Thanks to Net Galley for allowing me to review this book. I selected it because of my interest in Benjamin Franklin as a patriot, scientist, inventor, and writer.
This book describes how Mr. Franklin invented, reinvented, and refined the Franklin Stove. It is well referenced with over 100 pages of notes. I appreciated how the author intercalated the events of the 1700s with Franklin’s story. The opinions of Franklin’s contemporaries, scientists and political figures were also interesting. The discussion of fuel consumption remains a timely topic. I was a bit distracted by many comments that were in parentheses. I also found the discussion of climate change a bit heavy handed. None the less, this is an enjoyable and interesting read.

I enjoy reading books about events in science and technology, and about their histories. The Franklin Stove seemed like an interesting rabbit hole to explore, as it's not something I had thought about before. The book covers the history and functionality well, and does a good job of putting it all into context. I don't know if the author felt this wasn't enough or if she just had an axe to grind, but the book is much more than this, and spends many more pages on the evils of colonialism and slavery than it does on Franklin's stove. In that sense it is not what the blurb promised.

The blurb talks about Franklin and climate change, and that promise is fulfilled. Scientists of his age tried hard, were often motivated by purposes other than pure science, and made just as many mistakes as their present-day counterparts. The book is good at making that point, but I suspect it was not an intentional point.

Another good but unintentional point that the book hammers home is the finite nature of America's resources. The America of Franklin's time had open borders and the concept of near-infinite natural resources. Franklin saw this was unsustainable and lobbied against it. He also designed his stoves to reduce fuel consumption with this in mind, knowing that the influx of immigrants was inevitable. That is a great lesson for those following today's border policies.

I think the book could've covered its topic in half the number of pages with sufficient detail for lay readers. That would still provide plenty of context and even a little space for advocating for the author's political positions.

My primary complaint about the book is that I had to resort to the internet to understand how the titular object worked, even after several readings of the description in the book.

The Franklin Stove is a book that manages to be a history of indoor heating, scientific history of heat, a social history of Colonial-era North America, a biography of Franklin, and a polemic on climate change. The Franklin stove, what we now might think of as a type of fireplace, was an invention to provide more effective heating to homes. A better heating system was an issue due to the triple confluence of the Little Ice Age, dwindling North American forests due to colonial exploitation, and a rising expectation of the standard of living. While somewhat popular in the colonies, it also be popular in Europe.

Franklin would tinker with its design his whole life, and published notable scientific research on heat and smoke as part of his investigation. Some of his later designs, never commercially produced, are amazing, in effect replacing the fire with ornamentation. But the whole thing became a vestigial technology, owing to the shift from wood to coal for heating, and of the stoves only a single one remains.

The book's conceit is since the stove arose out of an event of climate change (the Little Ice Age), studying it can provide insight into how to address our own problem with climate change. This is so strained you could use it to drain pasta. But it is fun. Not the climate change, that's terrifying. But if you like any of the topics this book covers, (or several like me) it is is highly readable because of how much material it packs in.

It is about Franklin's paradigm about the people and material of the world. This includes the resources of the Americas and how they were used (wood and fire respectively), but necessarily spills into his views on slavery and the tribal nations. The take is illuminating, an sympathetic exploration of how Franklin came to think what he did while also not offering apologies for the ugly bits. But it is about how he was wrong, in terms of polity and morality.

It is about Franklin's place in the scientific community of the era, how he was received, and a study of fraction of his prodigious output in that regard. But it is also about the politics of those ideas, and the politics of the invention. It is about the design, manufacture, marketing, and redesign of the stoves, how they were popularized, improved upon, or copied.

Rather than climate change, I see this as a book about fuel, about how we get the energy to operate society, particularly in the ways that it the consumption of it operates invisibly. The book has a lot of interesting things to say about that, but then veers anthropogenic global warming in less of a pessimistic way and more of suicidal idealization way. And it is about the limits of imagination. Franklin was a genius who offered up and acted upon many insights, but seems to have gotten to the right answers, then drawn the wrong conclusions. It is sobering but also fascinating to see how that pieces itself together.

The book cannot stay on a single topic for more than three pages and I think that is wonderful. It is not discursive but holistic, ready to resume any fact from a new direction at any time and reorient itself to some new revelation. I do not know who the audience is supposed to be, and I think that is besides the foolish being turned off by the climate change discussion, but I do think that I am in it.

My thanks to the author, Joyce E. Chaplin, for writing the book and to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for making the ARC available to me.