Abraham Darby

English industrialist and inventor

• Born: c. 1678
• Birthplace: Wren's Nest, near Dudley, Worcestershire, England
• Died: March 8, 1717
• Place of death: Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, England

Darby solved the problem of substituting coal for wood in the making of iron. His use of coke, after further improvements made by his son, Abraham Darby II, and others, changed English iron making from a declining industry into the second leading sector, along with cotton production, of the first Industrial Revolution.

Early Life

Abraham Darby was born in the Midlands of England in a village southwest of Birmingham. This area, dotted with small furnaces and forges, would in later years contain such a concentration of metalworking establishments as to be called the Black Country, for its constant noise and clouds of smoke. Abraham was the only son of John Darby, a farmer who also worked as a nail maker and locksmith. The family were Quakers. The network of faith, mutual aid, and business dealings supported by this religious sect was central to Darby’s subsequent career. As a young boy, Darby worked in the family forge and gained a good knowledge of various kinds of iron working. When he was old enough, the boy was apprenticed to Jonathan Freeth, a Quaker malt mill maker in Birmingham. At the end of his term in 1698, Abraham married Mary Sergeant of Dudley. They moved to Bristol, at that time the second seaport in the country, and there Abraham set up as a malt mill maker in partnership with a number of Quaker merchants, many of whom were also connected with the iron trade.

It seems probable that in 1704, Darby spent some time in Holland, then well known for the skill of its metal casting. There he studied the Dutch method of casting brass pots and even brought back with him some Dutch workers to Bristol.

Life’s Work

In 1706, and back in England, Abraham Darby formed a new partnership, again with Quaker businessmen. They set up a brass works at Baptist Mills. The following year, 1707, Darby and his longtime worker and friend John Thomas were granted a patent for the casting of iron pots in sand, rather than using loam or clay. The importance of this breakthrough was that a cheaper, quicker method had been developed at a time when casting iron was rare, the demand for pots was increasing, and the import of expensive brass pots from Holland was becoming more difficult. Unfortunately, Darby’s partners were not sufficiently impressed, so he sold his shares in Baptist Mills and looked for a place to work on his own.

The place Darby chose for his new business, Coalbrookdale, had many advantages. It lay along the greatest commercial waterway in England, the River Severn. Large deposits of iron and coal lay near the surface within a mile of his works, and there was an abundant supply of wood nearby. In addition, a swift stream descended through the site, a source of power for Darby’s machinery. Iron making had been established there for some time, so premises were already constructed. Important markets were close by at Bridgenorth, Shrewsbury, Bewdley, and Welshpool along the Severn, and at various inland towns. Finally, there were many Quakers active in the area.

Despite all this, Darby chose to enter an industry that had been in decline for almost a century. The principal reason for this decline was that iron making depended on the use of wood. Great quantities of wood were needed to make charcoal. The use of wood for charcoal and the expansion of English agriculture were responsible for clearing many forested areas. By 1600, iron makers in the traditional iron centers of the Forest of Dean and the Sussex Weald had to find wood from farther and farther afield. New, more remote iron districts grew up in the Midlands and Yorkshire, but these, too, suffered shortages in raw materials. The decline of iron production was enhanced by the import of cheap, high-quality iron from Sweden, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, the American colonies. The advantageous position of Coalbrookdale was thus doubly important for the survival of Darby’s business and for the support of his experiments to replace charcoal with coke.

Darby was, above all, a religious man. His entire life was immersed in the Quaker faith. His social contacts were mainly with other Friends; his business partnerships were all with Quakers; his largest customer, Nehemiah Champion of Bristol, was also a coreligionist. At Coalbrookdale, Darby attracted families of Quakers to settle and work for him. Generations of workmen continued to work for the Coalbrookdale Company. All managers until 1897 were Quakers. Weekday meetings were held in the company offices at the works, and on Sundays Darby would take his place with the workers at the meeting. Later visitors confirmed that the friendliness and fellowship of the Quaker meeting carried over into the work situation. Darby’s other great quality was his concern for his family. He and Mary, his wife, had five sons and six daughters.

Darby leased Coalbrookdale in 1708. Almost from the beginning, he used coke in iron making on a commercial scale. Throughout his career at Coalbrookdale, Darby financed his capital requirements and purchased equipment through forming partnerships and taking out mortgages. Operating expenses such as wages were paid out of cash received from sales. From the beginning, Coalbrookdale proved to be modestly successful.

The England of Darby’s day was divided into regional markets limited by problems of communication in the days before the canal, road, and railway booms. Darby and his manager, Richard Ford, traveled the countryside selling their wares. They concentrated particularly on the regional fairs that served as the principal markets for the exchange of goods. Close to Coalbrookdale was the great annual fair at Stourbridge, where goods from all over the country and even from Europe were bought and sold, and then distributed to smaller merchants in the locality. There, Darby and Ford would meet personally with their customers to take orders and collect accounts. The partners found that dealing personally with customers enhanced their business. Furthermore, the method of casting any small iron ware to the customers’ individual specifications, direct from the furnace, and the substitution of coke for coal in many instances meant that Darby was able to satisfy his customers and sell more cheaply than his competitors. Through his modest business success, Darby was able to expand Coalbrookdale considerably. By the time of his death, it was a thriving business.

For the last eighteen months of his life, Darby was seriously ill. His son-in-law and manager, Richard Ford, and the workers ran the business for him. At the end, Darby died intestate. His widow took out papers of administration but half the works were mortgaged to the Bristol banker and longtime Darby partner, Thomas Goldney, who demanded payment and was given more shares in the business. When Mary died, shortly after Abraham, her brother Joshua Sergeant bought three shares (out of sixteen) so that the children might be left something from their father’s efforts. At the time of his father’s death, the oldest son, Abraham Darby II, was six years old.

Significance

Abraham Darby was not a great industrialist, and he profited but little from his invention. For many years, his claim to have been the first to solve the technical problems of using coke in iron making was also in dispute. For this reason, many accounts of the iron industry in Great Britain spend much less space than one would expect on the inventor of a process that served to revolutionize not only the whole industry but also society itself.

There are several reasons for this. To begin with, starting in the early seventeenth century, many individuals took out patents for processes that they claimed successfully used coal or coke to make iron. Beginning with Simon Sturtevant in 1612, through the tragicomic Dud Dudley, who died in 1684 but who may have found a solution, to William Wood in 1728, patents were taken out using coal in the iron-making process. No process, however, proved as successful as that of Abraham Darby. Furthermore, during his own lifetime, Darby did not publicize his invention. In fact, the first public account of Darby’s method did not appear until 1747, thirty years after his death, in a letter to the Royal Society from a visitor to Coalbrookdale.

Darby’s reticence, in part a product of his Quaker background, also resulted from the nature of his business. The many false starts to iron making with coal or coke made potential customers suspicious of an end product that was often characterized by defects and brittleness. From Darby’s own, incomplete business records, it appears that there was a high wastage rate; he was constantly experimenting to improve the quality of his product. In his own day, Darby was unable to produce good bar iron capable of being pounded in a forge; all products were cast directly from the furnace. Darby was also more fortunate than he probably realized in that the local coal he used was particularly pure, with a low sulfur content, and the resulting coke allowed for an acceptable form of iron. When he offered his invention to other ironmasters in Cumberland in northwest England and in Dolgelly, South Wales, they preferred to continue the use of charcoal, largely because the results from their own coke were so poor. Finally, Darby restricted his business to one branch of the English iron industry. It was by far the smallest branch and was confined to domestic users. Most iron makers worked with malleable, not cast, iron and used forges as well as furnaces. For them, during Darby’s lifetime, the use of coal was not an option except to produce a fire in the forge to shape iron made with charcoal.

Improvements in the use of coke were carried out by Abraham Darby II, who, until the discovery of his own wife’s diaries, was thought to deserve the credit for the successful use of coke in iron making. He was able to produce iron of much higher quality than his father, even bar iron for forge work. Further improvements by the great ironmasters later in the eighteenth century and the invention of the puddling process by Henry Cort meant that it was after 1780 before the use of coke in iron making became general.

Coalbrookdale continues to be a functioning ironworks, a living museum operated by the Ironbridge Gorge Trust. It is honored as one of the best in Europe, visited by thousands of tourists, schoolchildren, and scholars, and exhibiting the iron-making activities of the Darby family in the eighteenth century. Through the museum, Abraham Darby and his achievements live on.

Bibliography

Ashton, T. S. Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution. 2d ed. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1954. An excellent work on the iron industry in Great Britain. Ashton’s work is strong in providing the context of Darby’s inventions. A good discussion of Darby’s importance in the preface, with a first-rate treatment of Darby in chapters 1 and 2.

Boyns, T., ed. The Steel Industry. 4 vols. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1997. Volume 1 of this history of the steel industry examines Darby and the coal iron industry in eighteenth century England.

Deane, Phyllis. The First Industrial Revolution. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. The best short account of the Industrial Revolution by one of England’s most distinguished economic historians. Chapter 7 is about the iron industry.

Flinn, M. W. “Abraham Darby and the Coke Smelting Process.” Economica, n.s. 26 (1959): 54-59. Surveys the evidence concerning the date of Darby’s successful use of coke in iron making.

Hyde, C. K. Technological Change in the British Iron Industry, 1700-1870. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. A comprehensive analysis that explains the slow adoption of coke for iron making and the significance of the myriad technological advances that led to the rapid growth of the industry by 1800.

Mantoux, Paul. The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century: An Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory System in England. Translated by Marjorie Vernon. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. Rev. ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961. A brilliant, clearly written, comprehensive account by a famous French historian and first published in French in 1905. Still unsurpassed on most aspects of the Industrial Revolution. Mantoux sheds light on the regional nature of England’s economic life and its iron industry.

“Out of the Cauldron.” New Scientist 160, no. 2164 (December 12, 1998): 58. Focuses on Darby’s patent for casting iron bellied pots and his use of coal to produce iron.

Raistrick, Arthur. Dynasty of Ironfounders: The Darbys and Coalbrookdale. London: Longmans, Green, 1953. A standard account that is excellent on the Darby family and informative about the workings of the company despite patchy evidence for some periods.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Quakers in Science and Industry. Newton Abbot, England: David and Charles, 1950. Reprint. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968. Very good for explaining the importance of Darby’s Quaker beliefs and the network of which he was a part.

Trinder, Barrie. The Darbys of Coalbrookdale. London: Phillimore, 1974. A short, popular account of the ironmaster family that draws on some information not available to Arthur Raistrick.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. “The Most Extraordinary District in the World”: Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale. London: Phillimore, 1977. An anthology of visitors’ impressions dealing mainly with the century following 1750. Good for a flavor of the physical surroundings. Augmented by prints and photographs.