Who invented heaters

The drawings included in the patent filing show a heating furnace that was powered by gas. To heat an entire house, there were several heating units, each controlled by individual hot air ducts. The ducts were then directed to different parts of the building structure. Although this design was never used in an actual structure, using gas to power a heating furnace was a revolutionary idea since coal and wood dominated at this time.

This patent also marks the first time that a patent documents the idea that duct work could individually deliver heat to different areas of the house. Dave Lennox was the first man to manufacture and market a steel coal furnace in Due to lack of electrical power supply at that time, the heat was transported by means of natural convection rather than fans. Just after the turn of the century, Albert Marsh discovered Chromel; an alloy made of one part Chromium and four parts Nickel.

Some variations also include iron as part of the alloy. This new alloy heralded the coming of electrical heating elements in the market, and it was also times stronger than other similar materials of the time.

The first patent for inventing the central heating system was granted in to Alice Parker. This heating solution was a stark contrast to all the rest that came before it. It provided people with easy means to regulate the temperature throughout their homes more efficiently. An early prototype of a forced convection wall heater was introduced in , and it utilized a coal furnace and an electric fan, along with ductwork throughout the home to supply heat to various parts of the building.

By the middle of the 20th century, recessed wall heaters became more common in many households and apartments. These heaters utilized floor space efficiently, while still keeping the house warm. A more scientific approach emerged when Professor Dr.

Paul Meissner of the Vienna Polytechnical Institute, Vienna, Austria, published a book on heating with hot air in , wherein he explained the laws of warm-air heating. He was the first to recognize that provisions must be made to draw off cool air as warm air is admitted to a room; that this cool air could be returned to the furnace for reheating; and he even proposed the use of mixing dampers.

Meissner was vociferously attacked by stove makers of the time. Both the opposition parties, though they hate each other, will combine to cry down the invention and crush the inventor. Meissner believed that not only would they beat a path to your door if you invented a better mousetrap, they would also knock your door in and proceed to beat you up!

Despite the contemporary opposition, Professor Meissner was right, and his principles underlie all modern warm-air heating systems. Other hot-air systems were introduced in the United States before for use in larger institutional buildings. The first U. The system used a gravity hot-air system with a basement furnace and ductwork to the rooms.

A central heating furnace, of the gravity type later commonly seen, was said to have been invented in in Worcester, MA. Early furnaces were locally produced for the specific job — there was no furnace industry per se. The company survived until There were several manufacturers by the time of the Civil War, but the golden age for warm-air furnaces was after that war. From to , many dozens of firms entered the furnace business.

Furnaces were considered to be safe and easy to operate, ensuring their early popularity over steam heating systems, which required skilled operation lest they would explode! There was no standard for rating, and identical furnaces sported different ratings by different manufacturers. Outlandish claims were made, and by many manufacturers had gone out of business or merged due to a raging price war.

Hot water heating was making inroads into what had been a seemingly secure market. Test and research programs were conducted at the University of Illinois. The association later produced a series of manuals for proper sizing and installation of warm-air heating systems.

One installation was reported in a house in the late s where a fan was combined with a homemade gas furnace in Mannington, WV. It seems that a school board member wanted to duplicate the large fan system at his school, so he downsized the idea for his home. General Electric advertised such a booster fan designed specifically for furnace application in A paper was presented to the American Society of Ventilating Engineers in discussing the use of blowers with furnaces.

Emerson Electric marketed a disc fan blower to be added to the return side of the furnace in Blowers or disc fans were periodically applied to residential furnaces into the 20s, after which manufacturers began to take a hard look at equipping furnaces with fans as a package.

However, package blower-furnace units were not widely available until the s. At first steam heating progressed only in England, being used to heat mills and factories. Buchanan expanded his manual to a full handbook on steam heating in His Treatise on the Economy of Fuel and the Management of Heat was the first heating engineering book.

Europeans seem to have been reluctant to use steam heating, in some cases for political reasons. There was no such resistance to steam in the U. A number of steam heating systems were installed after , one of the earliest at a factory in Middletown, CT, in This system used exhaust steam from a high-pressure steam engine; thus the heating was essentially free.

Joseph Nason and James Walworth installed steam systems after using small-diameter wrought iron pipe. Nason and Walworth installed numerous steam heating systems in large buildings during the next decades, including the White House and the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. One of the earliest pioneers in residential steam heating systems was Stephen Gold, a Connecticut stove maker who began experimenting with steam in the late s.

The steam systems of the time were considered too complicated and unsafe for household use. Gold strove to overcome these issues, and was granted a U. Large steam systems used coils or rows of pipe to heat rooms, while Gold used the first radiator, a device consisting of two dimpled iron sheets that were riveted together at the dimples.

The edges were rolled over with a piece of cord as a gasket. The system operated at very low pressure using one pipe to distribute the steam. The system was manufactured by the Connecticut Steam Heating Company after Steam heating, like warm air, blossomed after the Civil War.

A number of manufacturers began making boilers and radiators of various designs. Like stoves of the era, many could be considered works of art. The steam heating systems of the 19th century operated at low pressure, using one or two pipes and a boiler or steam engine exhaust for a steam source. As buildings in the U. These problems were overcome in the s with the development of the vacuum-return steam heating system, perfected by Warren Webster using the patents of DeBeaumont and Williames.

The Webster system maintained a vacuum in the condensate return line, thus drawing steam throughout the system no matter the size. Vacuum-return systems soon became the system of choice for larger buildings. Many different patented designs of steam heating systems were in use by World War I. However, steam heating never really became popular for home heating due to perceptions about complexity, noise, and fear of explosions.

In the late s, M. Bonne-main in France constructed an actual hot water heating system using a boiler. The French idea was refined and introduced into England by the Marquis de Chabannes in Charles Hood of London wrote the first engineering handbook for hot water heating in , which was subsequently published in revised editions for 50 years.

Some attempts were made to accelerate the circulation with crude pumps, but the idea of using a circulator did not see real use until the beginning of the 20th century. Early hot water systems used very large pipes because it was thought this was necessary to ensure adequate circulation and heat retention.

Angier Perkins recognized the drawbacks of these bulky systems. He designed a high-pressure hot water system using small-diameter, thick-walled wrought iron pipe that he patented in His system heated the water in pipe coils placed in a furnace, then circulated hot water to coils of pipe or baseboard heaters in the rooms to be heated.

Perkins relied on very high temperatures and pressures to force the water to circulate through 1-in. The pipes were connected with screw joints to withstand the high pressures.

They frequently ran hotter than that — as much as ? After a few fires and explosions, Perkins modified his system by installing a temperature-limiting device, operating the system at a lower pressure and temperature. The idea of high-temperature hot water systems languished until they were revived in the s. Use of hot water systems seems to have been limited until the s, when they suddenly became very popular.

Steam heating for residences, already crippled by competition from furnace manufacturers, rapidly declined, and hot water became the dominant system for homes, especially in the eastern United States. They were shipped in wooden barrels packed in straw. Packing was expensive, and it was customary to charge the customer for the packing as well as the register. In , Charles Foster of St. Louis, MO, patented a damper-type register.

In , Novelty Manufacturing Co. The design and artistry of heating registers was almost limitless. Some had footrests, humidifying pans, or were even designed to look like fireplace fronts. Meanwhile, boiler design saw continuous improvement. Section-al cast iron boilers appeared around John Mills invented a successful watertube boiler in the s.

Early boilers and furnaces were encased in brick, but by , steel-encased furnaces and free-standing cast iron boilers appeared. Early steam and hot water systems used pipe coils mounted on walls or in various places in a room. The coils were also recessed in walls, behind grates, or placed below the floor in a compartment connected to the room with a short duct and register. Radiators of all types were sized by the amount of surface they had, measured in square feet.

Radiators as we know them date to , when Joseph Nason and Robert Briggs patented a new design featuring vertical wrought iron tubes screwed into a cast iron base.