The Franklin Stove

An Unintended American Revolution

By: Joyce E. Chaplin

Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell

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 inside a fireplace. Assembled from iron plates like a piece of flat-pack furniture, the Franklin stove became one of the most famous consumer products of its era, 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 crisis: a period of global cooling known as the Little Ice Age, when unusually bitter winters brought life to a standstill. And he conceived of his invention as equal parts appliance and scientific instrument—one that, by modifying how heat and air moved through indoor spaces, might be able to reveal the workings of the atmosphere outside and explain why it seemed to be changing.

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 England and France, takes measurements of the jet stream, and spars with proponents of the theory that clearcutting shade trees would lead to warmer winters. 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.

©2025 by Joyce E. Chaplin. (P)2025 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

"Through the prism of an object, Benjamin Franklin's eponymous stove, Joyce Chaplin presents a kaleidoscopic picture of North America during the Little Ice Age, when technologies of heating created an ecological battlefront between white settlers and Native Americans, each with their own starkly contrasting ideas about the environment. The Franklin Stove is a stellar example of how history should be written in this era of planetary crisis, in the wake of the collapse of earlier teleologies of progress."―Amitav Ghosh, author of Smoke and Ashes and The Nutmeg's Curse

"By exploring the origins and impact of an eighteenth-century invention, a more efficient wood-burning stove, Joyce Chaplin pursues the largest of stakes. The author reveals how technology compounds our environmental plight by promising a misleading liberation from natural limits―and by obscuring and replicating social injustices. Profound as analysis and vivid in writing, The Franklin Stove brilliantly illuminates the historical roots of our current environmental and social crises."―Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873