In 1662, English law gave tax collectors the right to walk into your home and count your fireplaces. For most of human history, warmth was never just comfort. It was something you built, bought, got taxed for, and sometimes died from.
This episode of Hidden History traces how we learned to heat our homes: from a fire in the middle of the room to Roman hypocausts and Korean ondol floors, the chimney and the Hearth Tax, the winters that killed by the hundreds of thousands, the 1952 London smog, Benjamin Franklin's stove, exploding boilers, the first thermostat, carbon monoxide, and the heat pump, the first way to heat a home with no flame in it at all.
Chapters
- 0:00 The tax man counts your fireplaces
- 0:56 A fire in the middle of the room
- 1:55 The Romans and the Koreans got there first
- 3:28 The chimney and the Hearth Tax
- 4:57 Surviving the winter
- 7:40 The city that choked on its own heat
- 8:42 Stoves, steam, and exploding boilers
- 10:10 The thermostat
- 10:43 The killer you can't see
- 11:22 Heat without fire
- 13:13 It wasn't comfort. It was survival.
