boiler n.

early 13c. (intransitive) "to bubble up, be in a state of ebullition," especially from heat, from Old French bolir "boil, bubble up, ferment, gush" (12c., Modern French bouillir), from Latin bullire "to bubble, seethe," from PIE *beu- "to swell" (see bull (n.2)). The native word is seethe. The figurative sense, of passions, feelings, etc., "be in an agitated state" is from 1640s.

I am impatient, and my blood boyls high. [Thomas Otway, "Alcibiades," 1675]

The transitive sense "put into a boiling condition, cause to boil" is from early 14c. The noun is from mid-15c. as "an act of boiling," 1813 as "state of boiling." Related: Boiled; boiling. Boiling point "temperature at which a liquid is converted into vapor" is recorded from 1773.

also boiler-maker, "a maker of boilers for engines," 1814, from boiler (n.) + maker. The meaning "shot of whiskey with a glass of beer" is short for boilermaker's delight (1910), a term for strong cheap whiskey, so called in jest from the notion that it also would clean the scales from the interior of a boiler.

1831, "iron rolled in large, flat plates for use in making steam boilers," from boiler + plate (n.). In newspaper (and now information technology) slang, the sense of "unit of writing that can be used over and over without change" is attested by 1887. The connecting notion probably is the permanence of the prepared plate compared to set type: From the 1870s to the 1950s, publicity items were cast or stamped in metal ready for the printing press and distributed to country newspapers as filler. An early provider was the American Press Association (1882). The largest supplier later was Western Newspaper Union.

An older name for it was plate-matter "type cast in a number of stereotype plates for insertion in different newspapers" (1878). Plate (n.) is attested by 1824 in printing as "a cast of a page of composed movable types." 

WITHIN the past ten years, "plate matter" has become more and more popular among out-of-town papers, and the more enterprising are discarding the ready prints and are using plate matter instead. For a long time there was a prejudice against "Boiler Plates," but editors of small, and even of prosperous papers, began to discover that better matter was going out in the plates than they could afford, individually, to pay for. It was found that the reading public did not care, so long as the reading columns were bright and newsy, whether they were set up in the local office or in New York. ["The Journalist Souvenir," 1887]