Trying to harness heat from the fireplace for cooking purposes, people in fifteenth-century Europe invented the first stoves. These stoves used wood and were made of brick and tile. Unfortunately, these stoves had no storage areas for the ash they produced and proved so inefficient that people continued to cook food in their fireplaces for the next two hundred years.

In the 1630s, John Sibthorpe of England developed an oven that used coal as its fuel. A decade later, the first cast iron stoves were manufactured in Lynn, Massachusetts. The design was simple: a cast iron box with a lid into which fuel would be added. Trying to capture heat from the fireplace for room heating purposes, Benjamin Franklin developed his cast iron stove in the early 1740s. The Franklin stove extended from the fireplace so that three sides of the cast iron could radiate heat throughout the...