Story Break
Stove Evolution
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. — Douglas Adams
Where Backpacking Stoves Came From
It looks like we have to give credit to the Swedes for the idea of small, portable stoves, specifically B.A. Hjorth & Co. (Bahco). B.A. Hjorth, born in 1862 near Tarku, Finland, built the Primus company into a worldwide brand. Primus was the first maker of the kind of portable, liquid-fuel stove that a backpacker might recognize.
The man responsible for the design breakthrough of the Primus stove was F.W. Lindqvist. His design created a way to vaporize fuel before it burned instead of WHILE it burned, reducing smoke, smell, and increasing stove efficiency.
Some events contributing to the development of small, portable, high-output stoves were the age of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, and two world wars. Backpackers are still reaping the benefits.
Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian arctic explorer, was the developer of what was possibly the most efficient small stove ever: the “Nansen Cooker”. It is a combination of a stove and a multi-level pot designed to use as much of the fuel’s heat as possible, reaching an efficiency of over 90%.
Materials They’re Made From
Most early outdoor stoves were made of some combination of brass and steel, but more sophisticated materials, such as titanium are being used in the 21st century, in such products as the Snow Peak GigaPower, Primus OmniFuel Titanium, and Vargo Triad XE alcohol/solid fuel stoves.
Titanium is more corrosion-resistant than iron, steel, or aluminum and is as strong as steel while weighing somewhat less. Titanium is about as corrosion resistant as platinum. That says something. Its melting point is higher than that of steel or aluminum (about 400 degrees F above steel and 2000 degrees F above aluminum) and it’s less likely to warp. Although expensive, it is getting cheaper as it appears in more and more products.
Sizes, Shapes, Weights
Backpacking stoves come in a wide variety of sizes and shapes. Earlier stoves (like the Svea 123, going back to about 1880) tended to be either cylindrical or rectangular, or sometimes dumbbell-shaped with a fuel tank on the bottom and a burner and cooking surface on top. They were also large compared to current stoves. Nothing you could carry in your shirt pocket or under your tongue. Things have changed over the decades, and things have radically changed in the last few years. We’ll see soon.
Fuels Throughout History
Stove fuel is a tricky subject, like finding out exactly what’s in the can of pudding you ate yesterday. Names are mutable, and vary throughout the world. Reading the list of ingredients may leave you feeling like you know something when really you’ve just had smoke blown through your brain.
Here in the U.S. you might say “kerosene”, but in most of the world you’d just get a dumb look at best. Most everyone else says “paraffin” but means the same stuff. Sort of. Paraffin isn’t just A fuel, but a FAMILY of hydrocarbons, some of which are used as backpacking stove fuels, though not that often anymore.
As goes kerosene, so goes “white gas”. At one time this apparently was a clean form of motor fuel without the additives needed for internal combustion engines. Now it’s a less explosive but still related fuel called “naphtha”, “Coleman Fuel”, or “shellite”, “wasbenzine”, “renset benzin”, “essence ‘c’”, “reinbenzin”, “fleckenbenzine”, “becina blanca”, “solvente”, or “industri bensin”, depending on where you are and how much you’ve had to drink.
Getting dizzy yet?
The heavier fuels like kerosene and various flammable oils have more energy per unit of weight than lighter fuels but the lighter fuels are generally more convenient. When you get heavier and heavier fuels, the molecular weight goes up as you’d expect, but the energy content goes up even faster. That’s from all the carbon atoms hanging out together.
Imagine that each carbon atom has four hands. No, seriously. Imagine that carbon prefers to hang out with other carbon atoms if at all possible. Birds of a feather and all that.
Sometimes carbon atoms hold onto only two other carbons, the one to the left and the one to the right. When they do this they form a chain, sometimes a long chain, but nevertheless they are also left with two free hands (since each one has four hands to start with). Then small, light, zippy little hydrogen atoms flit in to fill up the empty slots and tag along for the ride. Hydrogens have only one hand each, and they’re glad to catch a ride anywhere they can. Carbon plus hydrogen equals hydrocarbon.
The terms “heavier” and “lighter” refer to molecular weight. A heavier molecule has more carbon atoms holding hands with each other in a longer chain. As atoms go in the world of combustible things, carbon is kind of heavy. More carbon atoms means a heavier molecule. By comparison, hydrogen, the lightest of elements, is so very light that it barely counts at all.
When combustion starts it’s the hydrogen atoms that get their little butts burned first. They’re relatively weakly attached, with only one hand each, and they go flying off into space howling in pain, looking for some relief. But they don’t get far. Big bad predatory oxygen atoms cruising around like sharks after a sardine lunch just snap them up.
Snap, snap. Munch, munch. So long hydrogen atoms, hello water molecules.
Eventually, with more and more heat pouring in, the carbon atoms themselves finally give up and let go, flailing their many hands about, trying to put themselves out. The left over hungry oxygen atoms snap them up as well, although it takes two oxygens to subdue one carbon.
That carbon, some fighter there.
The ultimate results are water (hydrogen plus oxygen) and carbon dioxide (carbon plus oxygen).
So “heavier” fuels like kerosene, diesel fuel, coal oil (and dare we say it, olive oil, linseed oil, peanut oil and anything else greasy and liquid, some of it quite tasty, in fact) are harder to light, but have more energy because they have more atoms in each molecule, and carbon atoms burn hotter. But because of this, they also don’t burn as cleanly, and tend to leave more soot, which is what free, unattached, slow moving, unburned carbon is.
Among commercial backpacking stoves these days the liquid fuel designs are on the decline, especially those that burn heavier fuels. But let’s not forget another family of liquids, the alcohols, a collection of flammable compounds that are central to lightweight backpacking stoves. Alcohol stoves have always been around, but in the last 10 years or so the liquid fuel arena has drifted away from white gas and toward alcohol.
Gaseous fuels are probably the most popular group today: propane, butane, isobutane, and blends that burn in canister stoves. Fairly scarce during the period from the Dark Ages (a time notably bereft of backing stoves, and backpackers too, come to think of it) up through the first half of the 20th century, they’re everywhere today.
Solid fuels. The original camping and stove fuels. Today these fall into two groups: traditional natural fuels like wood, and manufactured fuels like trioxane and hexamine. In the past these were either the only fuels available (wood, charcoal, dried animal poo) or nonexistent (manufactured fuels such as charcoal briquettes or pellets used in home heating). We’ll see some of these ideas again a little later.
Trends For The Future
Chemistry doesn’t change much. Only fashion does. What once was awkward and inconvenient and perhaps prohibitively expensive might be cheap, quick, and easy next month. Think about cell phones. Or bubble gum. That’s why in backpacking the canister stoves using compressed gas have taken over much of the market. Once the technology matured it became too easy and cheap for a lot of people to avoid.
But in the last few years the rise of light and ultralight backpacking has upset the balance again. Most people still carry a commercially-made and commercially-fueled stove that burns either white gas or compressed gas. Lightweight backpackers aren’t looking for the most common solution. Light weight and simplicity come first, and simple alcohol or solid fuel stoves are most popular with them.
Right now we have a small but continuously growing community of people using and making small, light and simple stoves. As more and more people get used to the idea of carrying a sub-one-ounce alcohol-burning stove, or a solid-fuel-tablet-burning stove, or a light and simple wood-burning stove, these stoves will continue to catch on, and will evolve into ever more convenient forms.
We are a clever species and we will be sure to make it happen.
Famous Stoves
The big three names of the past were Optimus, Primus and Svea, all produced by Swedish companies. These three evolved separately but in parallel, and got jumbled together through mergers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Virtually every country in the world with an industrial base seems to have made camp stoves, but they all followed one or two basic patterns: either the stove stood upright with a tank on the bottom and a burner on top or it came in a flat rectangular steel box with a burner in the middle and a fuel tank off to one side. These stoves all burned liquid fuels. Not until late in the game did technology advance to the point that compressed gas could be handled safely in small containers.
The “Nansen Cooker”, mentioned a little while back, was a piece of true genius.
The stove was a pretty standard tank-at-the-bottom, burner-on-top type, but it had an arrangement of pots and flues that made it special. It should serve as inspiration to all lightweight backpackers who want to make each piece of gear serve several functions.
A regular pot sat above the burner of this stove. Enveloping this was another pan with a hole in the middle, shaped like a doughnut (or a Bundt cake pan for those with kitchen knowledge). This pan held snow or ice, or just cold water. Hot combustion gases hit the bottom of the cook pot, and went up around its sides, between it and the inner side of the doughnut-shaped pan. Then those gases continued through a hole in the doughnut-pan’s lid and circulated across the bottom of a third pan sitting on top of all this. This third pan also held snow, ice or cold water. Finally the combustion gases exited down the outside of the doughnut-shaped pan and out into the atmosphere.
Combustion of fuel produced hot gases, and they heated the primary pan, and then wiggled and wormed their way past several other pans on their way out. What was simple waste heat for every other stove became a resource for the Nansen cooker, a free way to melt snow or heat water for dish washing or warm drinks.
From Stoves To Camp Stoves To Backpacking Stoves
Let’s define a backpacking stove as a lightweight, portable device for burning fuel in a controlled way with the purpose of applying heat to a pot. This isn’t so different from Benjamin Franklin’s creation of a metal stove used to heat houses. In his time, advances in metallurgy made the Franklin stove possible (there are rumors of this design earlier on, but they were unsuccessful due to poorly performing metal in the stove walls).
While the Franklin stove was meant to heat the air all around it, a backpacking stove is meant to heat just a small cooking pot. So there are some differences, but just as the Franklin stove was a great advance for its day, the backpacking stove likewise is also a clever little device. It also uses simple but advanced technology functioning in primitive conditions.
In earlier times backpacking didn’t exist. Backpacking is a sport. In times past, people went to war, migrated hither and thither across continents, or herded animals day and night, and not for sport, either. But all of them did have to eat. All of them were basically out there doing a job. Just working. They weren’t fussy and lacked even a faint dream of advanced technology. These people burned wood in open fires, or in makeshift cook stoves at best.
Today, rather than being limited to hunting for wood before eating, we have a range of self-contained stoves to choose from, and they are made from not just iron or rough alloys of steel but materials like brass, aluminum, stainless steel, and titanium. A stove is no longer a box for burning wood, or a grate over a wood fire, but a reactor vessel for sophisticated chemical recombinations.
Now you can have your choice of kerosene, white gas, compressed gas, solid fuel tablets, gelled or liquid alcohol, or wood, and if you insist, fuels like diesel, lamp oil, or salad oil. Some stoves have fans and batteries. Some are solar-powered. Some are sophisticated mechanical beasts with many tiny parts working in intricate harmony, and some are so simple that they give you no bragging rights whatsoever.
The result of modern technology is that if you want, you can carry something small enough to fit invisibly in your armpit that will still provide you with a hot meal, albeit sprinkled with a few armpit hairs (optional).
Exercises
- Learn how to pronounce the word “fleckenbenzine”. Use it in a sentence at a party, while trying to impress someone of the opposite sex. Well what the heck, just try to impress anyone of any sex, gender, political persuasion, religion, or shoe size. You get extra points if you impress them in a positive way (i.e. they don’t beat you up).
- Take a day off and travel around to various stores in your neighborhood to see which ones carry denatured alcohol. If you can’t find any, and you’re starting to feel really frustrated, go into a liquor store and look at all the pretty bottles. Anything distilled will be burnable (whiskey, brandy, and so on). Remember that if you’re in need, you can always find it at a liquor store, if you have enough money. Write a long letter to your mother about your alcohol dependency.
- To experience the thrill of the olden days before backpacking, before restaurants, when people worked all day, slept all night, and did their own cooking wherever they happened to be, try cooking lunch at work, on the floor, using a backpacking stove, preferably one that is older than you are. If you don’t yet have a backpacking stove, then try a wood fire. This is especially fun if you work in an office. Convey the thrill of your adventure to coworkers as they gather around to watch you in wonder. Offer to share some of your treats with them. It will be worth it.
- Extra credit: Organize either an arctic or an antarctic expedition, and carry it out. Come back alive and make a movie based on your experiences. Arrange for someone else to make the movie in case you don’t come back alive (you may decide you like it there, or you may just croak).