Of interest: When I was looking at the photos of the room the fireplace jumped out at me as a Runford so I did a little digging. The Rumford fireplace, high tech for the day. He must have cared greatly to have that built. I found this: “Rumford wrote two papers[1][2] detailing his improvements on fireplaces in 1796 and 1798. He was well known and widely read in his lifetime and almost immediately in the 1790s his “Rumford fireplace” became state-of-the-art worldwide. Subsequent testing of Rumford’s designs has shown that their efficiency would qualify them as clean-burning stoves.[3]” and this, “Rumford fireplaces were common from 1796, when Count Rumford first wrote about them, until about 1850. Jefferson had them built at Monticello, and Thoreau listed them among the modern conveniences that everyone took for granted.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumford_fireplace
That’s some great input! Thank you for that interesting tidbit!
Nice post!
Here I am surfing FR and I learn something new.
It’s Freepers (aka “Freezers” as of today...LOL) with their distributed smarts that make FR a good read.
You might be interested to know that one of Sally Hemmings grandchildren (and supposed grandson of Thomas Jefferson) invented and patented a method of heating a bus!
One of the salient points about Rumford’s design is that most of the heat is reflected back into the room, rather than sent up the chimney as do ‘conventional’ fireplaces.
Interesting - thanks for sharing.