Les caprices de la goute, ballet arthritique. A cartoon from 1783 depicting Buzaglo's establishment for curing the gout by means of physical exercise.
William Buzaglo (more correctly Abraham Buzaglo) was an 18th-century self-proclaimed English inventor. He claimed to have invented a new plan of stoves to heat large public buildings, which was the first of his claims. He later practised medicine and claimed a cure for gout through regular muscular exercise alone. His method seems to have been something similar to modern physiotherapy or simple massage, but during his time he was generally considered a quack, mainly because of the "aboundingly" self-praising advertisements that he made for himself. His style of advertisement was humorously parodied by Captain Grose, an English draughtsman and lexicographer, with a caricature in a handbill titled "Patent Exercise, or Les Caprices de la Goutte". Buzaglo died in London in 1788.
Abraham Buzaglo was born in Morocco into a Sephardic Jewish family[1] in about 1716,[2] the second son of Moses Buzaglo, who may have been a rabbi.[1] In a brief article in the 1901 edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia he is called William Buzaglo, but this appears to be a mistake.[3]Cecil Roth, who wrote a more detailed note of Buzaglo's life, called him "The last but by no means the least of an extraordinary band of brothers". Getting into trouble with the Moroccan authorities, he spent some years in prison under sentence of death by burning.[4] He arrived in England in 1762 (if not before: his brothers were merchants in London) and, as was permissible in Jewish law, married his niece, Esther Rosa, daughter of his brother Haham Shalom Buzaglo. It appears he was soon successful in business and he acquired British citizenship in 1771,[5] which at that time required a private Act of Parliament.
The Buzaglo stove
A cast iron Buzaglo stove (centre) at the Bank of England (Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin, 1788, RIBABuzaglo stove, different ornamentation, still on display in Virginia
Winters being cold in England and heating inadequate ("a man roasted one part of his anatomy in front of a coal fire while his posterior was freezing"), Buzaglo turned his mind to improvements. On 23 April 1785 he was granted a patent for 'Machine for warming rooms equally in every part and without offensive smell, by means of a coal fire'.[5]
This machine, commonly called a Buzaglo, consisted of a cast iron superstructure containing a coal-fired stove. Unlike an ordinary coal fire, where the air passed upwards through coals burning on a grate, hence sending smoke and most of the heat up the chimney, it worked on an opposite principle. The air was sucked downwards through the burning coals, under the floor in pipes, and hence up a chimney. Thus the fire tended to consume its own smoke, the floor was heated, and so was the cast iron work of the stove, which was enormous, and behaved like a radiator. As an added attraction it could be and was cast into aesthetically pleasing shapes. Benjamin Franklin, who visited London, noticed two specimens, one in the Great Hall of the Bank of England, the other in the Hall of Lincoln's Inn. Another specimen was given by colonial governor Lord Botetourt to the House of Burgesses, Virginia, and can be seen today at Williamsburg Courthouse.[6]
The Buzaglo foot-warmer
Buzaglo's next invention was for a device "for the purpose of warming the feet of persons riding in carriages", for which he received a patent in 1769.[5]
Edgerton, Samuel T. (1961). "Heat and Style: Eighteenth-Century House Warming by Stoves". Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 20 (1): 20–26. doi:10.2307/988150. JSTOR988150.
Jacobs, Joseph; Lipkind, Goodman (1901). "William Buzaglo". In Singer, Isidore (ed.). Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. Retrieved 21 February 2025.
Loewe, Herbert (1945). "Solomon ben Joseph Buzaglo". Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England). 16 (1945-1951), pp.: 35–45. JSTOR29777858.
Lysons, Daniel (1795). The Environs of London. Vol.III. London: T. Cadell. Retrieved 21 February 2025.
Roth, Cecil (1969). "The Amazing Clan of Buzaglo". Transactions & Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England), 1969-1970. 23: 11–21. JSTOR29778782.
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