This paper explores the history of district heating before 1877 and the contributions made by Birdsill Holly, who that year installed the first commercially successful district heating system in Lockport, New York.
All modern heating apparatus can be traced back to Roman inventions, including hypocausts, greenhouses, water pipes, and hot water heating apparatus for baths. This technology, which never completely disappeared, became more widespread beginning with a climactic cold period in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Roman-style baths and greenhouses became popular in Italy and Egyptian incubators were introduced. At least one geothermal district heating system has been operating since the fourteenth century, and written accounts of this sytem influenced district heating innovations for the next five hundred years
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fuel conservation, smoke abatement, and safety were large factors in design of heating apparatus, as seen by a 1623 proposal to install district heating in London. A Russian palace built in 1783 had an extensive hot water system based on French technology. Separate boiler plants and underground piping were used by English factories in the 1790s and by 1820 was fairly common. Waste heat from factories was used to warm public baths by the 1830s and several proposals were put forward to heat worker's houses with this same heat supply. The Crystal Palace in London had district heating in 1851, and at least two steam district heating systems were built in the United States in 1853 and one, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapollis, has been in continuous operation ever since. A General Steam Supply Company was proposed in London in 1859 and a steam supply company was incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1869. Factories and institutions began to centralize their steam boilers on a large scale in the 1870s and many new boiler plants were built. In 1876, hot water district heating was used to heat several large buildings at an asylum outside London. Systems were proposed for Zürich and Warsaw in 1872 and several patents were obtain for district heating in the 1860s and early 1870s.
In spite of these efforts, no one had been able to introduce district heating on a commercial basis until Birdsill Holly, a Lockport, New York inventor, installed a steam system in that town in 1877. Holly had previously developed a successful direct pressure water supply system and applied many of the same principles to the Holly steam system. His company installed nearly fifty systems before being sold to a group of investors, who sold hundreds more throughout the world over the next eighty years.
By: Morris A. Pierce, December, 1994.