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SOLIFTEC Heroes of Fire

Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753 - 1814)
The self-educated Massachusetts shop assistant whose experiments into the nature of heat showed that it was a physical, not a chemical effect, put paid to the 'phlogiston' theory and founded the science of thermodynamics.
His theoretical skills, and British loyalties, gained him a knighthood, membership of the Royal Society and the connections to help found The Royal Institution. His practical skills allowed him to invent the coffee percolator, introduce the potato into Bavaria and design the trapezoidal open fire. A crater on the Moon is named after him.
Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)
The inventor of all inventors, Franklin was responsible for popularising the earliest of metal stoves, the 'Pensylvania Fireplace' - an open fire in a five-panel cast-iron casing which could stand in the middle of the room and so radiate heat in all directions.
Franklin's own version of the design passed the hot gases through a labarynthine heat exchanger at the back of the fire, extracting so much heat that upward momentum was lost and the appliances smoked badly. It took David R. Rittenhouse, another hero of early Philadelphia, to improve Franklin's design by adding an L-shaped exhaust pipe that drew air through the furnace and vented its smoke into a brick chimney.
William Flavel (1779-1844)
Working at the Leamington iron foundry established by his father, William introduced the 'Kitchener', the first all-in-one cooker with ovens, hotplate and grill, and wrote extensively on the theory of heat and the construction of fireplaces.

There is more information at www.sidneyflavel.co.uk from which excellent website the portrait of Flavel is reproduced.
Nils Gustaf Dalén (1869 - 1937)
The Swedish inventor and industrialist was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1912 for his work on automatic gas regulator controlled buoys. Blinded in a gas explosion the same year he took an interest in household matters and developed the heat-storage cooker first produced by his own AGA company.
Jacob Bronowski (1908 - 74)
Polish mathematician, philosopher, polymath and expounder of science and art in The Western Intellectual Tradition and the BBC series The Ascent of Man, Bronowski was also research director of the UK National Coal Board, where he was substantially responsible for the development of the 'Homefire' process to remove smoke from bituminous coal.