For example, a grant of a new tract of land extended to the monks of Newminster Abbey in Northumberland around 1236 included the right to collect sea weed and sea coal along its shore (the latter likely to fuel their saltworks). There is no doubt that sea coal was often found washed up on the seashore, having eroded from exposed coastal seams. Scholars have offered two explanations for why a similar black, lumpy fuel, dug from the ground, was said to come from the sea. Why “sea” coal? At the time, the term coal was used for what we now call charcoal. At that point, it appears in the written record as sea coal, or carbo maris. But no clear evidence of the widespread and regular use of coal in Britain arises thereafter until the thirteenth century. Ĭoal was used as fuel to some extent in Britain in ancient times – archaeologists have found coal and coal ashes in sites from the Roman imperial era. Britain’s near neighbor and arch-rival France got only one-tenth of its fuel from coal in the Napoleonic time period. This intensive development of coal mining was very particular to the island of Britain, not to Western Europe generally. By that time, however, Britain was extracting nine-tenths of its fuel energy from coal dug from the ground. Vaclav Smil estimates that, globally, 98% of all fuel energy came from plant matter in 1800. To keep it running required vast quantities of coal.įor most of history, across the world, wood served as the primary fuel source for both domestic and industrial heat, either directly or in a pre-cooked form called charcoal. It guzzled fuel in order to reheat its cylinder each cycle until it was warm enough to hold steam, only to cool the cylinder again immediately with the injection of water for the next power stroke. Sea Coalĭespite its sophistication compared to its immediate predecessors, the Newcomen engine was far from efficient. Such seemed to be the case the case with the mutual transmutation of coal, steam, and iron in the early industrial age.
The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras argued that the transformation of materials – such as food becoming flesh and blood – is possible because every kind of substance already contains a share of every other substance within itself. Some of that iron went into the construction of more steam engines. Then the coal produced from the mine went on to be used as fuel to smelt iron, with the help of other steam engines to power the bellows. Later, engines were used to blow fresh air into the shaft and to lift ore to the surface, in mines of all types, including iron mines. Steam engines first came into wide use for pumping water from coal pits, using the mine’s own product to power them. Yet the close ties between these three materials are undeniable. Perhaps, on the other hand, I’m getting carried away. Or perhaps they were in fact three substances of one single organism – iron the bone and sinew, coal the lungs and heart, and steam the pneuma, the spirit, the breath of life. Or perhaps an ecological metaphor is more appropriate – a symbiosis among three species, each nourishing one another and forming the core of a new, mechanical ecosystem, clanking and churning with life. Together they formed a kind of triumvirate, ruling over an industrial empire. The steam engine might have amounted to relatively little if not for its two compatriots, coal and iron.