Central heating was developed in warm countries. The Minoans of Crete (2700 BC – 1100 BC) devised a system of diffused heating. And around 150 BC the Romans developed the hypocaust system. A similar system of central heating was used in ancient Korea, where it is known as ondol. It is thought that the ondol system dates back to the Koguryo or Three Kingdoms (37 BC-AD 668) period when excess heat from stoves were used to warm homes.
This is how it worked:
Tile floors were supported by columns, creating a space beneath the floor where warm gases from a central fire could circulate and escape through flues in the walls.
That also meant a demand for well-made pipes – and thus the job of the plumber was created.
When the Roman Empire ended, widely people returned to the use of open fires for heating.
The hypocaust continued to be used in the Mediterranean region during late Antiquity and by the Umayyad caliphate. By the 12th century, Muslim engineers in Syria introduced a central heating system, where heat travelled through underfloor pipes from the furnace room, rather than through a hypocaust. This central heating system was widely used in bath-houses throughout the medieval Islamic world.
In the 13th century, the Cistercian monks revived central heating in Christian Europe using river diversions combined with indoor wood-fired furnaces. The well-preserved Royal Monastery of Our Lady of the Wheel (founded 1202) on the Ebro River in the Aragon region of Spain provides an excellent example of such an application.
By about 1700 Russian engineers had started designing hydrologically based systems for central heating. The Summer Palace (1710–1714) of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg provides the best extant example. Slightly later, in 1716, came the first use of water in Sweden to distribute heat in buildings. Martin Triewald, a Swedish engineer, used this method for a greenhouse at Newcastle upon Tyne. Jean Simon Bonnemain (1743–1830), a French architect, introduced the technique to industry on a cooperative, at Château du Pêcq, near Paris.
Angier March Perkins developed and installed some of the earliest steam-heating systems in the 1830s. The first was installed in the home of Governor of the Bank of England John Horley Palmer so that he could grow grapes in England's cold climate.
Franz San Galli, a Polish-born Russian businessman living in St. Petersburg, invented the radiator between 1855-1857, which was a major step in the final shaping of modern central heating.
The final Curious © phrase:
“When I was a graduate student at Harvard, I learned about showers and central heating. Ten years later, I learned about breakfast meetings. These are America's three great contributions to civilization”
( Mervyn A. King)
