Conquering Winter
The Making of:
This piece had its origins in an email exchange with Jack Crowley, author of The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), a classic in its rather small field. In August 2007 I sent him a copy of the first proper paper I had written on this subject, and had presented to the Hagley Seminar that April. In return, after some nice comments, he drew my attention to a call for papers for a special issue of Building Research & Information that he thought I might be interested in, and to which I could contribute. So I offered my piece, it was accepted, and then I had to write it against a pretty tight deadline (October). I got very thorough and helpful feedback from the journal's anonymous readers, as well as from Sean Adams at the U. of Florida (the only other serious stove guy, whom I'd met at the Hagley), Jack Brown from the U. of Virginia, a really good historian of technology, and Walter Friedman at the Harvard Business School.
This was an unusual essay for me to write, because it was produced to meet a commission -- it had to fit in with the themes of the BRI special issue, and reach out to a readership of non-historians. When I wrote it, I took the opportunity to begin to use the 19th-century riches that Google Books was beginning to make available (its development had already begun to transform the research I was able to do from England), particularly for understanding the social impact and cultural reception of the new technology of comfort and convenience. I needed a hook on which to hang my argument, and William Meyer provided me with it. Having a clear thesis to argue (against) certainly made the writing process a lot easier, and provided a strong structure to the piece, which it needed in order to be economical. But I've felt a bit guilty about this ever since -- the more I have read and re-read Meyer's work, the more I have thought that what I did was to strip out too many of the nuances that were there in his original, and to provide myself with the man of straw I needed to assault. I didn't really disagree with his central argument about the importance of fuel cost in driving the adoption of the new technology -- I just pointed out that, while it was probably necessary, it wasn't sufficient. When I have returned to these issues since then, I have been increasingly impressed by quite how necessary the economic argument is.
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