About Abraham Darby and Many Others

Many factors contributed to the success of Coalbrookdale. The Darbys' were one of the biggest influences on the success of Coalbrookdale; however, there were other factors and individuals, which contributed to the development of Coalbrookdale. I will discuss these in the essay below.
Abraham Darby 1 was born in 1678 as a son of a Quaker locksmith near Dudley. At the age of twenty-one he moved to Bristol and later became a partner in a brassworks. The pots that were made in the brassworks were too expensive for the poor people. The iron industry was doing poorly at this time due to scarcity of the original fuel, charcoal. However Darby had an idea, he thought that he could use coke as a fuel. The use of coke as a fuel to smelt iron had been attempted in the 17th Century, but the first successful process was established by Abraham Darby around 1709 at his newly acquired ironworks in the Coalbrookdale, Shropshire. …