The iron industry

Iron ore has to be heated (or smelted) to extract the iron. Until after 1700, the fuel for smelting was charcoal (partly burnt wood). But the demand for charcoal was eating up England´s forests. And the iron industry could not grow if there was not enough fuel. (The sulphur in coal had a bad effect on iron, so coal could not be used for smelting.)

In 1709, though, Abraham Darby of Coalbrookdale in Shropshire discovered that if you first made coal into coke it could be used for smelting. The invention was kept secret for 30 years. Even then, the news spread slowly. It was the 1760s before coke was widely used.

Darby´s methods produced good cast iron, which was used for guns and pots and pans. But they were no use for wrought iron, to make plough shares, tools, and nails. It was Henry Cort in 1784, with his "puddling process", who found a way of using coke to make wrought iron.

The work of Darby and Cort made iron cheap and plentiful. Big iron works were set up in South Wales, Scotland, the Midlands, and Yorkshire. By 1815 Britain turned out nearly ten times as much iron as in 1750.

The years 1750 - 1850 were the age of iron. It was used for beams in buildings, bridges, gas-pipes, and above all for machines. By the 1840s iron trains ran on iron tracks up and down the length of Britain. Iron was the key to the Industrial Revolution.

Walter Robson: Britain 1750 - 1900; Oxford University Press, 1993, page 15 f.