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:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)