AGA Cooker

In 1912 Swedish physicist Gustaf Dalen lost his sight in a laboratory explosion. Forced to stay at home, Dalen discovered that his wife was exhausted by cooking. He set out to develop an energy efficient stove that required no adjustment during cooking and had an oven that is constantly hot. Adopting the principle of heat storage, he combined a heat source, two large hotplates and two ovens into one unit: the AGA Cooker. The cooker was introduced to England in 1929.

The Aga was named after the gas company of which Dalen was a director, Svenska Aktiebolaget Gas Accumulator (the Swedish Gas Accumulator Company).

In 1912 Gustaf Dalen won a Nobel Prize for an invention making unmanned lighthouses possible.

The Aga gained a reputation for its dependability and was appreciated for its cosiness. it became a permanent fixture in many British kitchens from the 1930s.  

The cooker's popularity with owners of medium to large country houses led to the coining of the term "AGA saga" in the 1990s, referring to a genre of fiction set amongst stereotypical upper-middle class society.

The AGA is known for its longevity, and in 2009 the company set up a competition to find the oldest AGA still in use. The winning cooker was installed in 1932 and belonged to the Hett family from Sussex, in south England.

A modern-day three-oven AGA cooker. By Rbirkby at English Wikipedia 

The manufacturer of the Aga Rangemaster was sold to a US firm in a deal valued at £129 million in 2015. The group, which has been manufacturing its stoves in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, England, since 1930, agreed a sale with the Middleby Corporation.