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harry potter - When did using a fireplace as a portal first become used?


When did the idea of using a fireplace as a portal first become popular?


I am looking for any indication from writers, perhaps through interviews/posts where SciFi writers have explained the concept as to why a fireplace is used for such a portal - and what was the first popular example of such a portal. Aside from the stories about Santa Claus, my thoughts are that J.K. Rowling really brought forward the idea in the Harry Potter series (1997).


In Harry Potter, wizards and witches use Floo Powder to travel through the Floo Network.



In Doctor Who ("The Girl in the Fireplace", 2006), the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey land on what appears to be an abandoned spacecraft in the future. Throughout the ship, the Doctor and his companions find several "time windows" that allow them direct access to 18th century France. One of the two-way windows is the fireplace, through which the Doctor and Mme. Pompadour can clearly see one another. The Doctor can use the fireplace, along with other "time windows" to travel between his time (on the spaceship) and Mme. Pomadour's 18th century France. The fireplace is the last remaining time window after all had been supposedly shut off.


Girl in the Fireplace


There was a short story I remember reading when I was younger, there was a man inside of a fireplace and much like when at a bookcase and pulling a certain book to make it revolve, he pulled a lever inside and it revolved him into a what was described as a different time and setting.



Answer



It seems the most popular example would be Harry Potter series. I'm having a hard time finding popular examples before J.K. Rowling's Floo Network.


As Hypnosifl pointed out in the comments,



"if you're going to have magic portals in old-timey houses there's only so many places they could be"



J.K. Rowling's Revelations Excerpt below:




In addition to domestic fireplaces, there are around a thousand fireplaces across Britain connected to the Floo Network, including those at the Ministry of Magic, and various wizarding shops and inns.


‘Floo’ came from the flue that you find on a chimney and don’t ask me to tell you exactly what a flue is, because I don’t know. I just know it exists, but I’m not sure what it does exactly. I needed a way for particularly young witches and wizards to travel around because I’d created the International Statute of Secrecy, which was inconvenient, so immediately that made it quite difficult for them to move around, particularly over long distances, by magical means. So I thought they need something very discreet, and that’s how the Floo Network came about, so it was a way of moving from house to house without ever being seen by Muggles. But it was fun and comical to have it a little bit difficult to use, so that you could easily make a mistake in where you ended up.



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