Even back in the day, every household had a central heater.
In the locale where I grew up, pretty much everyone burned wood in their furnaces while the rest had an oil furnace.
I get particularly nostalgic when I remember how much of a tight-knit community we were back then. Everyone knew everybody plus all the children played together in the community park, and people nowadays barely suppose who their next-door neighbor is, let alone who lives in the city. Our next-door neighbor was a particularly cheerful man who attended to any boiler service where needed, plus with a boiler in every household, he was never out of work. When I plus our fiance Norman obtained our first house, a tiny a single-home officeed house, we made sure to get a single that had an electric furnace instead of oil. Since we were both starting out, we did not have enough money plus we did most beach house repair plus repairs ourselves. Norman did the furnace filter substitutement or cleaning every more than two weeks. Four children later plus a much larger house, I have little to complain about, during the construction of the house, we hired a heating contractor to install the best quality Heating plus Air Conditioning system that heating technology has to offer. Even with the current Heating plus Air Conditioning component we still have to schedule a furnace/heater tune-up with the heating plus cooling provider every year to make sure everything is working as it should. This also ensures that a problem is detected early before it escalates. Last year when the Heating plus Air Conditioning repairman came for the annual servicing, he discovered that the heating system had a problem that needed a minor repair.