People enjoy virtual fireplaces for their coziness and the sense of safety they evoke, even though they don't produce heat. The aesthetic experience of light and shadow, combined with the absence of demands on the viewer, makes it a relaxing background activity.
Fireplaces have been central to human homes, serving as a source of warmth, light, cooking, and social gathering. They are often seen as the heart of the home, symbolizing safety and community.
A fireplace primarily provides radiant heat, but it can also draw warm air from the house into the fire, creating a vacuum that pulls cold air in from outside, potentially making the rest of the house colder.
Wood stoves are more efficient than open fireplaces because they radiate heat in all directions and draw less cold air into the house. Some designs also use external air intakes to avoid pulling air from inside the home.
The cooking hypothesis suggests that the ability to cook food allowed humans to devote less energy to digestion, enabling the growth of larger brains. Cooking made food more nutritious and safer by killing pathogens and neutralizing toxins.
The director, George Ford, was inspired by his children's requests for a real fire during the holidays. He pitched the idea to Netflix, which initially ignored him, but later accepted it. The first film took two years to make and cost nearly $35,000.
Fireplaces have been seen as portals for supernatural entities, such as Santa Claus or evil spirits. In some traditions, shoes or witch bottles were placed near hearths to deceive or trap malevolent forces.
The law of contagion is the belief that objects once in contact with a person retain a connection to them, making them dangerous if discarded. This is why items like shoes or hair clippings were often hidden or protected.
Witch bottles were filled with urine, salt, and sharp objects like nails or pins. The idea was that an evil spirit or witch would be attracted to the scent and climb into the bottle, where it would be trapped or injured by the sharp objects.
Early humans followed natural fires caused by lightning or volcanic activity, scavenging cooked food and resources from the burned areas. Over time, they learned to maintain fires and eventually created them using tools like flint and tinder.
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe dig into the powerful resonance of the fireplace and hearthstone in human culture, psychology and myth.
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