Abraham Darby (1678-1717)

Abraham Darby (ca. 1678 – March 8, 1717) was the first of that name of three generations of an English Quaker family that was key to the development of the Industrial Revolution.

Abraham Darby I, the son of John and Ann Darby, was born at Wrens Nest, Woodsetton, near Sedgley, Staffordshire, just across the county boundary from Dudley. He was descended from nobility, his grandmother Jane having been an illegitimate child of Edward Sutton, 5th Baron Dudley.

Darby was apprenticed in Birmingham to a malt mill maker, then moved to Bristol, where he became a partner in the Baptist Mills Brass Works. The Bristol brass industry employed immigrants from the Netherlands, but in developing new techniques for casting metal pots, Darby seems to have been assisted only by British staff. Certainly there is no indication that any Dutch employees moved from there with him in 1709. In that year, he left Bristol to become an ironmaster with an ironworks at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire.

At the time, the normal way of producing iron was the "bloomery method," in which small batches of iron ore were placed in pans, covered with charcoal, then blown with a bellows. Charcoal was one of the few fuels that could reach the required temperature to smelt iron (about 1500°C); and as the iron industry grew and chopped down entire forests (leading to deforestation) to produce iron, it became increasingly expensive. The iron industry as a whole was continually moving to new locations in an effort to maintain access to charcoal production.

After arriving in Coalbrookdale, Darby attempted to develop coke-powered smelting. This had been tried in the past with little success, but Darby's supply of coal was fairly sulfur-free, and to everyone's surprise, worked. Better yet, he found that the coke would burn in piles, whereas charcoal would only burn in thin sheets. By piling the coke and ore into a large container, he could process considerably more ore in the same time. Further developments of this process led to his introduction of the first coke-consuming blast furnace in 1709. Before that time, blast furnaces had been fueled by charcoal.

The use of the blast furnace dramatically lowered the price of ironmaking, not only because coal was fairly common around the Midlands, but also because it allowed for much larger furnaces. Other ironmasters soon followed Darby's lead, but found that the process was not so easy to adapt. It was later learned that Darby's coal supply, from Cumbria, just happened to have a lower than normal sulfur content, which was key to producing quality iron. Ironmasters slowly adapted the blast furnace process with the introduction of various types of flux that cleaned out the impurities in the coal, and by the mid-1700s iron production had shot up.

In 1717 Abraham Darby died, leaving his son too young as yet to take over the business.

• See Abraham Darby by Samuel Smiles

• See Time Line - People 1

Sources of Information

• [1] Wikipedia