Unleash Your Inner Chef: Empava's 36" Gas Cooktop Brings the Kitchen Outdoors

The hidden physics and materials science inside your kitchen stove.

It begins with a drop of molten glass, falling like a tear into a bucket of cold water. It cools into a tadpole of transparent perfection, a curiosity that captivated 17th-century European courts. This object, known as a Prince Rupert’s Drop, is a paradox made solid. You can take a hammer to its bulbous head, striking it with force, and the hammer will bounce off without leaving a scratch. The glass seems indestructible. But, if you take a pair of pliers and gently snip its long, delicate tail, the entire structure disintegrates in a flash of light and a sharp crack, vanishing into a fine powder.

For centuries, this “devil in the glass” was a baffling parlor trick for kings and a profound puzzle for the first generation of scientists in the Royal Society. Today, the very same physics that governs its explosive demise is silently at work in your kitchen, providing the sleek, durable surface of your gas stove. It’s the first clue that the mundane appliances we use to prepare our meals are, in fact, quiet museums of applied science, housing principles that took centuries to understand.

The Architecture of Stress

The secret to both the drop’s strength and its catastrophic fragility is a concept called internal stress. As the molten glass tear plunges into the water, its outer surface cools and solidifies almost instantly, while the inside remains molten and liquid. As the molten core gradually cools and contracts, it pulls relentlessly on the rigid, unyielding outer shell. This celestial tug-of-war locks an immense amount of tension within the glass, while simultaneously compressing the surface into a state of incredible strength. The surface of a Prince Rupert’s Drop is, in essence, a Roman arch curved in on itself, held in a state of extreme compression. This is why it can defy a hammer.

However, the tail, which cools much faster, doesn’t develop the same compressive armor. It becomes the structure’s Achilles’ heel. When the tail is snipped, a crack is introduced that travels through the network of internal tension at over 3,000 miles per hour, releasing all that stored energy in a violent, explosive chain reaction.

This exact principle, albeit in a far more controlled manner, is what creates the tempered glass on a modern cooktop, like the one found on an Empava 36-inch gas range. Sheets of glass are heated to over 600°C and then rapidly cooled with jets of high-pressure air in a process called “quenching.” This creates the same architecture of stress: a highly compressed surface layer that is incredibly resistant to scratches, impact, and the thermal shock of a hot pan. It’s what allows you to spill boiling water on it without a second thought.

And, just like the drop, this strength comes with a caveat. While exceedingly rare, tempered glass can sometimes shatter spontaneously due to microscopic impurities, like nickel sulfide inclusions, that disrupt the delicate balance of tension. It’s a faint echo of the devil in the glass, a reminder that its strength is born from a deep, internal struggle.

The Art of the Blue Flame

If the glass surface is a monument to solid-state physics, the burners are a testament to the art of chemistry and fluid dynamics. For most of human history, fire was a messy, inefficient, and smoky affair. The great leap forward came not in a kitchen, but in a 19th-century laboratory. In 1855, Robert Bunsen needed a clean, hot, soot-free flame for his experiments. He devised a simple tube with an adjustable collar that allowed gas to mix with air before reaching the point of combustion. The result was the Bunsen burner, and for the first time, humanity had a truly controllable flame.

That invention is the direct ancestor of the burners on your stove. The goal of a modern burner, like the Italian-made SABAF components used in many contemporary appliances, is to achieve complete combustion. The ideal chemical reaction for natural gas (mostly methane, $CH_4$) is:

$$CH_4 + 2O_2 \rightarrow CO_2 + 2H_2O + \text{Heat}$$

To achieve this, the burner must act like a sophisticated carburetor, perfectly proportioning the fuel and the oxygen. When the ratio is just right, the result is a quiet, stable, and intensely hot blue flame. The blue color is the signature of excited molecules like CH and C2 radicals releasing their energy as light—a sign that the fuel is being converted almost entirely into heat, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. A lazy, yellow flame, by contrast, is a sign of incomplete combustion, where tiny, unburned particles of carbon (soot) are heated to incandescence, wasting energy and producing carbon monoxide. The varied sizes of the burners, from a small auxiliary ring to a powerful dual-flame wok burner, are simply different engineering solutions to the same chemical problem: how to deliver the right amount of heat for a specific task by mastering the art of the blue flame.

The Ghost in the Machine

But the most elegant piece of science in your gas stove is the one that does its job by doing nothing at all. It is a silent, unseen guardian that answers a critical question: what happens if the flame blows out while the gas is still on? In our hyper-electric world, you might assume the solution involves a complex sensor wired into your home’s circuitry. You would be wrong. The safety mechanism that prevents your kitchen from filling with explosive gas requires no batteries, no plugs, and no external power whatsoever. It is a ghost in the machine, powered by the very flame it is watching.

This magic is made possible by a discovery made in 1821 by German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck. He found that if you take two different types of metal wires, say iron and copper, and join them together at both ends to form a loop, a strange thing happens when one junction is heated while the other remains at room temperature. A small, continuous electric current begins to flow through the wires. No batteries, no chemical reactions—just a temperature difference creating electricity from thin air. This is the Seebeck effect, a cornerstone of thermoelectricity.

The device in your stove that harnesses this principle is called a thermocouple. It’s a simple probe with its tip, the junction of two dissimilar metals, positioned directly in the path of the burner’s flame. When the flame is lit, it heats the tip, and a tiny voltage—just a few millivolts—is generated. This minuscule current is just strong enough to power a tiny electromagnet that holds a spring-loaded gas valve open.

The whole system is a marvel of passive safety engineering:

• The flame is on, heating the thermocouple.
• The thermocouple generates its ghostly current.
• The electromagnet is energized, holding the gas valve open against the pressure of a spring.

If a gust of wind or a boiling pot extinguishes the flame, the sequence instantly reverses:

• The thermocouple tip cools down.
• The Seebeck voltage vanishes.
• The electromagnet de-energizes, and can no longer resist the spring.
• The spring snaps the valve shut, cutting off the gas supply.

It is a system with no moving parts to wear out, no software to crash, and no dependence on the power grid. It is a law of physics, elegantly applied.

From the explosive potential locked within a drop of glass to the ethereal current born from a flame, the gas stove stands as a quiet tribute to scientific discovery. It is an object that weaves together the Royal Society’s first experiments in material stress, a 19th-century German chemist’s quest for a perfect flame, and a physicist’s discovery of a strange electrical phenomenon. It reminds us that our homes are not just places of comfort, but are filled with the brilliant, often invisible, applications of the fundamental laws that govern our universe. The next time you turn the knob and hear that satisfying click-hiss, take a moment. You are not just cooking dinner; you are engaging with centuries of human ingenuity. You are commanding the devil in the glass and summoning the ghost in the flame.