Kitchen stove
A "drop-in range" is a combination stovetop-and-oven unit that installs in a kitchen's lower cabinets flush with the countertop.
In the Middle East, references to similar stoves and cooking ranges where the fire was lit from below are recorded as early as the 2nd-century AD, constructed of clay and either made portable or attached to the ground.
In the Middle Ages, waist-high brick-and-mortar hearths and the first chimneys appeared, so that cooks no longer had to kneel or sit to tend to foods on the fire.
[2] Open fire systems had three significant disadvantages that prompted an evolutionary series of improvements from the 16th century onwards: it was dangerous, it produced much smoke, and the heat efficiency was poor.
The first design that completely enclosed the fire was the 1735 Castrol stove, built by the Walloon-Bavarian architect François de Cuvilliés.
Near the end of the 18th century, the design was refined by hanging the pots in holes through the top iron plate, thus improving heat efficiency even more.
As an active scientist and prolific inventor, he put the study of heat onto a scientific basis and developed improvements for chimneys,[5] fireplaces and industrial furnaces, which led to his invention of the kitchen range.
His Rumford fireplace created a sensation in London when he introduced the idea of restricting the chimney opening to increase the updraught.
He and his workers modified fireplaces by inserting bricks into the hearth to make the side walls angled, and added a choke to the chimney to increase the speed of air going up the flue.
It also had the effect of increasing the efficiency of the fire, and gave extra control of the rate of combustion of the fuel, whether wood or coal.
[6] Following on from this success, Thompson designed a kitchen range made of brick, with a cylindrical oven and holes in the top for the insertion of pots.
His range was widely adopted in large cooking establishments, including at the soup kitchens that Thompson built in Bavaria.
Cast iron stoves replaced those made of masonry and their size shrank to allow them to be incorporated into the domestic kitchen.
An important figure in the early acceptance of this new technology, was Alexis Soyer, the renowned chef at the Reform Club in London.
The stovetop (range) surface had one or more circular heating elements, insulated with compressed magnesia and sheathed in a spiral metal tube.
A high-end gas stove called the AGA cooker was invented in 1922 by Swedish Nobel prize winner Gustaf Dalén.
A cooktop or hob is a cooking appliance that heats the bottoms of pans or pots; it does not have an enclosed oven as used for baking or roasting.
Flattop grills are also being installed into kitchen counters and islands, which do double-duty as a direct cooking surface as well as a platform for heating pots and pans.
