fossil fuels, and all that entails. Fascinating, far reaching account anchored in illuminating specifics.

[Christopher Gould · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, although I’m not annoyed by that as much as others seem to be. I learned quite a bit about Franklin’s interest in developing an efficient way of heating homes in the midst of a mini-ice age - something that I hadn’t realized was a motivation for his tinkering with hearth inserts and free-standing contraptions.

[Moonkiszt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joyce Chaplin has presented a refreshing NEW way to think about Ben Franklin - not just the innovative kite-flier who loved France. . .a lot. . .and advocated bathing not with water, but by sitting naked by a window for an 'air bath'. Which is all to say this was a fellow who thought and lived outside the box. This author focuses on Franklin's interest of changing the temperature of our interior living spaces - and because he lived in cold places, he wanted to warm them up. Hence his many versions of the Franklin Stove. Because of his need to attend to design features and improvement, he also had to consider fuel, available resources and affordability to purchase and maintain.

All these thoughts led our Great Thinker to great inventions which led to a thoughtful consideration of the consequences of so thoroughly changing the environment (wiping out whole forests which the pilgrims had been doing since they landed) that the climate was changing. To confirm his suspicions he and his loyal local recorders noted and kept records of temperatures, weather, natural irregularities which changed his mind in many ways (See all those annual almanacs!).

This book was a snappy surprise for me. I thought I was going to read what everyone had/has always said about Mr. F, and Joyce E. Chaplin didn't - her telling was from a new direction, her conclusions fresh and compelling, and while he was still on the odd side, one could begin to see there WAS a method to his madness, to his all-over-the-map interests - they were leading to his interest in what we are so concerned about now - Climate Change. Humans are part of that equation, and he was already working that out centuries ago.

I highly recommend this read - it is NOT just about the invention of a stove. It is about a change Ben Franklin made to human life that is effecting YOU this very minute you are reading this. . .wherever you are. If the interior spaces you live in can be controlled - made warmer or colder - Ben's dream has been realized.

KUDOS to Joyce E. Chaplin for this NEW look at Benjamin Franklin.

*A sincere thank you to Joyce E. Chaplin, Brilliance Publishing | Brilliance Audio, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review independently.* 25|52:44e

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating take on on Franklin, the scientist and the role of the Little Ice Age that
impacted America and Europe.

[Susan Wolff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of great historical information but extremely dry and tedious.

[George · Rating 1 out of 5]

A polemic on slavery and global warming, disguised as popular history. What could be wrong with that?