I remember my hearing my grandpa complaining about all of the “progress” that modern society had found.

In his mind, it was a bunch of garbage. He and his forefathers before him had all been living a similar and hadn’t complained about it. One piece of technology that he was constantly fixated on was the new furnaces. In his opinion, the furnace was definitely inferior to the fireplace for many reasons. Though furnaces were promoted to be the most convenient form of heat, he disagreed for many reasons. First of all, if you weren’t able to pay your electric bill or the power went out in your neighborhood, then you would have to go without heat for a long time if you had a furnace. However, with a fireplace, all you had to do was chop down some wood to have a roaring fire. Fireplaces were much cheaper than furnaces in that respect. Also, fireplaces required a lot less maintenance than a furnace, and you could fix a fireplace yourself. If you had a furnace, then you have to pay an HVAC technician a lot of money to fix your furnace if it ever stopped working. Though some people claimed that furnaces kept people warm during the night better than a fireplace, people have learned how to keep a fireplace going in the middle of the night by using the right kind of wood. Although convenient in the aspect that furnaces only require the switch of a button to turn on, my grandfather was firm in his belief that cutting wood and knowing how to kindle fire was a useful skill to have.

Steam boiler