Central Heating through the Ages

Central heating systems are an integral – and integrated – part of most homes on either side of the Tropic latitudes, and it’s hard to imagine a time when they didn’t exist. The concept of one source of heat circulating via pipes throughout an entire building was to revolutionise home design and essentially make the open fire an aesthetic rather than practical feature. From the earliest hypocausts to modern day boilers, mankind has developed increasingly available and more efficient ways to heat their homes.

Those clever Romans – who else? – devised the first central heating system as their empire spread into colder territories. The hypocaust was used in northern Europe from around 100AD and used convected air heated by furnaces in chambers under the floor.

Cistercian monks expanded on this with the first, primitive water boilers, diverting rivers into spaces heated by wood-burning furnaces. The Royal Monastery of Our Lady of the Wheel on the banks of the Ebro River in Spain boasts one such system. It dates from 1202.

By 1700, the Russians had started developing hydrological systems, of which Peter the Great’s Summer Palace is the finest example still standing.

The earliest steam-heating systems emerged in the 1830’s. The first one to be installed was at the greenhouse of the Governor of the Bank of England, John Horley Palmer, so that he could grow grapes in the cold British climate. As the industrial revolution took hold, larger and larger systems were necessary for the heating and operation of factories.

Despite its long history, the idea of central heating as a widespread household facility is relatively new. Working class families did not have the luxury of radiators and permanently available heat until late in the 20th century. And yet it has become such a mass application over the last twenty years that only the longest of memories could even conceive of calling boilers a “luxury” now – central heating truly has passed into the realm of “necessity”. This is evident in the huge industry we see today, with companies such as British Gas offering new boilers and gas maintenance, a far cry from those rudimentary early designs.

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