When was furnace invented

Down here in Kennesaw, Georgia, we tend to have short, mild winters, but the temperature can get downright bone-chilling. Have you ever set back for a moment and considered what it was like before the wonderful invention of furnaces? Furnace technology has definitely become much more advanced over the past century.

Up until , homes were heated by wood-burning stoves. It was around this time that cast iron radiators were invented, which provided homeowners with an affordable way to take advantage of central heating.

It was also around this time that the first steel coal furnace was invented. UGI has been a household name since Contact us today to learn more about the different home heating systems available that will keep you and your family comfortable through even the most frigid winters.

AD : First stoves made of clay were built. Get Your Quote. Maintenance Plans. Heating Systems. Water Heaters. Healthy Air. Duct Cleaning. Some had footrests, humidifying pans, or were even designed to look like fireplace fronts. Meanwhile, boiler design saw continuous improvement. Section-al cast iron boilers appeared around John Mills invented a successful watertube boiler in the s. Early boilers and furnaces were encased in brick, but by , steel-encased furnaces and free-standing cast iron boilers appeared.

Early steam and hot water systems used pipe coils mounted on walls or in various places in a room. The coils were also recessed in walls, behind grates, or placed below the floor in a compartment connected to the room with a short duct and register. Radiators of all types were sized by the amount of surface they had, measured in square feet.

Radiators as we know them date to , when Joseph Nason and Robert Briggs patented a new design featuring vertical wrought iron tubes screwed into a cast iron base. Each tube was proportioned to have exactly 1 sq ft of surface when screwed into the base, allowing many standard sizes of radiators to be manufactured. Nelson Bundy invented the first popular cast iron radiator in By the s, cast iron sectional radiators became very popular. Competition between manufacturers of boilers and radiators was intense.

As in the furnace business, bankruptcies and consolidations were frequent. The late 19th century saw the rise of the Business Trust, and the heating industry was quick to use this business form to improve the competitive situation. The most successful such trust was the American Radiator Company, which consolidated a number of the leading boiler and radiator manufacturers in The company was the Microsoft of its time.

Its success in capturing most of the radiator business is evident when surveying buildings with old radiators — American Radiator made most of them. The company exists today as American Standard. All of the early developments in forced-air systems concerned themselves with large buildings and factories. They rarely used furnaces directly in the airstream, but instead relied on indirect heaters using steam and, in a few cases, hot water. The use of recirculated air was not considered until after the s.

The design of centrifugal blowers was continually improved in England and Europe during the late 18th and 19th centuries. These early fans were mostly operated by steam engines. The Marquis de Chabannes advocated use of a centrifugal fan to force heated or cooled air through ducts to rooms. Walworth and Nason installed the first U. Customs House in Boston in General Montgomery Meigs planned a much larger system in for the House and Senate wings of the U.

These fans as built These vanes were curved and placed on the line of a logarithmic spiral of 45 degrees. The fans were centered in a ring of brick work The earliest fan systems were constructed completely onsite.

However, it was soon evident that there was a manufacturing opportunity. Shoemaker Benjamin F. Sturtevant patented a combination fan and heat exchanger for cooling or heating purposes in He soon had established a company to manufacture and sell fans and heating systems.

Other companies, such as Buffalo Forge Co. By the s, the method of using a fan to blow air over a steam- or water-heated surface, then distributing the air to rooms in large buildings, was well established.

By the turn of the century, these systems were quite sophisticated, some even featuring thermostatic and zone control. The plenum system lent itself to cooling as well with additional coils cooled in summer by refrigerated brine. These hot blast systems were also being equipped with air washers for filtering and humidifying by the s. The popularity of hot blast systems spurred the radiator manufacturers to develop cast iron heat exchangers with an extended surface that could replace the banks of pipe that previously had been used.

The most successful was the Vento sectional cast iron surface developed by John Spear in and marketed and manufactured by American Radiator Co. The Aerofin used spirally wrapped copper sheet to produce a finned, lightweight heat exchanger. It quickly supplanted cast iron.

These schemes were often complicated to adjust, if they could be adjusted at all. They were inconvenient, since one had to go to where the heating unit was located. Most heating systems simply relied upon the building engineer or homeowner to manually adjust firing rates, draft, valves, or dampers. Modern thermostat control suddenly appeared from several inventors, all about the same time. Andrew Ure in England invented the bimetal thermostat. He received a British patent in , but his device saw little use.

In the U. Professor Warren Johnson taught at a school in Wisconsin, where the only means of room temperature control was to tell the janitor to go to the basement and adjust steam valves. Johnson developed an electric annunciator system in that was used to signal the janitor when heat needed adjusting. He continued experimenting and in , patented a thermostat that relied on compressed air to operate steam valves. He then established the Johnson Electric Service Co.

Johnson went on to invent the humidostat for control of the humidity in buildings in The Butz Thermoelectric Regulator Company of Minne-apolis, MN, began manufacturing and selling the invention; however, the product did not sell well to homeowners. The company went through several name changes, ultimately ending up as the Minneapolis Heat Regulator Co. About , William Powers was daydreaming during a dull Sunday sermon when the idea occurred to him that vapor pressure could be used to manipulate a draft damper in a furnace.

He formed the Powers Regulator Co. Ironically, the first installation was in a church, where a thermostat was used to control mixing dampers in a plenum heating system.

The first Powers thermostats were about in.