Opinion | Can we invent ourselves out of climate change? Ben Franklin thought so.
Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips professor of early American history at Harvard University and author of the forthcoming book “The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution,” from which this piece is adapted.
The winter of 1740-1741 was miserable. Boston Harbor froze over. So did the Venice Lagoon. Crops died and famine reigned. Up to a fifth of Ireland’s population might have died, a greater toll than for the 19th-century famine called the Great Hunger.
The brutal season was part of a long cold spell now called the Little Ice Age, which extended from about 1300 to 1850 and was the latest and largest bout of climate change before our own. It was during this terrible winter that Benjamin Franklin sought to devise a fix: his famous stove.
He and his contemporaries disagreed over whether they could mitigate the cold weather — that is, warm it up — but they knew they had to adapt to it. In their adaptations, featuring a growing reliance on science and technology, they conducted a fire drill that might help us answer an urgent question: Can you invent your way out of climate change?
Franklin thought so. He’s an early example of the charismatic inventor who talks big about his clever devices. Faith in technology was part of an Enlightenment rage for “improvement.” From Franklin’s era, we inherit our techno-optimism: our hope that a single device, a silver bullet, can solve a huge problem.
We now expect even more from technology, maybe too much. Electronic devices are our friends, glowing presences that make us feel autonomous yet connected, an intoxicating combination. Artificial intelligence is our rival, a hypothetically self-governing power that might turn on and supplant its creators. Other new technologies are our saviors — electric vehicles, solar panels, heat pumps, carbon-capture contraptions, geoengineering schemes, gigantic orbiting parasols — that are supposed to solve the climate crisis without our having to make any other changes to society or the economy.
Franklin focused on one specific climate adaptation: making more heat with less fuel. His goal was to provide indoor comfort, besting the Little Ice Age and its tendency to bring life to a standstill. He put his solution to the test, inventing at least five stoves: two in Philadelphia, two in London and one in Paris. His efforts became famous. He recruited multiple collaborators for his half-century project. Printed works about his big idea circulated, before his death, in five languages from Philadelphia to Dresden.
His project was appealingly human in scale. He invented his stoves in three domestic settings, starting with his family’s sitting room in Philadelphia. Then, when he was a colonial lobbyist in London, he ran thermal experiments in rooms he rented from a very tolerant landlady, rebuilding her fireplaces, boring holes in her walls to monitor drafts, and using her daughter and any visitors as technical consultants. Finally, while he was U.S. ambassador to France during the American Revolution, Franklin helped Paris authorities solve a fuel crisis during another bad winter, 1783-1784, recommending a little rotating grate (a space heater!) to generate maximum heat with minimal coal — his fifth and final stove.
But Franklin didn’t think he was inventing a mere appliance. To him, the heating device was also a scientific instrument. The entirely heated room it created (a novelty at the time) was an indoor artificial atmosphere that could serve as a model for comprehending the natural one outside. In his Philadelphia parlor, Franklin focused on convection, the tendency of warm air to expand and rise. He used his observations from that small room to explain Earth’s atmosphere: the circulation of thunderstorms and atmospheric electricity, the Gulf Stream’s thermal patterns, the cooling effect of volcanic haze blown over oceans and continents.
As Franklin was discovering — and as we now know too well — climate is complex, and climate change is especially thorny. It’s the kind of dilemma that ethicists now call a “wicked” problem: something with so many rapidly mutating variables that it’s hard to decide what to do first and easy to make mistakes.
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Which Franklin did. His Pennsylvania stoves were made with slave labor. And the final three models burned coal, a gateway to our fossil-fuel dependence. In fact, his era’s search for better heating led into an unintended transformation of material life: the Industrial Revolution, which, with its historically unique rate of burning things, has artificially heated our entire atmosphere, generating the changed climate we now inhabit.
So, can we invent our way out of it? Franklin had some good advice about that. His famous almanac’s alter ego, Poor Richard, adapted a Latin proverb, festina lente: To get anything important done, you’ve got to “make haste” but, paradoxically, you’d better go “slowly.” Make haste slowly. To fix a wicked problem, people must get moving but correct errors as they go.
Franklin and his contemporaries certainly made haste. They didn’t deny climate change. Unlike today, the subject wasn’t a conversation killer: Franklin featured it in his Philadelphia newspaper, his almanacs, his scientific writings and as a lively topic of conversation in his artificially heated rooms.
The era’s silver-bullet thinking, however, was flawed. People fixated on better heating and better fuel — meaning, alas, coal. There are warnings in their mistakes: Don’t assume the quickest fix must be the final choice. And it might take more than one bullet to hit a target, particularly a moving one such as climate change. We’ll probably need every solution already dreamed up, from solar panels to (maybe) those giant orbiting parasols, plus other technology not yet thought of. But in the end, what we really need — at least as much as the specific technology — is to temper our inventiveness with both haste and caution.