The Franklin Stove

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.