Industrial Revolution
Coal, iron and steam, in that order — and the point at which material production stopped being limited by how much wood a country had.
From roughly 1760 in Britain, a transition to mechanised production driven by coal, iron and steam. Its material story is a single bottleneck being broken: iron smelting ran on charcoal, charcoal came from woodland, and Britain was running out of forest. Abraham Darby's use of coke at Coalbrookdale from 1709 uncoupled iron production from the growth rate of trees.
Everything downstream follows from that. Cheap iron made machinery, rails and structure; steam engines needed iron and produced the power to make more of it; and the whole system ran on a fuel that could be extracted faster than it was consumed, which no previous economy's energy source could.
History
Coke smelting from 1709, and slow to spread: Darby's coke iron was suitable for casting long before it was suitable for forging. Henry Cort's puddling and rolling process of 1783 and 1784 is what made coke-smelted iron usable as wrought iron, and it is arguably the more consequential of the two.
The Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale, cast in 1779, is the period's demonstration piece — built with joints copied from carpentry because nobody yet knew how iron structures should be detailed, and standing regardless.
Bessemer's converter in 1856 belongs to the end of the period and the beginning of the next: it made steel a bulk material rather than a specialist one, and the age of iron gave way to the age of steel within about thirty years.
Economic significance
It is the moment material production ceased to be constrained by annual biological growth, which is the most important thing that has happened to materials and is easy to state too casually. Before it, the ceiling on iron, glass, brick and lime was how much fuel could be grown; after it, the ceiling was how much could be dug up.
The consequences run in both directions. The volumes it made possible built modern infrastructure; the fuel it made ordinary is the origin of the emissions argument that cement, steel and the polymers all end up in.
How we know: checked recently · only one source, so there is nothing to cross-check it against · stated directly by the source.
How this connects
Where a connection has been confirmed by an outside reference, that reference is named beside it.
involved
- Iron — element · smelted with coke from 1709, which uncoupled iron production from the growth rate of woodland
- Cast iron — alloy · the first product of coke smelting, and the material of the Iron Bridge
- Steel — alloy · at the end of it, when Bessemer's converter made steel a bulk material within about thirty years
- Smelting — process · and the change was the fuel rather than the chemistry
- Mining and quarrying — industry · steam pumping allowed mines below the water table, which is what made deep coal possible
- Coalbrookdale — place · where the charcoal constraint was broken, and the place most directly identified with the period's material foundation
- Ruhr — place · and later the reason the European Coal and Steel Community placed Franco-German production under joint authority
- Sheffield — place · Bessemer built his first steelworks here in 1858, at the point iron gave way to steel
- Reinforced concrete — material · after it rather than during — Portland cement is 1824 and reinforcement is the 1860s onward, and the Romans had concrete with no reinforcement at all
- Charcoal — material · as the constraint it removed: the Revolution begins with an escape from a fuel limit, not with a new appetite for iron
Sources
- Wikimedia Foundation · Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication)
- Material WorldOur own writing