Abraham Darby I

Abraham Darby (c.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. The son of John and Ann Darby, he was born at Wrens Nest, Woodsetton near Sedgley, Staffordshire; just across the county boundary from Dudley.

Darby was apprenticed in Birmingham to a malt mill maker, and 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, he seems only to have been assisted 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, and then blown with a bellows. Charcoal was one of the few fuels that could reach the required temperatures to smelt iron, around 1500°C, and as the iron industry grew and chopped down entire forests to produce it, 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 were 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.

See also

* Abraham Darby II
* Abraham Darby III

Further reading

*A. Raistrick, Dynasty of Ironfounders: The Darbys of Coalbrookdale (New edn 1989).
*N. Cox, 'Imagination and innovation of an industrial pioneer: The first Abraham Darby' Industrial Archaeology Review 12(2) (1990), 127-144.
*C. K. Hyde, Technological change and the British iron industry 1700-1870 (Princeton 1977), chapter 2.

External links

*The Darby family of inventors
*The Darby family
*The Darby dynasty
*The Coalbrookdale Company, with which the family was associated

{{Persondata