Superior Clay Rumford Throats

Buckley Rumford Fireplaces
Superior Clay Rumford Throats

Because Superior Clay Corporation has been so successful in manufacturing vitrified clay Rumford throats and smoke chambers I think one of the footnotes in Rumford's 1796 essay is especially interesting:

"I have of late been much engaged in these investigations, and am now actually employed daily in making a variety of experiments with grates and fireplaces, upon different constructions, in the room I inhabit in the Royal Hotel in Pall Mall; and Mr. Hopkins, of Greek Street, Soho, Ironmonger to his Majesty, and Mrs. Hempel, at her Pottery at Chelsea, are both at work in their different lines of business, under my direction, in the construction of fireplaces upon a principle entirely new, and which, I flatter myself, will be found to be not only elegant and convenient, but very economical. But as I mean soon to publish a particular account of these fireplaces, with drawings and ample directions for constructing them, I shall not enlarge further on the subject in this place."

Rumford never did publish the results of these experiments, even though he wrote another essay on fireplaces two years later, in 1798, and had the opportunity to discuss these experiments in his essay on Kitchen Fireplaces. From the difficulty Superior Clay had in manufacturing a big Rumford throat that wouldn't warp or crack in the drying and firing process, I suspect Rumford's potter was unsuccessful. Our "potter," the Superior Clay Corp., may have only just accomplished what Rumford envisioned two hundred years ago.
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Follow-up in 2007
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