ESSE founder James Smith was born 4th June 1816. This video shows some key product design and advertising milestones of ESSE's history from 1854 to June 2023.
The founder of ESSE James Smith almost died as he was setting up the business. An adventurous soul, he walked from Edinburgh to Greenock docks seeking work, then shipped out to New York and spent seven years apprenticed in a metal works.
Smith set up his own stove and cutlery makers in Mississippi, prospered, and married the girl he left behind, then after seven children in nine years her health failed and they returned to Britain to start another stove-making factory here. Sailing back to America to sign over his ship SS Arctic hit the French vessel Vesta off Newfoundland. Hundreds died, but James floated for two days in a minuscule tin laundry basket and was rescued. The basket and the shirt he wore in it are displayed in ESSE’s museum today.
Smith established the company in Glasgow in 1854 with family friend James Wellstood and foundry man George Ure. He’d got a lot of ideas for stoves when he was in Jackson Mississippi, from seeing what settlers moving west were doing. The Mrs Sam model had its origins as a camping stove, not exactly a primus, but it could have wheels and hooks to lash it down on ships or wagons. Both Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton used that model in the Antarctic.
The name ESSE - which perhaps does sound more Scandinavian than British - came in Victorian times when a line was sold with French names like Jeunesse, and the suffix became the brand name.
Design and innovation have always been important for ESSE. A product with a fire basket that swings out to be filled and inside to burn was made in the 1860s! In the UK the stoves traditionally used anthracite or coal, but ESSE developed the first wood burner in 1910, with a secondary manifold to re-burn smoke, a bit like a jet engine re-burns fuel.
More recent developments include electric versions of the cooking ranges and a very stylish outdoor stove with a grill for barbecuing.
The markets have expanded, and the products have changed, as have some of the methods used in making them, but the company remains very proud of its origins and the philosophy of its founder.
On the warehouse wall, a poster quotes his words. ‘Orders punctually attended to and faithfully executed.’
5 июн 2023
