Post
by Sunny Boy » Wed. Mar. 04, 2020 11:02 pm
If you look at the number of kitchen range type stoves that have survived verses how rare the Baltimore style heaters there are, it indicates that there were far more kitchen stoves made.
Industrial design progress, wear and breakage from use, wartime metal scrap drives, and some other factors affect the survival numbers of all types of stoves. As kitchen range design improved and old rangers were replaced, so did central heating systems replace individual heating stoves. So as antique coal and wood stoves of all types were replaced with something more modern, that tends to reduce the numbers that survive at about the same percentage to what was originally produced. So the more that were made , the more likely we are to see higher numbers of that type surviving today. In short the higher number of ranges we see available means they were produced in much higher numbers than some other types of stoves.
One of the largest producers of stoves was Glenwood and we see a very large number of Glenwoods surviving today. And, that's not because they were the best, either. There were many other makes of stoves of equal quality, but fewer survive because of fewer built.
We see the same thing in the antique car world, - high number mass produced cars like the Ford model T and Model A still survive in the tens of thousands. Lower production number cars that were more expensive and had limited production have much fewer numbers surviving, often in the single digits because their original production was so limited. Researchers have put it at around 10% of original production is the average survival rate across the auto industry. The only exception to that was the impact of the depression and war time rationing took a higher toll on bigger gas guzzling cars like Packard and Pierce-Arrow, Cadillac, Lincoln, etc.. They were scrapped in higher numbers, whereas cheaper to run cars like Fords and Chevys tend to be saved because being lighter they were less cost in gas and tires to run in tough economic times.
Paul
