The Franklin Stove

An Unintended American Revolution

De: Joyce E. Chaplin

Narrado por: Cynthia Farrell

A Washington Post Noteworthy Book of March

"From Joyce Chaplin's engaging, wide-ranging pages a fresh Franklin emerges."—Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Revolutionary

"[Chaplin's] expansive claims for the Franklin stove’s importance click into place."―Dan Piepenbring, Harper's

"A fascinating, innovative, inventive look at a fascinating, innovative man and his inventions."—Charles C. Mann, bestselling author of The Wizard and the Prophet and 1491

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 crisis: 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 crisis: 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.

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

Reseñas de la Crítica

"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