Ironbridge and the industrial revolution

Jun 26 2009 By Ross Reyburn, Birmingham Post

This year is said to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Ross Reyburn examines its origins.

It is somewhat ironic that the inspirational symbol of the Industrial Revolution which changed the world is sited on one of the best scenic views in England. Opened on New Year’s Day in 1781, the striking arched Iron Bridge, elegantly spanning the River Severn, is today overlooked by the small Shropshire town of Ironbridge, picturesquely perched on the steep wooded hillside of the Severn Gorge.

The world’s first cast iron bridge was a PR coup for the Darby dynasty, the family of great ironmasters, echoed today by the fact that it provides the serene focal point for the UNESCO Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site.

“The bridge was a fantastic exercise by Abraham Darby III to promote iron,” said David de Haan, the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust’s director of learning.

“The bridge goes from nowhere to nowhere – the location was just a wharf where there was a ferry and the town didn’t exist when it was built. There was a bridge upstream and another being built two miles downstream.  It was built in a location where it would look good.”

Travel a mile from the bridge into the valley at Coalbrookdale and you can find the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution near the Museum of Iron: the ruined remains of the formidable brick furnace which was known as The Old Furnace where Abraham Darby I (1678-1717) succeeded in smelting iron by using coke instead of charcoal in 1709, exactly 300 years ago.

 The son of a Quaker farmer, Abraham Darby I  was from Wren’s Nest, Sedgley in Staffordshire and later ran his own business in Bristol, malt-making, brass- and iron-founding.

 “He was aware this part of the country was rich in raw materials and had the River Severn, the motorway of its day, for transport,” pointed out de Hann. “So he took a lease on a derelict furnace in Coalbrookdale and restored it, played with it and experimented with making cast iron rather than cast brass.”

Abiah Darby, wife of Abraham Darby II and mother of Abraham Darby III, provided a rare 18th-century account of her father-in-law’s achievement in smelting iron with coke.

“Many years later, in a letter Abiah Darby wrote in 1763, she recalled the date as around the year 1709,” said de Haan. “The company records show bills for ‘charking coles’( ie charcoaling coal, or roasting coal until it becomes coke) in January 1709.”

Perceptively likening the achievement as the equivalent of what “printing was to writing”, she wrote: “He first try’d with raw coal as it came out of the mines, but it did not answer. He not discouraged, had the coal coak’d into Cynder, as is done for drying Malt and it then succeeded to his satisfaction.”

“There is very little we know about Abraham Darby I,” said de Haan. “The Quakers didn’t believe in excess or frivolity – there is no portrait of him.”

“Darby’s key product was cast-metal iron pots. He found that, with coke, he could make cast-iron pots half the thickness of charcoal-fired pots – twice as many with the same quantity of iron.”

This was a somewhat modest outcome, for Darby’s great achievement was showing that coke could replace charcoal in the process of making iron.

Darby’s involvement in producing malt mills for the brewing industry provided an obvious link with his 1709 breakthrough, for coke was used in the malting process as the sulphur from charcoal tainted the beer.

Initially Darby’s discovery was handicapped by the fact that his cast iron was not suitable for conversion to wrought iron. This was solved by his son, Abraham Darby II (1711-63), in the 1750s, heralding the start of the Coalbrookdale area spearheading the Industrial Revolution by producing iron for the steam engines which transformed manufacturing.

Besides becoming a main supplier of parts for the steam engine market generally, The Coalbrookdale Company opened new ironworks at Horsehay and Ketley and provided the cylinders for the Newcomen engine.

The company also played a pioneering role in the creation of the railways. It made iron wheels, the first iron rails and produced the world’s first steam locomotive, built for Cornishman Sir Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) at Coalbrookdale in 1802.

Unfortunately, the project faltered in 1803 with the death of the company’s gifted ironmaster William Reynolds,  whose father Richard had created the company’s railtrack network designed to service the local mines; no record exists of whether the locomotive actually ran.

 The plaudits went elsewhere in 1804 when Trevithick’s “Penydarren” locomotive made its historic nine-mile journey achieving speeds of nearly 5mph when hauling ten tons of iron by rail to the Merthyr-Cardiff Canal before breaking down on its return journey.

It was Abraham Darby III who completed a hat-trick of  major achievements by his family by building the stunning Iron Bridge after extending the Old Furnace where his father produced iron by smelting coke in 1709.

The idea for the Iron Bridge came in a letter from Shrewsbury architect Thomas Farnolls Pritchard to the celebrated ironmaster John “Iron Mad” Wilkinson, who famously built himself an iron coffin. But  it was Abraham Darby III who was responsible for the visionary enterprise based on a design by Pritchard.

The bridge spanned 100ft using 379 tons of iron and cost  £6,000 to build – around £1.5 million in today’s money.

The year 2009 also marks another major Industrial Revolution anniversary; 200 years ago, on August 17 1809,, the Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton, whose destiny was inextricably linked to Coalbrookdale, died.

While Coalbrookdale provided the iron-making innovations, it was Boulton in Birmingham who kick-started the Industrial Revolution through his celebrated partnership with James Watt, which was begun in 1775 by marketing the steam engine perfected by the Scottish engineer.

Watt’s engine, with its separate condenser and later rotative engine was in a different league to Newcomen’s older atmospheric engine, bringing the steam engine out of the mines to the factories and opening up a new world of mass production.

But it was the extraordinary John Wilkinson, rather than Darby, who became the main supplier of the cylinders for the Boulton/Watt engines through the accuracy of his boring machine. 

In 1776, the second Boulton/Watt engine was installed at Wilkinson’s  New Willey works near his Broseley home on the other side of the Severn to Ironbridge. Watt supervised the operation but it was his main Bersham ironworks in North Wales that was the main source of the cylinders.

It is the huge range of Boulton’s activities that merits his stature as the greatest British industrialist, for the Boulton/Watt partnership was just part of his empire.

Boulton’s circle of friends, known as The Lunar Society, met at his home at Soho House, travelling home by the light of the full moon.

They were a rare gathering of brilliant minds which included master potter Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen and the remarkable scientist, physician and philosopher Erasmus Darwin, who pioneered the evolution theory made famous by his grandson.

The world’s oldest working steam engine, the Smethwick Engine (1779), built by Boulton & Watt to recover canal water, is now in Birmingham’s Thinktank Museum while a weighing scales manufacturer occupies the architecturally uninspired buildings which once housed the Soho Foundry.

North-west of Birmingham, the Coalbrookdale area’s industrial heritage has been spectacularly preserved. In 1959 Darby’s Old Furnace, buried in soil, was restored.

Today, it has become what de Haan describes as “the shrine of the Industrial Revolution” housed in a neat modern triangular building with a glass frontage where a walkway guides visitors around the impressive 25ft high brickwork (which is missing its upper 10ft) of the furnace where great innovation took place.

Some may view Coalbrookdale as the birthplace of global warming as well as the Industrial Revolution. But one would like to imagine that if those men who changed the world – the  Darbys, Wilkinson, Boulton and Watt – were around today, ingenuity would prevail.

* A version of this article is published in the July edition of History Today magazine.