In the 1950s an induction cooker boiled water through a sheet of newspaper
On a touring General Motors showcase in the mid-1950s, Frigidaire demonstrated an induction cooker heating a pot of water with a newspaper sandwiched between burner and pan. The stunt showed off how safe and convenient the technology was, yet that model never went into production.
Induction had to wait for the 1970s. Engineers at Westinghouse's research centre near Pittsburgh unveiled a single-burner Cool Top range at a home builders' convention in Houston in 1971, driving its 25 kilohertz current with transistors borrowed from car ignition systems. A few hundred follow-up units sold for 1,500 dollars with a set of layered steel and aluminium pans, made from 1973 until the division was sold in 1975.
People cooked over open flames for nearly two million years, and an estimated three million still do. Setting a pot on three stones made the first stove, a design still common worldwide. Bronze and Iron Age Korean stoves sent smoke and leftover heat through channels under the floor to warm the house. Russian stoves heat several thick stone flues, then have the fire put out and the flues shut so the masonry holds on to the warmth. Colonial American bakers judged a brick oven's heat by putting a hand inside.
The first cast-iron stove, little more than an iron box without a grate, was made at Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1642. Benjamin Franklin's 1742 Pennsylvania fireplace added a grate, sliding draught doors and a winding flue that kept heat in the room, using a quarter of the wood an open hearth needed during a fuel shortage. Philo Stewart's compact Oberlin stove of 1834 sold some 90,000 units over three decades.
Gas followed: a Moravian named Zachaus Winzler cooked with it in 1802, and James Sharp's commercial gas stove went on sale in 1834. Electric cooking got an early boost in 1892 when Thomas Ahearn, head of a Canadian power company, served a meal made entirely with electricity at Ottawa's Windsor Hotel. As central heating spread, stoves became mainly for cooking, and hot iron ranges gave way to gas and electric steel.
Source: Stove
