History
The chip heater is embedded in Australian and New Zealand social history as many people can remember using one or someone who had one. The precise history of the chip heater is unclear.
The original idea surely must be derived from vertical steam boilers. Professor Miles Lewis notes that “the 'instantaneous water heaters', which were being sold by Douglas & Sons of Melbourne by 1888 were probably of this sort. In 1892 the Melbourne iron founder Angus McLean was advertising as the sole proprietor and manufacturer (presumably for Victoria) of Fischer's Patent Bath Heater, which could be heated with wood in three minutes at the cost of one farthing.”
Catalogues from the National Radiator Company (Hull, United Kingdom) from 1913 and 1919 which were marketed in Australia do not show chip heaters suggesting that the chip heater was local innovation.
Read more about this topic: Chip Heater
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)