We’re inside Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, summer residence of the Habsburgs. It’s a big place. There are 1,441 rooms! Don’t worry. We’re not going into all of them. We just want to get a feel for what it was like to hang with the Habsburgs.
There’s a lot of oohing and aahing going on in here. I may have previously expressed the thought that Schönbrunn Palace is grand, but perhaps not as grand as say, Versailles. I would like to retract those hasty words at this time.
The Rooms
Some of the rooms in Schönbrunn Palace have themes. For example, two rooms are called the Chinese rooms. The walls in these rooms are black lacquer with gold trim. Nice. And of course, they’re filled with beautiful antique Chinese art. Someone in the Habsburg line was seriously into oriental art.
Some rooms are themed galleries, displaying art from a certain time or place. One such room is the Napoleon Room. In the Napoleon room, huge Brussels tapestries adorn the walls.
I’m starting to understand why they needed to have so many rooms. Many of these rooms exist just to house collections of beautiful things acquired by the Habsburgs over the years. Schönbrunn is part house, part personal museum.
Many rooms have a large, odd-looking thing placed against a wall or in a corner. Each one is unique, but they all have a similar shape. Each is shaped like a cross between a pot-belly stove and a fancy sculpture. They’re big – at least six feet high.
How to Heat a Palace
I had to do some homework to find out what they are. They’re heaters. You’re thinking, “OK. They’re steam radiators, just big, fancy ones.” Nope.
They’re wood-burning heaters. They look like anything but. I mean, for one thing, there’s no place to put in any logs. I’d have never guessed.
These heaters are always in a corner or next to a wall. There’s a hole in the back of the heater that’s connected to an opening in the wall. Servants put wood into the heater from another room or from somewhere on the other side of the wall. That way, people living there wouldn’t have to be bothered by seeing ‘em.
Just between you and me, I bet some super-rich people who lived in palaces like this didn’t even know how rooms were kept warm in winter. Probably never even gave it a thought. Outside cold. Inside warm. What’s to think about?
These heaters are made of ceramic material such as porcelain. Ceramic materials have high thermal capacities, meaning they retain heat well. Once you get a ceramic material hot, it will hold the heat for a long time.
Think “Giant Coffee Mug”
Just think of these heaters as being giant ceramic coffee mugs. Once the mug is heated up, it will keep the coffee hot for quite awhile.
A network of channels in the upper part of the heater captures the rising heat and radiates it into the room. Smoke exits through ventilation ducts in the wall.
Once a servant put in some wood and got one of these heaters going, it’d give off heat at a fairly constant rate, keeping a room warm for as long as a day or two. Pretty clever.
Mark Twain’s Thoughts on Heaters
When Mark Twain toured Europe, he took note of these ceramic heaters. He was impressed. He couldn’t figure out why we didn’t have them back home. After describing how nice these European ceramic heaters were, here’s what he had to say about the ones back in the States…
“The American wood stove is a terror. There can be no tranquility of mind where it is. It requires more attention than a baby. It warms no part of the room but its own. And it breeds headaches and suffocation.”
And later he says… “We have in America many a breed of coal stoves, also – fiendish things, every one of them.”
I guess we know where Mr. Twain stood on the issue of American heaters, eh?
Maria Theresa
The person who, more than any other, converted Schönbrunn Palace from an overgrown hunting lodge to an empire-worthy palace was Maria Theresa Habsburg. Not only that – she ran the whole Habsburg empire for forty years. She was something else.
To be continued…
