The Iron Men of Shropshire: How They Put the World to Work

The Industrial Revolution was born in Shropshire. Humans had known for millennia how to produce iron but it was an expensive business, needing large amounts of wood to make the charcoal to produce the iron and objects had to be beaten out in a blacksmith’s forge. Then in 1709, one man made the breakthrough that kickstarted the Industrial Revolution: how to make iron in vast quantities using coke instead of charcoal. In that year Abraham Darby built his pioneering coke-fired blast furnace to...