Stove
A stove or range is a device that generates heat inside or atop the device for local heating or cooking. Stoves can be powered with many fuels, such as natural gas, electricity, gasoline, wood, and coal.
The most common materials stoves are made of are cast iron, steel, and stone.
Concerns about air pollution have fostered efforts to improve stove design. Pellet stoves, for instance, are a type of clean-burning stove. Air-tight stoves, another type, burn their fuel more completely than conventional ones and so reduce the amount of the combustion by-products. Another method of reducing air pollution is through the addition of a device to clean the exhaust gas, such as a filter or afterburner.
Research and development on safer and lower-emission stoves is continuously evolving.
Etymology
Old English had a word stofa, meaning a hot-air bath or sweating room. However, this usage did not survive, and the word was taken newly from Middle Low German or Middle Dutch in the 15th or 16th century, later meaning any room heated with a furnace. By the 17th century it had come to mean a heated box such as an oven, and by the 18th century could mean an open fireplace.History
Versions prior
Cooking was performed over an open fire since nearly two million years ago. It is uncertain how fires were started at these times; some hypotheses include the removal of burning branches from wildfires, spark generation through hitting rocks, or accidental lighting through the chipping of stone tools. During the Paleolithic era, approximately 200,000 to 40,000 years ago, primitive hearths were constructed, with stones arranged in a circle shape. Human homes centered around these hearths for warmth and food. Open fires were quite effective; most fires are 30% efficient on average, and heat is distributed positively, with no heat being lost into the body of a stove. An estimated three million people still cook their food today over open fires.Pottery and other cooking vessels were later placed on open fire; eventually, setting the vessel on a support, such as a base of three stones, resulted in a stove. The three-stone stove is still widely used around the world. In some areas it developed into a U-shaped dried mud or brick enclosure with the opening in the front for fuel and air, sometimes with a second smaller hole at the rear.
Early designs
Bronze and Iron age Korean Agungi and buttumak, that funnel he smoke and residual heat, from the stoves enclosed fire, through underfloor channels, to offer Underfloor heating, are known. In similar times, the Ancient Egyptian, Jewish and Roman people used stone and brick ovens, fueled with wood, in order to make bread and other culinary staples. These designs did not differ extremely from modern-day pizza ovens. Later Scandinavian stoves featured a long, hollow iron chimney with iron baffles constructed to extend the passage of the leaving gases and extract maximum heat. Russian versions are still frequently used today in northern nations, as they hold six thick-walled stone flues. This design is frequently positioned at the intersection of internal partition walls, with a piece of the stove and flue inside each of four rooms; a fire is kept until the stove and flues are hot, at which point the fire is extinguished and the flues are closed, storing the heat. During Colonial America, beehive-shaped brick ovens were used to bake cakes and other pastries. Temperature control was closely managed by burning the appropriate quantity of wood to ash and then testing by inserting hands inside, adding additional wood, or opening the door to allow cooling. The oldest surviving stove in France is attributed to the Alsace region, dated to 1490, and made out of brick and tile, including the flue pipe.Ceramic
s have been used for millennia for cooking.Masonry heaters were developed from Neolithic times to control air flow in stoves. A masonry heater is designed to allow complete combustion by burning fuels at full-temperature with no restriction of air inflow. Due to its large thermal mass the captured heat is radiated over long periods of time without the need of constant firing, and the surface temperature is generally not dangerous to touch.
Cast-iron
In 1642, at Lynn, Massachusetts, the first cast-iron stove was constructed. This stove was little more than a cast-iron box with no grates.Benjamin Franklin designed the "Pennsylvania fireplace", now known as the Franklin stove in 1742, which incorporated the fundamental concepts of the heating stove. The Franklin stove used a grate to burn wood and had sliding doors to control the draught, or flow of air, through it. It had a labyrinthine path for hot exhaust gases to escape, thus allowing heat to enter the room instead of going up the chimney. Because of its compact size, the stove could be fitted to an existing fireplace or used free-standing in the middle of a room by connecting it to a chimney. Developed amid a wood shortage, it required one-quarter the quantity of fuel as a regular fireplace and could raise the room temperature more quickly. Throughout North America, the Franklin stove enjoyed widespread adoption, warming farmhouses, city residences, and frontier huts.
For cooking, Count Rumford created a cast iron oven around 1800, the Rumford roaster. This was built into a brick kitchen range. Isaac Orr of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, created the first circular cast-iron stoves with grates for cooking meals on them roughly five years later. The potbellied stove traces its origins to the early 1800s, inspired by the Franklin stove developed twenty years prior. Jordan A. Mott designed the base-burning stove for burning anthracite coal in 1833. In 1834, Philo Stewart created the Oberlin Stove, a small wood-burning cast-iron stove. It was a compact metal kitchen stove that was far more efficient than cooking in a fireplace due to its improved heating capacity and allowance for record cooking durations. It was a huge commercial success, with some 90,000 units sold in the next 30 years, because it could be formed into desired shapes and forms and could survive temperature fluctuations from hot to cold readily. These iron stoves evolved into specialized cooking machines with chimney flue pipes, oven openings, and water heating systems. The originally open holes into which the pots were hung were now covered with concentric iron rings on which the pots were placed. Depending on the size of the pot or the heat needed, one could remove the inner rings.
Usage of gas
The earliest reported use of gas for cooking, according to the Gas Museum in Leicester, England, was by a Moravian called Zachaus Winzler in 1802. However, the first commercially produced gas stove, invented by Englishman James Sharp, did not enter the market until 1834. By the end of the century, the stoves became popular because they were easier to control and required less maintenance than wood or coal stoves.The switch to gas was prompted by concerns about air pollution, deforestation and climate change, causing the general public to reconsider the usage of coal and wood stoves. Under common-use conditions, indoor NO2 from gas stoves can quickly exceed US Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization 1-h exposure benchmarks in kitchen air. NO2 pollution has been shown to harm human health.
Electric stoves
Electric stoves became popular not long after the advent of home electricity. One early model was created by Thomas Ahearn, the owner of a Canadian electric company, whose marketing included a demonstration meal prepared entirely with electricity at Ottawa's Windsor Hotel in 1892.As central heating became the standard in the developed world, cooking became the primary function of stoves in the twentieth century. Iron cooking stoves that used wood, charcoal, or coal radiated too much heat, which made the kitchen unbearably hot in the summer. They were superseded in the twentieth century by steel ranges or ovens fueled by natural gas or electricity.
Induction
The first patents for induction stoves date from the early 1900s. Demonstration stoves were shown by the Frigidaire division of General Motors in the mid-1950s on a touring GM showcase in North America. The induction cooker was shown heating a pot of water with a newspaper placed between the stove and the pot, to demonstrate the convenience and safety. This unit, however, was never put into production.Modern implementation in the US dates from the early 1970s, with work done at the Research & Development Center of Westinghouse Electric Corporation at Churchill Borough, near Pittsburgh. That work was first put on public display at the 1971 National Association of Home Builders convention in Houston, Texas, as part of the Westinghouse Consumer Products Division display. The stand-alone single-burner range was named the Cool Top Induction Range. It used paralleled Delco Electronics transistors developed for automotive electronic ignition systems to drive the 25 kHz current.
Westinghouse decided to make a few hundred production units to develop the market. Those were named Cool Top 2 Induction ranges. The development work was done at the same R&D location by a team led by Bill Moreland and Terry Malarkey. The ranges were priced at $1,500, including a set of high quality cookware made of Quadraply, a new laminate of stainless steel, carbon steel, aluminum and another layer of stainless steel.
Production took place in 1973 through to 1975 and stopped, coincidentally, with the sale of Westinghouse Consumer Products Division to White Consolidated Industries Inc. Modern-day induction stoves are sold by many manufacturers, including General Electric, LG Corporation, Whirlpool Corporation, IKEA, and Samsung.