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Writing in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes famously imagined human life without government—what he referred to as “the state of nature”—as “poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” He might also have added cold. The centuries commonly referred to as the “early modern era,” including the decades of European colonization of the Americas, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution, took place within a period of atmospheric cooling known as the Little Ice Age.
For Benjamin Franklin, one particularly frigid 18th-century winter catalyzed a decades-long project to design a stove that would heat an entire room. The coal-burning stoves that Franklin eventually created were also a response to the problems of widespread deforestation and poor air quality, indoors and out, created by inefficient combustion of fuel.
In the world that the Franklin stove helped to make, the costs of energy consumption have become ever more invisible. And yet, the material realities of energy and infrastructure have shaped the organization of human societies—relations of class and labor, gender, and the construction of racial difference—in innumerable ways, in Franklin’s time and in our own.
Joyce Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on the history of science, climate, colonialism, and the environment. Her latest book is The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution. More than just an account of the stove(s)—there were multiple iterations—the book is a history of a previous moment of resource scarcity, climatic crisis, and Franklin’s ambition to engineer a more livable human future.
This conversation took place in the spring of 2025, as the “visionary futurist” Elon Musk’s illegal Department of Government Efficiency eviscerated the US federal workforce while the Trump administration canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for scientific research and attacked any efforts to mitigate the effects of anthropogenic climate change. The past is never a roadmap, but rarely are the crises we face entirely without precedent. In Chaplin’s skillful hands, the world that made the Franklin stove has much to offer as we grapple with the challenges of the present.
Emma Herman (EH): One detail from the book that stands out to me is this idea of the invention of an artificial atmosphere. You say, for example, that what Franklin was really inventing was not just his stoves, but this idea of an artificial atmosphere “big enough to live in.” I wonder if you could orient us a little bit more toward how people were thinking about nature and climate in the 18th century and how that’s feeding into what Franklin considers the relevant possibility for his devices and his inventions.
Joyce Chaplin (JC): Franklin was gifted, talented, energetic, invented things, did science, but the historical moment he lived in—the Enlightenment—is very important as well. People were asking things like: Do humans have to accept certain limitations [kinds of material circumstances]? Do only a minority escape certain kinds of suffering? So, for example, keeping warm in cold weather used to be a matter of wearing a lot of clothing, even indoors. People in winter would be wearing a head covering, many, many, many layers, even when they went to bed. So the idea that better indoor heating could be invented that would make an entire room warm was really astonishing. Franklin’s achievement is having a heating system that he claimed could do that. Now we live in entire huge buildings that are artificially heated and cooled, so this seems small, but it’s the first necessary step to say, yes, we can do this, that air within a building, starting with this room, could be controlled.
EH: There’s a tension or a theme that runs through the book of this tug, or this push-and-pull between visibility and invisibility—not only the invisibility of the enslaved labor used to forge the iron that makes the stoves but also the displacement of even earlier fuel sources, distance of cities from places where coal was mined or trees could be found, and one of the ways I was thinking through this entanglement was the question of domesticity, and the point that you make about domestic fuel consumption as a crucial precursor to industrialization in the shift to a fossil fuel economy. Is there a particular vision of domestic space that Franklin’s stoves helped to make? Thinking about this in particular in relation to gender, you have this brilliant line about what a woman could do with fire—“If a woman commanded fire, what else might she be capable of?”—and the dangers and promises and perils embedded in these inventions and these debates.
JC: A hearth was conceived of as a female space. Women are supposed to stay indoors, but the hearth had to belong to a man. The sense of order was that the woman would be tending his household and his fireplace, not their own. Franklin, when he was living in London, had a landlady who was a widow with a daughter, and so he was living in a female-dominated household and was aware therefore that women can live under their own smoke. And he eventually publishes a letter that he had written to the landlady’s daughter, Mary Stevenson, where they discuss how chimneys should be designed. And that’s a very important gesture, welcoming women into scientific space. He not only reports her name and what they talked about, but that she has expertise. Women might be gathered around the hearth, but they know stuff. And it could be their own hearth, so yes, he’s definitely participating in a shift toward domestic spaces belonging to a more democratic definition of people who have households, run those households, are consumers—including of coal, so not everything that’s being done here is heartwarming—toward domestic spaces belonging to a greater number and different types of people. It was not all encompassing then, and it’s still not all encompassing—not everyone can afford and does enjoy that indoor comfort for either heating or cooling, more crucially now, and whether people have independence in choosing energy use also remains an open question. So, right, the 18th century is when a lot of new material stuff started to happen, and what individual consumers are doing and the power that they have to configure their own lives and spaces, which can also affect or absorb the greater economy, is really quite interesting.
EH: Do you think the stove fits into the broader lineage of what we consider to be labor-saving inventions, such as the dishwasher and the washing machine? Does it make sense to code [Franklin’s invention] in that way?
JC: It’s really impressive that in this London household, there is one servant in the end. Franklin had brought over two enslaved men, young men, when he and his son lived in this household in London earlier. One of the men had simply walked away, and Franklin eventually decided not to pursue that escape legally, part of his shift in terms of understanding that maybe people don’t like being enslaved; maybe this was a bad thing to do, which he finally publicly accepts later in life. It’s significant that when Franklin comes back to London a third time, he doesn’t bring anyone. The household only has one servant, and otherwise it is the women who are doing the work: the landlady and her daughter. Franklin writes a comic description of the household, the Cravenstreet Gazette, where he characterizes himself as “Doctor Fatsides, who is just useless, leaving things untidy, he’s always wondering what there is to eat.” And meanwhile the household keeps on going without any effort on his part and with only this one hired woman who assists sometimes. They are outsourcing a lot of the tasks. I suspect they have their chimneys cleaned by professional services. They have fuel and probably a lot of prepared food delivered, because they live in London and have other kinds of services that outsource the labor for keeping a household going, so it is a very interesting shift. A hundred years earlier, to run a London townhouse, you would have had to have more people. But fireplaces are not as demanding as they used to be. Coal is more compact, it’s not like having wood delivered, and there are just a lot more urban services that contribute to a modern industrial economy. So Franklin is an interesting witness to that transition from a world that overtly exploited human labor to one where it’s not as overt and may be invisible. So all the people, probably children, who were cleaning chimneys—you hired them, you didn’t worry about them. Some people did, so there was eventually reform in London banning the use of child labor in what was a sometimes fatal operation. But it’s a series of adjustments that are slow, that favor some populations versus others. And it’s uneven in terms of who actually benefits.
EH: One of the points you make about the consumer culture of Franklin’s time is that it’s in those new consumer objects like stoves that we can [also] see the costs of an emerging modernity, constructed on and enabled by new forms of energy consumption, namely the use of coal. How did the process of writing and researching this book shift your understanding of this time period, which you’ve spent a lot of time studying more broadly?
JC: I had never really concentrated on the so-called transition out of organic energy—the use of all those trees, the use of human labor, the significance of food. It’s not that we left that world behind. We still eat food, and people still do a lot of labor. But there is intensification of energy consumption and a shift toward fossil fuels—in this era, coal. Some people speculate that these are connected, that, for instance, possibly abolitionism, the abolition of slavery, must have been inspired by new energy sources. Once people have coal and steam engines, they realize that maybe they don’t need people to do that work anymore. The corollary is this dire prediction that if we give up fossil fuels we are going to slide back into this barbaric past where people were literally enslaved. I don’t think making that prediction now is necessarily well motivated; I think a lot of that is very, very facile protection of or defense about fossil fuel interests. In Franklin’s case, historically, it just doesn’t check out. He and his wife start to consider abolition and emancipation of their own workers before anyone is burning coal in the Franklin household in Philadelphia and before Franklin is really settled in London. [Abolition] had been a question that occurred to them earlier, and to a lot of other people. In some sense [the idea that abolition emerged from a new energy regime] is saying that enslaved people themselves were accepting of [this fate], that they needed coal to give them the idea of demanding their freedom. No. So I wanted to challenge that, and, when I picked up this project I never thought I would get into the details, but there it is. I don’t think we can look at the 18th century as being the moment when fossil fuels were an emancipating force.
EH: The premise in that kind of narrative is that something or someone has to be subjugated and it’s just a question of what or who, but part of what Franklin was trying to explore with his stoves, in his own, earlier era of climate crisis, is a question of alternatives. One argument for doing history is that in thinking about what is precedented and unprecedented, we can tease out not answers or solutions, but useful hints for our present selves about where we might go and what we might do. What are some of the lessons we might take from Franklin’s process? How might modern climate scientists or a geoengineers or “tech optimists” learn from Franklin’s response to the climate crisis of the 18th century?
JC: What’s so interesting about Franklin’s era is that people were aware that something had gone amiss with the environment, but they weren’t sure how or why or what they could do about it. The visibility of the problem and the public visibility of debate about solutions was really quite impressively different from what we have now. I don’t think we have that historical awareness of [where one is in the material world], when we feel comfortable, in so many kinds of places and at whatever cost, whereas people in the past would have thought about wood and coal and breathing smoke and coughing, of being too cold to really do work even if they were indoors. I don’t want to say that the solutions that Franklin’s era came up with are models for us to follow; he really worked on the heating part of it. How you keep warm indoors when the climate is colder and some winters are very, very bad? How do you do that without deforesting your entire nearby landscape or polluting cities?
It’s not the holistic solution that we need at the moment. The scale is quite different. Nevertheless, I don’t think he would have thought, all we need is one perfect stove and we’re okay. He was very aware of the supply chain problem: Where is the fuel for any stove going to come from, and what are the costs for getting that? And maybe different kinds of buildings and fireplaces need different apparati. There wasn’t going to be one thing that would do it. He is also interested in indoor cooling. He speculates about how you could do that. But, again, he [was interested] in ventilation and making sure that air was clean indoors and in reducing emissions, also concerned to make outdoor air fresh, even in cities like London. We have some similar concerns: when we can see smoke from our emissions. we know carbon dioxide is being generated. We need to worry about pollution, as well as how people are going to live with responsible energy use, when we have inherited expectations from Franklin’s era about how we should be comfortable and how life should not be miserable at any time of year.
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EH: You briefly referenced the popular conversation around the cold and the climate and the ongoing scientific debate in which people—presumably elite citizens—were all engaged. What were governments doing to encourage or discourage the circulation of this scientific knowledge? How did they shape the emergence of this new economy into which the coal-burning stove is fed and to which it becomes much more central in the 19th century?
JC: This is an era when government intervention would seem small in scale, but this is when it started. There is the Royal Society of London that sponsors scientific publication and innovation and rewards certain kinds of activities. For his experiments with electricity, Franklin wins their Copley Medal, an award that still exists. So there was direct state and in fact royal sponsorship of science, an endorsement that science should be done.
EH: Imagine that.
JC: Yeah, imagine that. As well, there were royal and other kinds of patents, rewarding innovators with monopolies on the use of certain kinds of devices. The most famous of Franklin’s era was the patent that Matthew Boulton and James Watt got on their famous steam engine, where they got very good terms and made real money off that, and again, that’s because of state protection of their invention. So yes, there are some real interventions that profit some people and encourage science, technical inventions, engineering, and entrepreneurship generally.
Governments didn’t necessarily do a lot, however, about regulating energy use, with the exception of wood. The protection of wood for strategic operations, especially the construction of warships, was just a military necessity that required thousands of trees. Whole forests would be lost in the sinking of a fleet. So there wasn’t a nation in Europe that wasn’t really invested in a forestry policy related to building ships, often to the irritation of ordinary subjects, because that meant that they didn’t have ready access to cheap firewood. Hence, the attraction of coal. Coal looks like a great solution, so that was a step, led by private entrepreneurship. There is some legal regulation of domestic fuel, but that’s very different from the royal forestry. There are some efforts to subsidize and distribute firewood to the poor, specifically free, white, and civically important populations. Outside of that, good luck keeping warm. Those provisions for the poor are an interesting exception to the consumer model for using energy, but [they] didn’t reach everyone, especially, in the colonies, enslaved people.
EH: We might characterize the 18th and 19th centuries as a long era of contestation over the commons. Part of what we see in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is this consolidation of state—and capitalist—power over the market. There is no longer any alternative to going to the market; you have to do that to survive. In thinking about the genre of environmental history writ broadly, there’s very often a critique that all of our histories are declensionist. Everything boils down to the idea that capitalism is bad and causes all of these other, inescapable problems for us. I think there’s a real sense of frustration that emerges from that. We want to understand these material histories, but also it’s so depressing. How do you write around that?
JC: I’m going to add an additional depressing thing, [in reference to] the colonies especially: the Marxist idea of primitive accumulation. In the colonies, this included the dispossession of indigenous people and the appropriation of their resources, precisely what is being done in Pennsylvania. Franklin is very aware of that when he talks about saving the trees. Well, whose trees are they? They’re not his, they belong to the Lenape and the Haudenosaunee, and this is where I emphasize Franklin’s role as the diplomat, as the observer of diplomatic relations with Native people, and [his] knowledge that they used resources differently. So there’s that bad part of it too, the American economy being imperialist and becoming capitalist.
I recognize that to say “It’s always bad and it’s getting worse and for more and more people” is paralyzing. I don’t like the broad popular literature where Franklin is just this great guy all the time and solves everything for us, but I do think there is something about the Enlightenment moment and improving things, improving life for people—it wasn’t a bad project, it should have just been itself improved and then extended. That’s work we should do. [The Enlightenment was an era when] science was part of public life, innovators were rewarded for certain kinds of things, women were granted scientific expertise, and certain people were legally emancipated. It’s a very interesting package in terms of people thinking, How could we live completely differently? What might we challenge as no longer appropriate for an enlightened population? This is the inspiring part of it. Not to say that they didn’t make mistakes, but that we should therefore know how to avoid doing that. In terms of the climate question and energy use, again, I think that we can look at what they accomplished, understand their mistakes in order to not make those mistakes again and to build on whatever success might be there. That’s how society develops, it’s not linear.
When Franklin moves to London he can’t believe how filthy the air is. He has a friend who teases him for being a universal smoke doctor, running around critiquing everyone’s fireplace all the time. Well, it wasn’t a bad goal. About 50 years after Franklin dies, an American, Eunice Foote, does experiments showing that burning coal emits carbon dioxide, which has a warming effect on whatever atmosphere it enters. There are all these moments where the penny should have dropped about atmospheric pollution and it would have been good had it dropped; had universal smoke doctors proliferated in the 18th century, then they’d have been ready to get on the case.
EH: Part of what Franklin’s role as smoke doctor highlights to me is the utility of comparison, because he’s going from the colonies to London and he has this experience with the relatively clean air and clean forests of the New World and going back to this dirty, very polluted, very gray London. Thinking about the difficulty of moving away from declension narratives, not only in writing but also in teaching, how do you approach students who have only ever known one version of this world? They’re in history classes, but they’re not necessarily immersed in thinking about alternative pasts. Are there any sorts of techniques or tactics [that you use]? How do you think about that?
JC: A lot of debates about the climate crisis are very futuristic, to try to imagine something. The past shows us that people have lived other problems or versions of our problems, other solutions, and it’s not that the futuristic thinking is always bad, and it’s not like the historical examples give us concrete policies, but I hope study of the past opens up an imaginary space where people can think, Ahh, with some kind of useful recognition. In Franklin’s world, it was mostly individual consumers who were making these very, very historic decisions. Government was [somewhat] guiding that, but not really, and that is a big lesson that if you’re going to try to solve climate change through individual consumer decisions, are we about to make a mistake on the scale of trustfully adopting coal? Don’t we need better guidance, now, from organized bodies of science and government? Obviously we do. But I also think that consumer action is needed, that the whole, much derided idea of the consumer’s carbon footprint is still useful. People should, if they are able to, think that way, even as they should probably expect governments and learned bodies to do more of the work than they would have done in the past. In Franklin’s era, they had a lot of the same parts, as it were, but they assembled them differently. So what do we learn from that kind of example that might serve us in the future, even as it’s not a clear blueprint? We have to figure that out. 
