Industrial Revolution · CHAPTER 3 ·
Steam power, coal and iron
Chapter 3 of The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914: “Steam, Coal and Iron”
James Watt’s steam engine, patented in 1769 and built from 1775 with Matthew Boulton at Soho near Birmingham, used about a quarter of the coal of Newcomen’s engines. Coke smelting at Coalbrookdale freed iron from charcoal, and canals moved coal cheaply to the towns, turning coal into power, metal and transport.
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The map above is the world of The Industrial Revolution in Europe, 1820 — Coal, iron and the canal network.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1815 · Europe in 1815.
Part of IB History: The Industrial Revolution →
SHORT EXPLANATION
Britain’s industrial districts grew around a fuel that had once been used chiefly for heat. Coal could power an engine, supply a furnace and travel by canal. James Watt’s engine, patented in 1769 and built with Matthew Boulton from 1775 at Soho, condensed steam in a separate chamber. It used about a quarter as much coal as Thomas Newcomen’s older mine-pumping engine, rather as a modern engine can travel farther on the same tank of fuel.
At Coalbrookdale, ironmakers used coke—coal baked to drive off impurities—in place of charcoal from forests. Canals made the heavy fuel cheaper to carry. These changes reinforced one another: coal supplied power and iron, while waterways brought it to the people who could use it.
The transition took time. Water wheels supplied about three times as much power as steam engines in 1800, and steam passed water only around 1830. Between 1788 and 1830 iron output rose about tenfold; coal output doubled between 1800 and 1830 to about 30 million tons.
The map shows coalfields as hatched patches from Tyneside to South Wales and canals as blue lines. England and Wales had about 4,000 miles of navigable waterway by 1830. Since moving coal was expensive relative to its value, it often paid to bring iron ore, cotton and workers to the coalfields instead.
The full story
A mine could supply a town with coal, but the deeper its workings went, the more water its owners had to remove. Britain had burned coal for heat since the sixteenth century, and pits on Tyneside shipped it down the coast to London. In 1712 Thomas Newcomen built the first practical steam engine to pump water from mines. Coal was helping solve a problem created by the search for more coal.
Newcomen’s engine consumed a great deal of fuel because each stroke heated and cooled the same cylinder. Waste mattered less at a pit, where coal was almost free. It mattered greatly in Cornwall’s copper and tin mines, where coal had to be brought from elsewhere. In 1765 James Watt, an instrument maker at Glasgow University, saw that a separate chamber could condense the steam while the cylinder stayed hot. He patented the idea in 1769. From 1775 he and Matthew Boulton built engines at Soho near Birmingham; by 1800 they had made between 450 and 500, many for Cornish mines. The saving in fuel made the improved engine especially attractive where coal was dear.
Iron production faced a different limit. Smelting iron from ore with charcoal required wood, and the supply of woodland constrained output. In 1709 Abraham Darby smelted iron using coke at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. His grandson’s works later cast the Iron Bridge across the Severn in 1779. Coal could now help make the metal used in bridges, engines and machines without requiring a corresponding supply of forest charcoal.
The metal from a blast furnace, called pig iron, was brittle. For tough wrought iron that could be hammered and rolled, it needed further treatment. Henry Cort’s puddling and rolling process of 1783–84 stirred pig iron to burn out carbon and made wrought iron in large batches. Ironworks gathered on coalfields, especially at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, where Cyfarthfa and Dowlais became the world’s largest ironworks. British pig iron output rose from about 68,000 tons in 1788 to about 678,000 in 1830. Cheaper iron in turn reduced the cost of engines, rails and machines.
Coal’s bulk made transport essential. In 1761 the Duke of Bridgewater opened a canal from his mines at Worsley to Manchester, and the town’s coal price fell by about half. Investors copied the example. The Trent and Mersey connected Staffordshire’s pottery towns with both coasts; the Grand Junction joined Birmingham to London. The blue lines on the map show a network that by 1830 formed part of roughly 4,000 miles of navigable waterway in England and Wales.
Steam did not immediately displace the older sources of power. In 1800 water wheels still supplied about three times as much power as steam engines. What changed over time was the range of work coal could do: engines made it a source of motion, furnaces used it to make iron, and canals carried it to customers. Railways and steel would build on that combination.
FULL EXPLANATION
From an organic to a mineral economy
E. A. Wrigley’s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (2010) locates the decisive change in the economy’s energy supply. In an organic economy, fuel comes from the land’s annual produce. Land used to grow fuel is land unavailable for food or timber, so growth runs against a limit even when it is real. Coal opened a much larger store: the accumulated remains of plant growth over millions of years. A rough comparison shows the scale. A ton of coal yields about as much heat as an acre of woodland grows in a year. Britain’s output of roughly 30 million tons around 1830 was therefore equivalent to perhaps 30 million acres of forest, close to England’s entire land area. Kenneth Pomeranz makes that calculation central to his comparison with China. There is a difficulty with treating coal as an explanation of timing. England had burned large quantities since the 1600s, and early factories mostly used water. Wrigley’s argument answers a longer-run question: coal allowed growth to continue once available land was fully used. On that interpretation, the machines mattered because they made this mineral energy available for more kinds of work.
How slowly steam spread
The famous engine did not at once become Britain’s principal source of power. Alan Kanefsky estimated that around 1800 steam engines supplied about 35,000 horsepower, compared with about 120,000 from water wheels; steam passed water only around 1830. N. F. R. Crafts found little contribution from steam to British productivity before the 1830s, while G. N. von Tunzelmann showed that Watt’s engine saved many mills only modest sums compared with a good water wheel. These figures make a mill owner’s choice easier to understand. Engines cost money and early examples broke down. Water power, meanwhile, was improving through iron wheels and larger reservoirs. Steam had other advantages: a river fixed a mill to a particular site and could fail in drought, whereas an engine could run beside a town canal near workers and coal, at a larger scale. Around 1800 Richard Trevithick’s high-pressure engines made steam lighter and stronger, so it could move as well as pump and turn. The locomotive followed. Crafts and C. K. Harley estimated overall growth of about 1.4 per cent a year in 1780–1801 and 1.9 per cent in 1801–31. Those modest rates are consistent with the gradual spread of a technology whose later consequences were far-reaching.
Iron, coke and the move to the coalfields
Darby’s use of coke in 1709 did not immediately free every ironmaker from charcoal. His iron could be cast into cooking pots and similar objects, but it was too brittle for the wrought iron a blacksmith needed to hammer into shape. Better blast furnaces, steam-driven bellows from the 1770s, and Henry Cort’s puddling process of 1783–84, which stirred molten iron to burn out carbon, made coke iron suitable for most uses. The fuel changed the industry’s location. Charcoal works had stood near woodland in the Weald, the Forest of Dean and Furness. Coke works gathered where coal and ironstone, a local iron ore, lay together: Shropshire, the Black Country west of Birmingham, South Wales and later Scotland. Merthyr Tydfil grew from a village into Wales’s largest town. By 1845 Dowlais had 18 blast furnaces producing about 88,000 tons of iron a year. How much did iron itself drive growth before the railways? Historians disagree; war, nails, tools and farm implements accounted for much early demand. The growth also rested on harsh and dangerous work by miners and ironworkers. In 1831 Merthyr’s workers rose against wage cuts and debt. Cheap iron nevertheless made a later development possible: thousands of miles of iron railway track depended on metal that could be produced cheaply.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
Coal close to towns and the sea. Coal was useful to distant customers only if it could be carried to them. British seams lay near coasts and navigable rivers; Tyneside had shipped coal to London since the Middle Ages, while Midland and Lancashire fields lay beside growing towns. Britain mined about 15 million tons a year by 1800. Accessible, cheap fuel gave both inventors and buyers a reason to develop machines that consumed it.
Flooded mines demanded engines. Deep mines encountered water faster than horses or water wheels could remove it. Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine of 1712 used air pressure on a piston to pump it out. Coal mines could feed its wasteful appetite with free waste coal, and by 1800 hundreds worked in Britain. Cornwall’s copper and tin mines had to pay more for coal, creating a market for James Watt’s more efficient engine.
Skilled hands and patient capital. A separate condenser could save fuel, but Watt needed more than an idea to sell a working engine. John Wilkinson supplied accurately bored cylinders from 1775, using a machine patented in 1774 for cannon. Birmingham metalworkers made parts, and Matthew Boulton brought capital, a factory and salesmanship. Parliament extended the patent in 1775 to 1800, giving the partners twenty-five years to recover their investment. Craftsmen, investors and lawmakers helped turn the invention into a product.
Cotton and war created demand. Buyers gave the new technologies a reason to spread. Cotton mills wanted reliable power, and the wars with France in 1793–1815 required iron for cannon, shot and ships. Contracts and wartime prices encouraged owners such as the Crawshays of Cyfarthfa in South Wales to expand; mill owners who had outgrown their streams turned to steam. Each industry could become a customer for another, making investment in costly equipment worthwhile.
THE TURNING POINT
Boulton and Watt at Soho, 1775. At Soho near Birmingham in 1775, Watt’s fuel-saving idea acquired the means to reach customers. His separate condenser cooled used steam outside the cylinder; Matthew Boulton provided a factory, capital and salesmanship, John Wilkinson supplied accurate cylinders, and the patent was extended. The partners charged an annual fee equal to a third of each customer’s coal savings, connecting payment to the benefit. Watt’s rotative design in the 1780s extended steam from pumping to turning machinery. With canals delivering coal, factories could be built away from the rivers that had supplied water power.
What it changed
Locomotives grow out of colliery engines. A locomotive grew out of work at collieries, or coal mines, and ironworks, where high-pressure engines could be made light enough to move on rails. Richard Trevithick ran one at Penydarren near Merthyr in 1804. Tyneside colliery engineers, including George Stephenson, built locomotives to haul coal wagons. Chapter 4 follows them to the first public railways: within about forty years an engine for hauling coal had become part of a national system carrying goods and people.
Industry gathers on the coalfields. Moving heavy coal cost money, so industries that burned it had reason to gather near the seams. Lancashire and Yorkshire textile towns, South Wales iron towns and north-east shipbuilding towns stood on or beside coalfields. So did the Black Country, the metalworking district west of Birmingham named for its smoke. Chapter 5 follows the towns that developed there; the location of fuel helped shape where people lived and worked.
The continent copies the model. Britain’s combination of coal, iron and canals appeared in Belgium’s coal belt from Mons to Liège, the Ruhr valley in western Germany and Upper Silesia, now in Poland, often with British machines and engineers. The map shades Belgium and Switzerland as industrializing by 1820. Chapter 7 follows both borrowing and different paths: coal shaped heavy industry’s location, while coal-poor Switzerland used water power and skill.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the steam engine the cause of the Industrial Revolution, or one of its results?
The engine answered needs that already existed. Newcomen built it to drain mines in an established coal industry; Watt found buyers among mines and mills that were already expanding. Water supplied more power until about 1830, and N. F. R. Crafts and other economic historians find steam’s contribution to productivity small before the railway age. In those respects steam was a result of industrialization. Its later effects were considerable. By converting coal’s heat into motion, engines allowed factories and ironworks to work away from particular rivers, encouraged concentration on coalfields and in towns, and eventually powered railways. They made the mineral economy, powered by coal dug from the ground, fully productive. Steam was thus a late but decisive cause of the revolution becoming self-sustaining: its most familiar technology mattered greatly after earlier industries had created a market for it.
An interesting fact
Mine and mill owners understood what a horse could do. James Watt used that familiar measure to explain his engines, estimating the work of a horse turning a mill. He defined horsepower as 33,000 foot-pounds per minute, enough to lift 33,000 pounds one foot in a minute. The generous estimate made his engines look modest, and customers bought them rated in horses. Car engines still use the unit. Watt received another connection with the measurement of power after his death. In 1882 the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a national society of scientists, named the scientific unit of power the watt in his honor. He devised one unit to sell engines; the other bears his name.
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