THE FRANKLIN STOVE

An ingenious scientist faces climate change.

Historian Chaplin focuses on Benjamin Franklin’s multiple renditions of an innovative stove to examine the intersection of scientific inquiry, race, class, politics, and economics at a time of climate change and resource depletion—a period, she underscores, not unlike our own. Born into the long, cold winters of the Little Ice Age, a span of interglacial cooling that lasted from 1300 to 1850, Franklin sought a way to create “an artificial atmosphere big enough to live in.” In his family’s living room, he experimented with ways of heating that minimized both wood consumption and the emission of smoke. Vital to his project was an ongoing exploration of climate—he tracked temperature changes in his famous almanac—and the movement of air, wind, and heat. He countered a prevalent assumption that cutting down forests and eliminating the shade of trees might make the climate milder; deforestation only exacerbated the resource problem. Chaplin details the challenging material conditions for colonists, Natives, and enslaved Black people during what she terms the industrious age, a precursor of the Industrial Revolution. “On average,” Chaplin notes, “white colonists were better off than their European counterparts, but this was, in part, because the wealth they were creating was shared unequally, if at all, with Native and Black people.” Eventually, Franklin came to modify his invention to burn coal, a nonrenewable resource that served as “the lively fuel of industrial capitalism, the revolution that, far more than resource conservation, and more even than the American revolt against British rule, marks the modern world.” Chaplin’s narrative contains an urgent message: Climate is complex and changing; no silver bullet will halt or reverse climate change; critical, instead, are “energy programs with teeth and legal challenges to fossil fuel interests.”

A fresh, authoritative history.