Pub. 8 2018 Issue 3

16 AT THE CENTER OF UTAH INDUSTRY W hen you t h i nk ab ou t m i n i ng , all of the items in your kitchen should come to mind. However, metal is used in dozens of ways that most people take for granted: pots and pans are obvious, but appliances such as stoves, refrigerators, and dishwashers should be included, too. Consider the pipes that provide water, the use of metal knobs or handles, sinks, counters, and cabinets, and kitchen tools such as knives and spatulas. At the table, there is flatware and (often) the lids on salt and pepper shakers. How, exactly, did metal come to play such an important part in creating the kitchens we use every day? Fully answering that question isn’t possible in the space of a single article, but the following sections will teach you about two important spots in the kitchen: the stove and the sink. Stoves and Ovens The earliest approximation to a kitchen was cooking outside over a fire. People soon built something to hold the food and the wood. Once someone came up with the idea of a metal pot, people learned to make and hang cauldrons over the fire; initially, the rod that held the pot over the fire was probably made from the trunk or branch of a tree, parallel to the ground, but later on, the rod was made of metal, too. At Dover Castle in England, there is a model of a 12th-century kitchen that shows what experts think an indoor version of a kitchen must have looked like. An early wood-burning stove was developed by a Frenchman named Francois Cuvilliés in 1735. Benjamin Franklin invented a stove in 1742 that provided a place for hot gas to go when it left the stove, but he didn’t intend for it to cook anything; it was only meant to heat a room. Cooking still took place in the fireplace. Coal-burning stoves had to wait for the Industrial Revolution, and the metal used to build them had to be sturdy enough to tolerate the high levels of heat created by burning coal instead of wood. James Sharp, a British inventor, patented a gas stove in 1826. The move to gas was prompted by concerns about the environment, such as a i r po l l u t i on and diminishing forests, and gas stoves soon became popular because they were smaller and lighter than other kinds of stoves. Most kitchens used gas ovens by the 1920s. The Oberlin Stove was designed by Philo Stewart in 1834, and it was designed specifically for cooking. It was built of iron, burned wood, and was connected to the household chimney, but it also had a hole to be used as an oven and a place to heat water. The first patent for an electric stove was granted in 1912 to the Copeman Electric Stove Company, which was located in Michigan. The electric oven and METAL IN THE KITCHEN: A SELECTIVE HISTORY