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For a specific date in the first energy transition—coal’s becoming a distinctive industrial fuel, superior to wood—January 1709 could well do. That month, Abraham Darby, an English metalworker and Quaker entrepreneur, working his blast furnace in a village called Coalbrookdale, figured out a way to remove impurities from coal, thus turning it into coke, a higher-carbon version of coal. The coke replaced charcoal, which is partly-burned wood, and had been the standard fuel for smelting. Darby was convinced, he said, “that a more effective means of iron production may be achieved.” He was also ridiculed. “There are many who doubt me foolhardy,” he said. But his method worked.1 Though it took a few decades to spread, Darby’s innovation lowered the cost of smelting iron, making iron much more available for industrial uses, helping to spur the Industrial Revolution.
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