Why Did Lodge and BSR Keep Making Nothing but Heat Ring Skillets

up until the 70's while it seems like Wagner and Griswold discontinued heat rings years earlier? I know Lodge and BSR were southern companies but apparently they still marketed their products nationwide I believe. Thanks for any insight.
 
In the south, a lot of stoves were still probably wood burning into the 60's till the 70's.
That seems logical to me. my dads family was from Kentucky and when he was younger he remembered many still had outhouses in use. He was in his late teens in the early 1960’s
 
In the south, a lot of stoves were still probably wood burning into the 60's till the 70's.

I don't know about that. I grew up in small town GA during that time and while there were still people we knew that used wood stoves, the overwhelming majority by that time were either gas or electric coils.
 
Yes, a lot of stoves were lp gas or electric in populated areas or those who could afford the lp gas. But many in rural areas and in low income areas were still probably using wood burning stoves.

You have to remember, the south as a whole was relatively poor. You had many more "have nots" than "haves". I've been coming to the south since 1974. It was very impoverished back then. Everyone from the north and west has come in and helped bring more and better jobs for a better lifestyle.

I still know of homes that have wood burning stoves in rural areas.
 
I don't know why BSR and Lodge continued with heat rings, but I doubt it was because the south had a lower socioeconomic status. I've lived in the south since 1953 when I was born. While we were above the "have nots" we well below the "haves." I knew exactly one family that had a wood cook stove and that was my grandparents in WV. The stove was a bit unusual in that it was both gas and a wood stove side by side. My grandparents had gas, but I never once saw my grandmother use it. She always cooked on the wood side.
 
I agree with Kevin. I came around a bit later, but have similar observations. Besides, the people who did cook on woodstoves probably weren't buying too many brand new skillets anyway.
 
Since nobody seems to have any concrete info and we're just making guesses, I might as well take a stab...

I'm much more a BSR guy than a Lodge guy so my speculation is based on BSR.

My main guess is it cost money to create new non-heat ring patterns so it was never a motivator.

Farther out there, maybe there was some belief that a heat ring went beyond fitting a wood stove eye, it was thought to have some other practical purpose, maybe helping "trap" heat under a skillet or something like that? Yeah, that's a stretch, but stay with me...

They switched to DISA automation in the late '60s. This required creating new patterns compatible with the DISA machines. So they left the heat rings on their traditional skillets with these new patterns, fine. But they also took advantage of DISA's production capabilities to introduce some new designs in the years afterwards, and that may give us some insight on their thought processes...

I have four examples of those - two sizes of cornbread skillet, a square skillet, and a chef skillet. The cornbread skillets, no heat ring. Makes sense - they're designed for the oven, not the stovetop, don't need heat rings. Then the square skillet, no heat ring. It may be designed for the stovetop, but really, how would you do a heat ring on a square skillet? It's be strange and impractical (and, as a side note, these examples, along with the chicken fryer, dispel the notion that BSR made "nothing but heat ring skillets"...)

But then there's the chef skillet, released in the mid-'70s. And it has a heat ring. Why? It's one thing not to change the design of their existing skillets when new patterns are created, that could be as likely lack of thought as a calculated decision. But the chef skillet was a new design, why include a heat ring? And don't give me a story about it being to accommodate the vestigial wood stove users by then, especially for a modern design made to be shaken and toss food.

No, there had to be a reason to include it when other new designs of the era did not have one. They thought it needed it, that it served some practical purpose beyond fitting in the eye of a wood stove, whatever that purpose may be.

Or it was something stupid like they thought it looked pretty. I don't know, I'm just making this up...

Happy Holidays everybody.
 
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