According to the judgment of history and of their contemporaries, the two foremost geniuses among the founding fathers were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. But even geniuses make mistakes, and Franklin made a lulu with the stove he invented. It just plain did not work. In one of those examples of being "too clever by half," Franklin designed it so that the smoke came out the bottom. His idea was that the stove would produce more heat, but in fact the fire went out if you looked the other way for ten seconds. The basic idea was a good one: to build a freestanding cast-iron fireplace that could be situated away from the wall, thus radiating more heat around the room. But Franklin did not really grasp that heat rises, and that the smoke would have to be removed through a pipe with access to the outside placed above the stove. Eventually the stove was redesigned by David R. Rittenhouse and was in wide use by the 1790s. Quite reasonably, he called it a Rittenhouse stove. But legend has its prerogatives; the device is known to this day as the Franklin stove.
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