Not sure if this is the correct forum for this or not. But I would like help from anyone to identify this stove that my grandfather gave to me.
That's a rarity! It's called "Luxspiseln no.1", and was seen atleast in catalogues and instructions from 1902. I have a catalogue with this one posted in the reference gallery, but you need to be a subscriber to see it. Below I'll attach the part about this range from a general article about Lux in "Teknisk Tidskrift" from 1902. Do you have the burner with it? This part, if you pull out the lower left drawer:
That is indeed a beautiful unit. Does the burner on the left run on kerosene? I would have guessed the stove was a wood burner. My parents used to have a mountain cabin in the White Mountains of Arizona, close to the Whiteriver Apache Reservation. As a student, I would go up there on XMAS Break and ski at the nearby Apache Sunrise resort. At one time we acquired a Ben Franklin stove. It was quite fancy with chromed trim fenders around the rectangular black cast iron firebox. We fed it Juniper wood, which has a cedar-like scent. It had an ornate pagoda-looking chrome superstructure`, which I discovered swung out 90* exposing a pair of circular iron plates which could be lifted up if one wanted to put a cast iron cooking pot of the right diameter in the hole. Mostly, I learned to fry steaks on a griddle on the top, using the right combination of wood pieces. In the event of a snowstorm, we would cook pea soup on the rangetop and tune in Wagner on the FM from Northern AZ University in Flagstaff. Desert dwellers develope a mild obsession with snow and winter. If it gets boring, we can always go back to the Valley. Good times. I miss it. We sold that place in the mid-Ninties.
Yes, this burner run on kerosene, and it use a regular pump to pressurise it. Otherwise Lux normally used CO2 for most of their appliances.
Thank you for such a quick and detailed answer. It does have the burner as well. Anything that might be missing to get it to work? Do you know how many of these were made?
I don't know how many of these they sold, but in a history document I got from Bo Ryman many years ago, I read that the stove range was a total fiasco due to its complicated handling. People just simply prefered the regular wood stove of this kind. The actual casting of the range was put out to Norrahammars Bruk, and then Lux equipped it with their burners. Apparantly they ordered 2000 ranges from Norrahammar. The production started sometimes in 1902, but they canceled it already in June 1903, and it is written that most of them were un-sold and just simply was scrapped, being a huge loss for the freshly started company. Luckily they soon made a great world-wide success with their lamps so the company could remain.
Complicated handling would have been a pain for something that was an everyday use appliance but is just the sort of thing that might appeal to a modern user of a collectable stove.
