Fireplace

"The first attempt at manufacturing heating apparatus at Durham, Pa., was in 1741, by the Durham Furnace Company. The firm consisted of George Taylor (later one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence), James Logan and James Morgan, iron masters (the latter being the father of General , the hero of Cowpens)."

"In 1745 Franklin invented the famous stove which bears his name. This pattern continued to be cast at the Durham Furnace until 1774, and probably later."

"The object of the art of heating is to secure this required warmth with the greatest economy and efficiency. ...For reasons of health it may be assumed that no system of heating is advisable which does not provide for a constant renewal of the air in the locality warmed, and on this account there is a difficulty in treating as separate... the subjects of heating and ventilation... The object of all heating apparatus is the transference of heat from the fire to the various parts of the building it is intended to warm, and this transfer may be effected by , by conduction or by . An open fire acts by radiation; it warms the air in a room by first warming the walls, floor, ceiling and articles... and these in turn warm the air. Therefore... the air is... less heated than the walls. In many forms of fireplaces fresh air is brought in and passed around the back and sides of the stove before being admitted into the room."

"The open grate still holds favour... though... it has been superseded by the closed stove. The old form of open fire is... wasteful of fuel, and the loss of heat up the chimney and by conduction into the brickwork backing of the stove is considerable. Great improvements, however, have been effected in the design of open fireplaces, and many ingenious contrivances... are now in the market..."

"Unless suitable fresh air inlets are provided, this form of stove will cause the room to be draughty, the strong current of warm air up the flue drawing cold air in through the crevices in the doors and windows. The best form of open fireplace is the ventilating stove, in which fresh air is passed around the back and sides of the stove before being admitted through convenient openings into the room. This has immense advantages over the ordinary type of fireplace. The illustrations show two forms of ventilating fireplace..."

"The years of the central- fireplace brought the development of the first s. ...Metal andirons in their functional form consisted of two vertical bars on flat or arched leg bases, with an elevated horizonal cross-brace to space them apart and keep them upright. ...The upper part of the vertical members featured extended prongs or notches. This gave support for a horizontal rod, or spit, for cooking meat, and... hanging cooking pots directly over the fire."

"The first wall fireplaces were constructed without chimneys. They used an extended masonry or metal hood over the fire. Smoke exited through a simple hole through the wall... Early fireplaces... had no sides or other devices to form a firebox. ...Many fireplaces of the wall type were located in a corner of a room."

"[C]rude efforts were eventually adopted to create s of s to channel the unwanted smoke... The masonry surface behind the fire aided... radiating heat, and the heavy mass... in the wall and the chimney stored heat... increasing its efficiency."

"Early experiments... led to a method to create firebrick... for... the... firebox. ...s were made more tight with the emergence of fired-clay pipe or flue liners."

"Experiments by, and the design work of... led to the type of fireplace closest to the present day configuration. ...The designs Thompson perfected were known as Count Rumford Fireplaces."

"Many homeowners abandoned the fireplace as a means of cooking with the emergence of the eighteenth century manufactured stoves. Led by the development of... the ', other types of cast iron stoves became available, including the potbelly stove and the massive kitchen range. The advantages offered by the stoves included radiation from the heated cast iron surfaces, better draft for more efficient burning, and successful operable dampers to regulate the fire."

"Gwell eo beroù war an oaled / Eget e ti marc'h rous ar pried (Better skewers on the fireplace than in the spouse's russet horse shed.)"

"In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. "So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room," thought Alice: "warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!""

"In the winter on a Sunday afternoon, I can spend six hours in front of the fireplace, just looking at the flames and thinking. In the evening, I’m drunk with beautiful thoughts. My wife says to me, ‘What are you looking at?’ I say, ‘The fire.’ We have to take a step backward."

"There is nothing of greater interest connected with the Durham furnace than the manufacture of iron stove plates and their artistic embellishments. ...[T]he manufacture of iron stoves, for heating of buildings, was begun at the furnace about 1741, when controlled by George Taylor, James Logan and James Morgan, father of General , iron master. These were called the "Adam and Eve" stoves from the figures, cast on them. ...In 1745, the furnace began casting the famous "Franklin Stove," or fire-place, and continued until it blew out, 1793. They were favorably received and with minor improvements, extensively manufactured. It was the first stove made that could be utilized for baking and cooking, having an extra door above the fuel door, a plate the whole length of the stove and a descending flue the same as the Prince Rupert stove, 1678, cast in England. It was improved, 1754, by a door on one side. This was known as the Philadelphia pattern, though smaller in size. The Franklin sold at £4. 6s, each at the furnace, and at Philadelphia £18 per ton, the price varying with the metal. About 1775, a stove pattern, artistically decorated with a bony skeleton inscribed on the center of the side plates, grasping a bone in one hand in the act of striking a man, near the end of the plate, while another figure on rear end of plate is standing in a frightened attitude looking on the unequal battle. Beneath the figures is the following inscription:HIR. FEIT. MIT. MIR. DER. BITER. TOTER. BRINCT. MICH.INTOTS. NO.A free translation of this Swedish-German is "Here (man) presumes to fight with me, bitter death, but he cannot overcome death.""

""Do not repine, my friends," said Mr. Pecksniff, tenderly. "Do not weep for me. It is chronic." And with these words, after making a futile attempt to pull off his shoes, he fell into the fireplace."

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm."

"Here's a list of Dutch paintings intended for the Salon: - Israëls, ...https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/102868 Old Friends (Silent Conversation) an old man sits in a hut by the fireplace in which a small piece of peat barely glows in the twilight. For it's a dark hut... His dog, who's grown old with him, sits beside him–those two old creatures look at each other, they look each other in the eye, the dog and the old man. ...Nothing else – the twilight, the quiet, the loneliness of those two old creatures, man and dog... that old man thinking... that face – a melancholy, satisfied, submissive expression.. .I definitely know of no other painting than this Israëls that can stand up to Millet's 'Death and the Woodcutter'... on the other hand I know of no other painting that could stand up to this Israëls than Millet's Death and the woodcutter... Moreover, I feel in my mind an irresistible desire to bring together that painting by Israëls and that other by Millet and make them complement each other.."

"It happened because one day I was sitting one side of the fireplace, and my wife was sitting on the other, and I suddenly said to her, "Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave, being boys and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books.” And she said, "That’s a first-class idea! You write it!" So I went ahead and wrote it."

"Lele liilii ka lehu o kapuahi (He is scattering the ashes of the fireplace)."

"The prisoner was no longer fastened to the bed save by one leg. Before the seven men had had time to recover themselves and spring upon him, he had bent over to the fireplace, reached his hand towards the furnace, then rose up, and now Thenardier, the Thenardiess, and the bandits, thrown by the shock into the back part of the room, beheld him with stupefaction, holding above his head the glowing chisel, from which fell an ominous light, almost free and in a formidable attitude."

"The grate had been removed from the wide overwhelming fireplace, to make way for a fire of wood, in the midst of which was an enormous log glowing and blazing, and sending forth a vast volume of light and heat; this I understood was the Yule-log, which the Squire was particular in having brought in and illumined on a Christmas eve, according to ancient custom."

"Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by Míro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace — it looks like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a fireplace, let’s call it a fireplace too — the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory."

"A good night for the fireplace to be crackling with flames - or so he figured, Crumpling the papers he could only see As testimonials to long plateaus of emptiness."

"A woman who taught at Berkeley dropped in on me once and saw a book burning in the fireplace. She pointed at it in terror, and I explained that it was a crummy ghostwritten life of a movie star and that it was an act of sanitation to burn it rather than sending it out into the world which was already clogged with too many copies of it. But she said, "You shouldn’t burn books" and began to cry."

"And I live with the dead – my mother, my sister, my grandfather, my father... .Every day is the same – my friends have stopped coming – their laughter disturbs me, tortures me.. ..my daily walk round the old castle becomes shorter and shorter, it tires me more and more to take walks. The fire in the fireplace is my only friend – the time I spend sitting in front of the fireplace gets longer and longer.. ..at its worst I lean my head against the fireplace overwhelmed by the sudden urge – Kill yourself and then it’s all over. Why live? I light the candle – my huge shadow springs across half the wall, clear up to the ceiling and in the mirror over the fireplace I see the face of my own ghost."

"All these people come to see the White House and they see practically nothing that dates back before 1948. Every boy who comes here should see things that develop his sense of history. For the girls, the house should look beautiful and lived-in. They should see what a fire in the fireplace and pretty flowers can do for a house; the White House rooms should give them a sense of all that. Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there. It would be sacrilege merely to "redecorate" it—a word I hate. It must be restored—and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship."

"I interrupted the old man in midsentence and stood straight up from the rocker. It felt as if a pulse of energy ran up my spine, compressing my lungs, electrifying my skin, bringing the hairs on the back of my neck to full alert. I moved closer to the fireplace, unable to absorb its heat. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" My brain was taking on too much knowledge. There was overflow and I needed to shake off the excess. The old man looked at nothing and said, "We are God's debris.""