Why Did the Industrial Revolution Run on Coal? Steam, Iron and the Fuel Under Britain

Wood was the fuel of every pre-industrial economy, for cooking, heating, brewing, glassmaking, brickmaking and, as charcoal, for smelting iron, and a growing population with a fixed area of forest hits a ceiling. England hit it early, because its land was farmed and its towns were growing, and by the reign of Elizabeth I the price of firewood in London had risen so far that householders turned to sea coal, shipped down the coast from Newcastle, which was dirtier and smellier and half the price. By 1700 London was burning a million tonnes a year, its air was famous, and the collieries of the north-east had become the largest industrial enterprise in Europe, with the deepest mines, the first railways, wooden wagonways on which horses pulled coal to the river, and a problem that would change the world, which was water.

A coal mine fills with water, and the deeper it goes the more there is; by 1700 the mines were down to the limit that horse-driven pumps could drain. Thomas Newcomen, an ironmonger from Devon, built the first practical steam engine in 1712 to pump a colliery in Staffordshire, a beam engine in which steam condensed in a cylinder pulled a piston down and worked the pump, and it was so wasteful of fuel that it made sense only where fuel was free, at the pithead. James Watt's improvements from 1769, the separate condenser and rotary motion, cut the coal consumption by three quarters and let the engine drive machinery anywhere, and the mines that had needed the engine now supplied the engines that needed the coal. The sequence:

• •1709: Abraham Darby smelts iron with coke, coal baked to remove its sulphur, instead of charcoal, freeing iron from the forest
• •1712: Newcomen's engine drains mines and makes deeper coal reachable
• •1769 to 1785: Watt's engines drive mills, and the factory no longer needs a river
• •1784: Henry Cort's puddling process makes wrought iron with coal in bulk
• •1804 to 1830: the steam locomotive, from Trevithick's Welsh tramway to the Liverpool and Manchester railway, moves coal and then everything else
• •1850s: steamships, the Bessemer converter and gas lighting, all fed by coal

Other countries had coal; China had burned it for centuries. The economic historian E. A. Wrigley's argument, now broadly accepted, is that Britain's coal was unusually cheap where it was needed: the seams were thick, near the surface and near navigable water, so that a tonne at the pithead in Newcastle cost a fraction of what it cost in Paris or Beijing after carriage, and a cheap fuel made a fuel-hungry technology like the early steam engine worth building. High wages and cheap energy together, in Robert Allen's version, made it profitable to replace workers with machines in Britain and nowhere else in the eighteenth century. Britain's coal output rose from 3 million tonnes in 1700 to 30 million in 1830 and 290 million in 1913, when it employed a million miners, and every other industrialising country, Belgium, Germany, the United States, built its industry on its own coalfield.

The price was paid in the mines and the air. Children hauled coal through seams too low for adults until the Mines Act of 1842 barred women and boys under ten from underground; firedamp explosions killed hundreds at a time, and the Davy lamp of 1815, meant to prevent them, let miners work in gas that would have stopped them before; and the slow deaths from dust and from the smoke of the cities went uncounted. The smoke that hung over Manchester and London was coal, the Great Smog of 1952 was coal, and the carbon dioxide that began rising in the atmosphere in the nineteenth century, measured in Antarctic ice, is the same fuel. The Industrial Revolution released humanity from the limit of the land by drawing on a store of sunlight laid down in the Carboniferous, and the bill for that is the one being paid now.

Britain's coal peaked in 1913, its last deep mine closed in 2015, and its last coal-fired power station shut in September 2024, 142 years after the world's first opened in London; the country that began the age of coal was the first major economy to leave it. Coal still supplies about a third of the world's electricity, mostly in China and India, whose industrial revolutions have run on it for the same reasons Britain's did, and the question of the next fifty years is whether the energy that the coal made possible can be had from somewhere else. The wagonways of the Tyne became the railways, the pumping engines became the power stations, and the black rock that outcropped on the Northumberland coast is the reason the modern world looks as it does.

The Industrial Revolution ran on coal because Britain ran out of wood, sat on thick seams near the sea that made coal cheaper there than anywhere else, and built the steam engine to drain its own mines; coke freed iron from charcoal, Watt's engine freed the factory from the river, and the locomotive and steamship moved the fuel and the goods. Cheap energy and dear labour made machines worth building in Britain first, the cost fell on miners, city air and the atmosphere, and the country that began the age of coal ended its own use of it in 2024.