One cause of the rising demand for coal in Britain was the depletion of the woodland and supplies of charcoal, making manufacturers anxious to find a new source of fuel. Of particular importance were experiments of the iron industry in using coal instead of charcoal to smelt iron ore and to process cast iron into wrought iron and steel. The first success in these attempts came in 1709, when Abraham Darby, a Quaker ironfounder in Shropshire, used coke to reduce iron ore in his enlarged and improved blast furnace. Other processes, such as glassmaking, brickmaking, and the manufacture of pottery, had already adopted coal as their staple fuel. Great technical improvements had taken place in all these processes. In ceramics, for instance, the long efforts of European manufacturers to imitate the hard, translucent quality of Chinese porcelain culminated in Meissen at the beginning of the 18th century; the process was subsequently discovered independently in Britain in the middle of the century. Stoneware, requiring a lower firing temperature than porcelain, had achieved great decorative distinction in the 17th century as a result of the Dutch success with opaque white tin glazes at their Delft potteries, and the process had been widely imitated.
The period from 1500 to 1750 witnessed a steady expansion in mining for minerals other than coal and iron. The gold and silver mines of Saxony and Bohemia provided the inspiration for the treatise by Agricola, De re metallica, mentioned above, which distilled the cumulative experience of several centuries in mining and metalworking and became, with the help of some brilliant woodcuts and the printing press, a worldwide manual on mining practice. Queen Elizabeth I introduced German miners to England in order to develop the mineral resources of the country, and one result of this was the establishment of brass manufacture. This metal, an alloy of copper and zinc, had been known in the ancient world and in Eastern civilizations but was not developed commercially in western Europe until the 17th century. Metallic zinc had still not been isolated, but brass was made by heating copper with charcoal and calamine, an oxide of zinc mined in England in the Mendip Hills and elsewhere, and was worked up by hammering, annealing (a heating process to soften the material), and wiredrawing into a wide range of household and industrial commodities. Other nonferrous metals such as tin and lead were sought out and exploited with increasing enterprise in this period, but as their ores commonly occurred at some distance from sources of coal, as in the case of the Cornish tin mines, the employment of Newcomen engines to assist in drainage was rarely economical, and this circumstance restricted the extent of the mining operations.
Three methods of ventilating a mine, woodcut from De re metallica by Georgius Agricola, published 1556.The Granger Collection, New York
New commodities
Following the dramatic expansion of the European nations into the Indian Ocean region and the New World, the commodities of these parts of the world found their way back into Europe in increasing volume. These commodities created new social habits and fashions and called for new techniques of manufacture. Tea became an important trade commodity but was soon surpassed in volume and importance by the products of specially designed plantations, such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, and cocoa. Sugar refining, depending on the crystallization of sugar from the syrupy molasses derived from the cane, became an important industry. So did the processing of tobacco, for smoking in clay pipes (produced in bulk at Delft and elsewhere) or for taking as snuff. Cotton had been known before as an Eastern plant, but its successful transplantation to the New World made much greater quantities available and stimulated the emergence of an important new textile industry.
The woolen cloth industry in Britain provided a model and precedent upon which the new cotton industry could build. Already in the Middle Ages, the processes of cloth manufacture had been partially mechanized upon the introduction of fulling mills and the use of spinning wheels. But in the 18th century the industry remained almost entirely a domestic or cottage one, with most of the processing being performed in the homes of the workers, using comparatively simple tools that could be operated by hand or foot. The most complicated apparatus was the loom, but this could usually be worked by a single weaver, although wider cloths required an assistant. It was a general practice to install the loom in an upstairs room with a long window giving maximum natural light. Weaving was regarded as a man’s work, spinning being assigned to the women of the family (hence, “spinsters”). The weaver could use the yarn provided by up to a dozen spinsters, and the balanced division of labour was preserved by the weaver’s assuming responsibility for supervising the cloth through the other processes, such as fulling. Pressures to increase the productivity of various operations had already produced some technical innovations by the first half of the 18th century. The first attempts at devising a spinning machine, however, were not successful; and without this, John Kay’s technically successful flying shuttle (a device for hitting the shuttle from one side of the loom to the other, dispensing with the need to pass it through by hand) did not fulfill an obvious need. It was not until the rapid rise of the cotton cloth industry that the old, balanced industrial system was seriously upset and that a new, mechanized system, organized on the basis of factory production, began to emerge. Agriculture
Another major area that began to show signs of profound change in the 18th century was agriculture. Stimulated by greater commercial activity, the rising market for food caused by an increasing population aspiring to a higher standard of living, and by the British aristocratic taste for improving estates to provide affluent and decorative country houses, the traditional agricultural system of Britain was transformed. It is important to note that this was a British development, as it is one of the indications of the increasing pressures of industrialization there even before the Industrial Revolution, while other European countries, with the exception of the Netherlands, from which several of the agricultural innovations in Britain were acquired, did little to encourage agricultural productivity. The nature of the transformation was complex, and it was not completed until well into the 19th century. It consisted partly of a legal reallocation of land ownership, the “enclosure” movement, to make farms more compact and economical to operate. In part also it was brought about by the increased investment in farming improvements, because the landowners felt encouraged to invest money in their estates instead of merely drawing rents from them. Again, it consisted of using this money for technical improvements, taking the form of machinery—such as Jethro Tull’s mechanical sower—of better drainage, of scientific methods of breeding to raise the quality of livestock, and of experimenting with new crops and systems of crop rotation. The process has often been described as an agricultural revolution, but it is preferable to regard it as an essential prelude to and part of the Industrial Revolution. Construction
Construction techniques did not undergo any great change in the period 1500–1750. The practice of building in stone and brick became general, although timber remained an important building material for roofs and floors, and, in areas in which stone was in short supply, the half-timber type of construction retained its popularity into the 17th century. Thereafter, however, the spread of brick and tile manufacturing provided a cheap and readily available substitute, although it suffered an eclipse on aesthetic grounds in the 18th century, when Classical styles enjoyed a vogue and brick came to be regarded as inappropriate for facing such buildings. Brickmaking, however, had become an important industry for ordinary domestic building by then and, indeed, entered into the export trade as Dutch and Swedish ships regularly carried brick as ballast to the New World, providing a valuable building material for the early American settlements. Cast iron was coming into use in buildings, but only for decorative purposes. Glass was also beginning to become an important feature of buildings of all sorts, encouraging the development of an industry that still relied largely on ancient skills of fusing sand to make glass and blowing, molding, and cutting it into the shapes required. Land reclamation