I understand that with a traditional fireplace, most of the heat is lost through the chimney and you have to be very close to it to feel much heat. A wood stove or insert performs much better. However, I’m curious how people stayed warm enough in a house. It would seem that everywhere besides being near the fireplace would be freezing. I guess fireplaces were mostly meant to locally heat people near the fireplace, and not so much that the fireplace is a central heat source. That would explain why people often had a fireplace in every room. Just light the fireplace that you will be near for most of the time, etc. rather than heat the whole house. Just curious since you often hear “warm by the fireplace”.
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Ny oarents have a fireplace in their living room. With it lit, it heats up a significant part of the main floor. The entire hearth surrounding the fireplace is brick, which holds heat and radiates it for a while. Also while being inefficient, burning wood does create a lot of heat, and even if a lot is lost, some is retained and used to heat your house
Lots of firewood. Keep feeding the fire. It is warmest by the fireplace. Wear extra clothes and blankets if you are further away. Keep the door shut, don’t let that cold air in!
You basically answered your own question. Old-style open-hearth fireplaces heat by thermal radiation. The air temperature may be cold as hell, but the fire can give off enough IR that anything with a line of sight of it will get warm. This includes people as well as objects in the room like the floor, walls, beds, etc.
The same way people managed with the incredibly inneficiebt internal combustion engines from the before time. It was more efficient than the alternative
How did people make do with the incredibly inefficient Ford model T? The alternative was a horse.
They were very inefficient, the Franklin Stove invented in 1742 to redirect heat into the room instead of up the chimney.
I think the other comments explained it adequately, but I wanted to add that ‘inefficient’ doesn’t mean ‘ineffective’. A fireplace in an insulated house may lose a lot of heat up the chimney, but it’s still producing a lot of heat for the house and the house can still be warm. It just uses a lot more energy to maintain that temperature than it would if you weren’t letting so much heat out through a hole in the house.
In the same way that a less efficient car can go the same speed as a more efficient one, but it’ll consume more fuel to maintain that speed.
That all being said, a lot of houses heated with fireplaces were also poorly insulated so they’d be losing significant heat through more than just the chimney. And that brings us back around to sweaters and blankets and sitting by the fire and radiant heat and all the other things that have been mentioned in the comments already.
People made do because it was better than nothing. You kept the fire fed all winter while wearing warm clothes inside and you got by. The inside temperature would slowly rise the longer the fire is kept going. Being able to wear shorts, a T-shirt, and no footwear inside during winter is a relatively new thing as it is keeping a house at 75°F/24°C all winter. Heck, wearing warm clothes inside is still a thing, I live in rural New England, and trying to keep my house warm enough to walk around naked would cost a fortune. yes you’re warmest nearest your heat sources but you learn to wear a sweater and some slippers and you’re quite comfortable at 65°F.
[Masonry stoves](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater) increase the time it takes for the smoke to escape and therefore making the heat exchange better. Also they have a lot of thermal capacity making them slow to heat up but also slow to cool down.
In Scandinavia they have had stoves for a couple of centuries, rather than open fireplaces, and secondary glazing was ubiquitous for a similar period. They knew how to make and retain warmth there.
Well.. the thing about traditional fireplaces is that.. they aren’t exactly traditional.
Most fire places now are functionally irrelevant, and just decorative, but an actual fire inside a home was either an open fire, a woodstove (as you mentioned which is effective once those become a thing) or a giant open fire through the center of a building (think Vikings)
also when it comes to heating, most homes and places where people lived were smaller and built with nature in mind, rather than just slapping a house wherever.
“Beds” were elevated, hot rocks would be used, and people made sure to keep the cold air out as best as possible (which also was a huge fire safety hazard)
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