An open fire is not a particularly warm thing to have unless you’re directly in front of it. Most of the heat goes straight up the flue, and it uses an enormous amount of air to keep burning - it will pull huge volumes from rvertwhere it can. This is why these old buildings didn’t suffer from damp issues - the open fires burning were ventilating them.
It's the same problem as those portable AC units: the exhaust (chimney in this case) draws large amounts of air in from outside which is at the wrong temperature (cold in this case).
At some point they realised and the newer ones have a dupex air duct so you can keep air pressure even
Huh, just like a balanced flue.
If it has a flue or chimney, it isnt really an open fire. Look at an ancient long house, or farmer's thatched cottage from say 400 years ago. They had a fire on a stone circle on the floor in the middle of the room, and a high roof sometimes with a hole but often not. It was smoky, but kept everyone warm.
It gave people lung cancer, too. Maybe genetic adaptation to that (pretty toxic) environment is why smoking doesn't kill people more quickly.
I think before heating without smoke, it was perfectly sensible to smoke tobacco because it was the least bad thing you were inhaling on a daily basis, and you were likely going to die of lung cancer regardless. Makes sense we didn’t really discover the risk until after we stopped using wood burning stoves (or burning coal, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s mother would to in Little House when it was available)
Sorry, it’s not a topic I know an awful lot about. I was talking about an exposed hearth with a chimney like in the article, as opposed to a cast iron unit that recirculates the air like a stove
There have been times, with various crises, where I only half considered if indoor plumbing was such a great thing. But that's probably a very old-fashioned New England thing.