The Finnish wood-fired mass ovens, described in our article Scandinavian Bread and Grains, were the predecessors of the famous Swedish AGA, an institution in many British homes, but originally invented in 1922 by the Swede Gustaf Dalén. Learn more about the Swedish gas accumulators.
Nils Gustaf Dalén was a man of his time, an entrepreneur starting his career as chief engineer at the Gas Accumulator Company and appointed the managing director for AGA when it was founded in 1909. In 1910, the company bought a large real estate in Lidingö and built a production plant that was completed around 1912, when they moved out from the facilities in Stockholm.
In 1912, Dalén was blinded by a gas explosion, and in the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his “invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys”. It was a simple but effective sun-sensitive valve for lighthouses.
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The stoves were an immediate success and worked on the exact same principle as the old Finnish mass ovens but was made of 600kg cast iron, fuel efficient and much cleaner and easier to regulate than the old stoves. It could even serve as central heating. There were already 50,000 AGAs in Britain in the 1940s. The stoves were produced in Sweden at first but sold to an English company in 1957. The stoves are still standing in many old Swedish houses and can be repaired and used indefinitely.
During his life, AGA was one of the most innovative companies in Sweden and produced a large variety of products that grew every year. Finally, in the early 1970s AGA, was forced to reduce the number of markets it was involved in and concentrate on the production of gases for industrial use.
AGA conceived and developed HiQ for specialty gases. In 2000, AGA was integrated into Linde AG.
The Swedish Gas Accumulators, written by Tor Kjolberg