Battling Stoves of 1907

Dusty D loves stories about battling technologies, and here's a sterling example, all on one front page. In the upper right there's a story about some poor schlub who jumped out of his upstairs window to escape an EXPLODING GASOLINE STOVE--that's right, a stove that burned gasoline. In the center is an account of the new Electric Company trying to woo housewives with elegant tidbits cooked in a New! Electric! Stove! (Oooooh!)

The exploding-stove guy stopped to put his trousers on. (Rolls eyes). Perhaps he took a moment to select a matching cravat, and maybe arrange his hair just so with some Dippety-Doo. When your sister yells "THE GAS STOVE EXPLODED!!!" that is not a signal for sartorial musing. Go, man, go!

Over at the electric demo, the stove has 3 settings. Period. Low, medium, high. So for those of us used to baking bread at 350 for 40 minutes--outta luck. You had to guesstimate it; temperature settings didn't come along till later.

But at least you didn't end up jumping out of windows right and left. The story reads like a press release, does it not? Coincidentally, I hope, there's a nice big ad for the Electric Co. right next to it. It shows the menu for the next electric stove demo, headed by Chicken a la Wilke, a dubious amalgam of peas, eggs, cornstarch, and chicken. There are also mac n cheese and coffee and cake. Though Dusty D is one of those snooty (natural) gas-stove snobs, the electric stove must have been a godsend to housewives who, you know, were tired of their stoves exploding all the time, dangit.

Late 19th-Century Gasoline Stoves: Cooking on a Bomb Used to be Normal

Darn it, the storm knocked the power out. I can't get a thing out of this electric range. But I've got to get dinner on the table! Hmm...

I know. I'll take our camping stove here, and put it on top of the range--then I'll take this coffee can, cut a hole in the bottom, and run some plumbing pipe from it down to the campstove here. There we go. OK, now I'll fill the can with gasoline from the lawnmower gascan! Whoopsie, spilled a little--ah, it'll evaporate. All righty!--looks like we're back in business! Hey, hand me those matches!

As frightening as this scenario seems, gasoline stoves or "vapor stoves" were for sale in Ypsilanti in 1888, as seen in the June 28, 1888 Ypsilantian ad at top. The stoves burned "stove gasoline," a "heavy" or crude form of the fuel. (Vapor stoves could burn multiple fuels that also included kerosene, a type of oil, or a fuel called "distillate"). Gasoline stoves offered a quicker cooking time and, unlike wood or coal stoves, didn't make the kitchen unbearably hot in the summer. They also weren't sooty, like coal stoves. They were a blessing to homemakers who were tired of sweltering at every summer meal and who weren't connected to a city natural gas system.

Insurance companies weren't fond of gasoline stoves due to their inconvenient tendency to explode in a giant fireball of ignited gasoline vapor that could incinerate the entire house. One insurance policy charged an extra premium for gasoline stoves and took pains to spell out the terms under which it would allow a homeowner to install a gasoline stove. It allowed only one stove per household and stipulated that owners could fill the can of gas only during daylight--to avoid the danger of filling the can, with a fuel exuding flammable vapors, by the light of a flame lamp.

Take a look at the range in your kitchen and imagine a can of gasoline suspended above it, connected by a single slender pipe, as in the Ypsilanti ad at top, or the picture at left. Can you imagine this device in a home with lively young children prone to bump against this pipe and slosh the can?

Another danger the stoves created was toxic vapor, as seen in this story at right, about the tragic death of one couple asphyxiated by their stove.

A Google search for "gasoline stove" and "death" summons up scores of late 19th-century obituaries. Thankfully, times were changing.

"In the latter part of 1901," says this excerpt below from Victor Ross's book Petroleum in Canada, "the increased demand for gasoline began to manifest itself, and gasoline at that time was no longer the indifferently regarded product of the primitive days of the early gasoline stoves."

"As the price of gasoline increased and as the danger of the gasoline stove began to be more thoroughly understood, the real work of producing a satisfactory kerosene stove began."

Gasoline stoves were, thankfully, a short-lived appliance in some late-19th-century Ypsilanti homes as safer cooking devices succeeded them, relegating this household bomb to the past.