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”.
In: Technology
If you look into most primitive technologies what becomes apparent after a while is that everything involved burning huge amounts of wood.
That kinda worked when the global population was merely 10’s of millions, although we did deforest enormous swaths of the planet, there used to be a lot lot more forest, Europe used to be 80% forest.
When the sheer number of trees needed for the burning started to become an issue we moved onto coal.
You would not believe how much coal we burn, 8 billion tons a year is not a number you can easily associate with. If you stacked it all on Manhattan it’d be hundreds of feet thick. Something like 25 floors of coal across all of Manhattan. PER YEAR.
And so now we have problems with too much burnt coal and wood in the air.
Latest Answers