The Franklin Stove by Joyce E. Chaplin

The Franklin Stove:

An Unintended American Revolution

By Joyce E. Chaplin

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025

The Franklin Stove, the new book by Harvard University historian Joyce Chaplin, is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but it’s nevertheless very much a product of American academic writing: it contains no slaves, only ‘enslaved people,’ the word ‘white’ is never capitalized as a physical descriptor, whereas ‘black’ (and ‘indigenous’) always is, and most centrally, white men are essentially outside even the concept of redemption or change: they are always and only their worst selves.

Benjamin Franklin owned slaves before he didn’t. He was silent on the evils of slavery until he wasn’t. Once his mind was changed on the subject, once he saw slavery for the evil it is, he threw himself into its abolition in the new country he was helping to form. He was one of the highest-profile abolitionists of his day, but because he wasn’t born that way, modern academia, essentially vengeful in its underlying ethos, banishes him. Chaplin calls it “correction”:

Long-celebrated for his late-life contributions to white abolitionism, Franklin is now also known for personally enslaving several people and for profiting from printing “runaway” advertisements for Black fugitives in his newspaper. To these corrections, add another. Benjamin Franklin, the genius of heat, used the work of enslaved Black people to make himself famous, but never spoke of their work in forging his stove project or expressed regret for exploiting their labor, which was likewise essential to Pennsylvania’s industrialization.

The Franklin Stove has a much broader story to tell than merely one invention about the size of a dish washer, and Chaplin tells that story well (as well as cloggy academic prose can manage), but any reader wanting to enjoy that story will need to accept the book’s founding premise first: that Benjamin Franklin was an evil person, that it would have been better if he’d never been born, and that any good he did in his life was both insufficient and accidental.

Beyond that, the book’s opening idea is that Franklin saw the convergence of two needs and acted on what he saw. His age was colder, still in the grip of what’s called the Little Ice Age, and his age was also more denuded of forests, and the combination meant one thing among many: a method of heating houses that worked well with less fuel would be, as it were, a hot commodity. Hence the birth and popularity of the Franklin stove, which shot its inventor to stardom (as Chaplin notes, the 1744 pamphlet describing the stove was Franklin’s first bestseller, “the first of his writings to be translated and printed abroad”), paving the way for his later scientific writings on a wide range of topics – and also heating many homes by a technical process Chaplin not only describes in detail but contrives to make interesting even to non-technical readers:

Once wood is laid and lit on the hearth plate, its flame and smoke rise faster than any significant amount of air can b warmed. The smoke’s increasing pressure will send it, first, down the back of the airbox, then into the three slots in the bottom plate, where it next transits the space between the chimney’s false and true backs, and finally, up, and out of the house – good riddance. Meanwhile, the warmed air is accumulating and begins to flow into its slot in front of the rising smoke (which helpfully blocks it), entering the airbox. This metal chamber absorbs the heat in two ways: from the fire itself, of course, but also from the hot air most fireplaces send straight up the chimney.

As Chaplin notes, the entire broader project of the Franklin stove can be characterized as either optimistic or pessimistic visions of America, “both the violent capitalist machine in an Edenic garden and far-out, new age, redeeming alt-tech.” She leaves absolutely no doubt how she herself characterizes it. It’s not the Black Death or a life-ending asteroid strike, but it’s not far off:

In fact, his entire stove project depended on colonial law’s power to designate land as property, nullifying Indigenous people’s sovereignty, and on laws that regulated labor to the point of making some people into property. Pennsylvanian fireplaces, made on Lenape land and with enslaved labor, express perfectly how American nature was both legally redefined for modern consumer-producers, as a revolution merely industrious was morphing into something semi-industrial.

Chaplin intriguingly calls Franklin’s response to that convergence of factors a “climate-change fire drill that never quite worked,” and inevitably the “Coda” of her book addresses the subject of the 21st century’s climate change emergency, which represents a similar crossroads: “We have a choice,” she writes, “radical change now, while we can still exert some control over it, or even more radical change later, as control becomes less and less possible.” We can only hope, she concludes, that climate-aiding technologies like solar panels, electric cars, and carbon capture will save the day.

And if not? Maybe there’s a way to blame Ben Franklin, who died in 1790.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News