Power point II. The Industrial Revolution II. The Spread of the Industrial Revolution across the Globe: Convergence dynamics and the Standard Model

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  The use of coal did not begin with the Industrial Revolution. It was particularly widespread in Britain, where coal served a wide variety of purposes, both domestic (heating) and industrial: ‘brickmaking, glass, ceramics, soap boiling, lime burning, forging, distilling, and brewing’ (Mokyr, 2009, p. 22).
  
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  What changed during the Industrial Revolution was primarily:
  

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   the introduction of the steam engine which allowed to pump water from coal mines
   
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   the use of coal in the iron and steel industry
   

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  In 1709 Abraham Darby discovered how to smelt iron ore using coke (a purified form of coal) rather than charcoal as a fuel, and the process started becoming widespread in Britain in the second half of the century.
  
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  In the long run this permitted a vast expansion of the IRON industry. As Wrigley (1988, p. 80) put it,
  
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  ‘Iron . . . has many physical properties that make it of the greatest value to man but as long as the production of 10,000 tons of iron involved the felling of 100,000 acres of woodland, it was inevitable that it was used only where a few hundred-weight or at most a few tons of iron would suffice for the task in hand’.
  
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  The switch to coal allowed humans to tap into a vast capital reserve of energy and to develop the iron industry.
  
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  In 1712, Thomas Newcomen developed his famous steam engine to pump water from mines.
  

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  Deposits of iron ore were scattered across Europe and were thus widely available and in abundant supply, whereas wood had become scarce in several areas.
  
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  To overcome this “wood brake,” which was binding in the 17th and 18th centuries, societies had to proceed to a new technology independent of wood.
  
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  Temporary solution: import iron from Sweden and later Russia (where wood was abundant and labor cheap) for the increasing British iron consumption.
  
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  Around 1860 Britain was heavily dominant, with the next largest country, France, producing less than a quarter of the British output.
  

The coal-based British iron industry

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  At the beginning of the eighteenth century the British iron industry was small and unable to meet domestic demand, with imports exceeding domestic production.
  
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  British costs of production were high, largely because of the high cost of charcoal.
  
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  The transition from charcoal to mineral fuel techniques made possible a process of import substitution
  

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  As late as 1755, only 20 percent of pig iron produced in England and Wales was being smelted using
  

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  Abraham Darby is usually credited with being the first successfully to operate blast furnaces using
  

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  The large increases in production turned Britain from one of the foremost importers of iron products in the eighteenth century into a net exporter by the early nineteenth century.
  
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  Within a century, the British iron industry had transformed itself from a small high-cost producer into the leading supplier of iron products for the world market.
  

Brief overview of the production stages and processes in the iron industry, emphasizing the distinction between traditional and modern methods.

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  In the first stage of production, iron ore was smelted in the blast furnace.
  
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  In the traditional method, the fuel was charcoal, derived from wood, while the modern process used coke, derived from coal.
  
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  The output, “pig iron,” contained a lot of impurities and a high content of carbon, which made it brittle and unsuitable for
  

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  Pig iron had to be further refined at the forge to produce malleable or wrought iron.
  
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  This refining largely involved reduction of the carbon content and required re-heating, again either using charcoal in the
  

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  The graph shows the evolution of the share of iron produced with coke (new technology).
  
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  For instance, c.1770, 50% of pig iron was produced using coke in England-Wales.
  
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  The rest was produced with the old technology, namely charcoal.
  
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  Southern Belgium was the first and almost the only continental region to follow the British model in its entirety because as in Britain, iron ore and coal were situated close together, duties were low and final markets close.
  
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  In the 1860s German and French charcoal- using ironworks retreated into niches and in the end sank into insignificance.
  
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  In Austria and Sweden instead persisted the use of charcoal technology.