HEATING AND LIGHTING

In early modern Anglo-American housing culture, people with the means to have ostensibly comfortable houses did not necessarily build them. When Governor William Bradford referred to the early houses of Plymouth Colony as "small cottages," he was employing a historical association of "cottage" with substandard housing. After all, these structures lacked foundations and had wooden chimneys, thatched roofs, earthen floors, unglazed or small-paned casement windows, and wattle-and-daub walls. In England inhabiting a cottage marked people as lacking sufficient landholdings to support a household, but in early America there were many more cottages than cottagers. Most American households held sufficient land to provide livelihoods for their members, so they were not cottagers in the sense of living in a dwelling owned by someone else. The term "cottage" nearly passed out of usage in colonial America, although most Americans lived in houses that looked like cottages. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries housing in America lacked the close architectural association with social standing that it had in Britain. Spending on fashionable architectural designs for heating, illumination, privacy, and hygiene—in other words, physical comfort—had a relatively low priority in colonial Anglo-America.

The analysis of physical comfort—self-conscious satisfaction with the relationship between one's body and its immediate physical environment—was an innovation of eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. It indicated a disposition to criticize traditional material culture and to improve upon it. In the first chapter of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the Scottish economist Adam Smith identified candles as one of the "necessaries" of life, by which he meant "not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people." Considering candles as a necessity was part of the Enlightenment's developing attention to physical comfort.

As the value of physical comfort became more explicit and desirable, the technology of its improvement gained intellectual prestige. Here Benjamin Franklin was the paragon among eighteenth-century philosophes, with his interest in the history, anthropology, and science of basic household comforts. He identified himself with members of a scientifically enlightened subculture who criticized the priority of fashion over comfort in the domestic environment. He promoted candles made of spermaceti (a waxy substance derived from sperm whale oil) for their steady, clean illumination; he suggested that people experiment with the ventilation of their sleeping quarters to improve their sleep; and his name became synonymous with smoke-free and draft-free heating. He appreciated that the obstacles to improving comfort were more cultural than technical, and to remove these obstacles he urged his readers to question expert authority on material culture and to transcend their adherence to the customs of their ethnic group regarding the domestic environment.

In Pennsylvania Franklin could consider a range of ethnic alternatives in domestic comfort. He was particularly attentive to the Dutch and German use of stoves that entirely enclosed the fire and used it only for heating purposes. Franklin contrasted the clean warmth of these stoves with that provided by the two fireplace types popular among English colonists: a large traditional fireplace in which people could sit warmly within the hearth space itself, and fashionable smaller fireplaces whose classicized designs were the focus of interior decoration. From Franklin's perspective both of these chimney fireplaces required an invidious trade-off between comfortable heat and smoky discomfort: the more heat, the more smoke.

Rather than leave such technical problems aside once he had established a transatlantic scientific reputation, Franklin became the Enlightenment's authority on smoky chimneys. He drew on his scientific work in physics to dissociate the fire's elements of smoke, heat, and light. To reduce drafts, Franklin designed a stove that cut off the air for ventilation from that for combustion by piping the latter directly to the fireplace from outside the house. Because such stoves provided draft-free warmth throughout a room, members of a household would be freer to spend time together out of choice rather than from physical necessity for the fire's heat and light. At the same time they would be able to pursue their individual activities in a uniformly heated space. Or so he hoped. In fact, his original design was difficult to retrofit and too complicated to be frequently installed in new construction. What came to be known as the Franklin fireplace was basically a cast iron version of the genteel open fireplace, with its trade-off of smoke and heat.

Franklin was also attentive to the relationship, developing throughout the Anglo-American world, between genteel domestic culture and improved artificial illumination. People wanted more light. Interest in the improvement of domestic lighting was especially keen in America. Americans had a near monopoly on the new spermaceti industry, extracting from sperm whales an oil that flowed well in temperate climates and also provided a new candle material, spermaceti wax, which burned cleanly and gave a reliably bright light. Franklin promoted the spermaceti candle for these qualities, and experimented with multiple-wick oil lamps in order to determine the most efficient arrangement for a bright light.

Thomas Jefferson's design and furnishing of his home at Monticello epitomized the new attention to comfort, as he sought to improve the heating, ventilation, illumination, privacy, and hygiene of conventional architecture. For insulation the north-facing tea room had triple-glazed windows and double sliding glass doors, and he installed a Rumford stove for heating. Jefferson also promoted Aimé Argand's (1750–1803) design of an oil lamp whose cylindrical wick produced a bright light, and sent examples from France to James Madison and others. Jefferson never elaborated on what he meant by "the pursuit of happiness," but given his lifelong obsession with the improvement of convenience and comfort, it seems reasonable to infer that he believed their successful pursuit would result in happiness.

But the efforts of Franklin, Jefferson, and other philosophes to improve comfort had little effect on most Americans' priorities for their domestic environments. At any one time in the late eighteenth century, a large proportion of the American population (outside New England) still lived in houses of quickly worked local materials, usually logs. According to the 1798 Direct Tax Assessments, windows, and even more so windowpanes, were the chief architectural improvements, adding more value than material of construction, floor area, or number of stories. In the countryside, glazed windows were a luxury, but living in a house built of logs did not preclude such refinement, nor was sheer affordability the main constraint. The plans, amenities, and finish of the houses in which most Americans lived at the end of the eighteenth century—room-and-loft house plans, wood and clay chimneys, few and small windows, and construction from local raw materials—would still have earned them the derogatory designation "cottages" in England.

See alsoTechnology .

bibliography

Bushman, Richard L. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Crowley, John E. The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Larkin, Jack. The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790–1840. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Nylander, Jane C. Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760–1860. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Rybczynski, Witold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. New York: Viking, 1986.

John E. Crowley