Start Date
29-5-2020 7:00 PM
End Date
29-5-2020 7:15 PM
Description
Modern inventions normally build upon advances in science and engineering that have gone on before. Such was the case in 1859 when George B. Simpson was granted a patent for an ‘Improved Electrical Heating Apparatus’ (Simpson). (See Figure 1.) The ‘electro-heater’ consisted of a long coil of ‘platina’ wire laid in a serpentine groove cut into ‘common soapstone’. When electricity was applied from ‘any well-known electric or galvanic battery now in use’, the wire glowed and radiated heat. The apparatus worked by ‘generating heat sufficient to warm rooms, boil water, cook victuals, &c., by passing currents of electricity over the combined arrangement over coils of platina or other metallic wire properly encased in metallic tubes or open vessels insulated with any of the well-known substances non-conducting of electricity’. What Simpson described was a perfect description of the electric hobs in the cooktop I purchased 134 years later.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21427/aqxj-bk94
The Wire That Made Cooking Electric
Modern inventions normally build upon advances in science and engineering that have gone on before. Such was the case in 1859 when George B. Simpson was granted a patent for an ‘Improved Electrical Heating Apparatus’ (Simpson). (See Figure 1.) The ‘electro-heater’ consisted of a long coil of ‘platina’ wire laid in a serpentine groove cut into ‘common soapstone’. When electricity was applied from ‘any well-known electric or galvanic battery now in use’, the wire glowed and radiated heat. The apparatus worked by ‘generating heat sufficient to warm rooms, boil water, cook victuals, &c., by passing currents of electricity over the combined arrangement over coils of platina or other metallic wire properly encased in metallic tubes or open vessels insulated with any of the well-known substances non-conducting of electricity’. What Simpson described was a perfect description of the electric hobs in the cooktop I purchased 134 years later.