Jason in San Antonio, Texas, is curious why the term salamander is applied to small heater on a construction site. In ancient lore, the mythical beast called a salamander was impervious to fire. Later salamander was applied to various heating instruments, from an 18th century browning iron to modern pizza broilers. Salamander has also been applied metaphorically to the seeming invincibility of brave soldiers, fire-eating jugglers, and women who stay chaste despite temptation. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “When A Salamander is a Heater”
Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Jason from Evansville, Indiana.
Hi, Jason. Welcome to the program.
Thanks.
What’s going on there?
I was calling about something I see. I work at an architecture firm, and when I’m out in the field,
I see temporary heaters on job sites, and they refer to them as salamander heaters.
And I looked it up to see if it was like a brand name type of thing that’s just being used generally,
But I didn’t really find anything on that, and I wondered why they were referred to as salamanders.
Salamander heaters? These are small devices, appliances that give off heat?
Usually they’re bigger, kind of like a torpedo heater.
They run off of propane, and they’ll heat like a job site for temporary heat during, like, cold months.
When they’re building a building and it doesn’t have a full heating system yet.
So what are we talking, like as big as an oil barrel or smaller?
For bigger jobs, yeah.
If it’s more like a residential project, they might be kind of the size of a small trash can,
Kind of turned on its side, and then they have an element in the middle.
They make a lot of noise, too, kind of like they have a fan or something.
Gotcha.
Right.
There is so much cool history behind this word, Jason,
Because in ancient lore, a salamander was this mythical beast that could live in fire.
It actually thrived in fire.
It loved being in fire, and it could put fires out if it wanted to.
And this is a really, really old word.
And then the word from Greek and Latin came into English
And got applied to all kinds of things that have to do with heat.
You’ll see salamander ovens in kitchens,
You know, like when you go and get a slice of pizza heated up, a lot of times those ovens are called salamander ovens.
There is also in the mid-18th century, there was a kind of device called a salamander, which looked like a big iron flat spoon.
It was about two feet long, and people would stick that in the fire and then put it over like a pudding or a roast or something to kind of brown it with the heat there.
And so they’re all different kinds of devices that have that name salamander because salamander mythical beast was something that lived in fire.
And what’s really curious is that it was only later that what we think of as a salamander, the animal, got that name as well.
But it really doesn’t have anything to do.
So the mythical salamander predated the salamander animal that we know today, the lizard-like creature.
Yes, and the lizard-like creature today, of course, has nothing to do with fire.
And it took its name from the mythical creature.
That’s cool.
And the term for heaters predates using it for the creature?
It depends because there’s so many different kind of heaters that have been called salamander.
There’s these little braziers that have hot coals in them.
There’s different parts of blacksmithy furnaces have sometimes been called salamanders,
Including the lumps of metal, waste metal that are inside.
Asbestos itself has been called a salamander.
Fire-eating jugglers have been called salamanders.
Soldiers who bravely face enemy fire,
Not like fire with flames, but fires and gunfire,
They were sometimes called salamanders.
Yeah, because they’re invincible.
And women who remain chaste despite temptation
Were also once called salamanders.
So in the heat of the moment,
They could stand the pressure of their passion.
I never knew it was such a versatile term.
Right? Yeah.
It’s really cool. I love it.
Well, thank you. That’s very interesting.
Yeah, well, thanks for that question.
There’s so much history behind such a simple word.
Jason, thank you. Take care.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
I’m betting that a lot of our listeners know salamander as this removable plate from the top of an old-fashioned stove that heats up.
And you can do with it, like you said, you can brown things, but you can also use it to heat up water really fast or put it in a container and then put it in your bed to keep the bed warm.
Or it’s the plate that you lift up to put more whatever wood or whatever in your stove.
Right, just something that can stand the fire.
