PH_Industry

Introduction

Industry

Agriculture

Population

Appendices

Recommended Reading

An industrial case study: iron

In the fifty years after 1760 the annual output of British pig iron increased eightfold. As with cotton such an increase in output depended upon significant technological innovations particularly in steam engines for pumping and hoisting which gave cheaper access to deeper seams of better quality coal and iron. Blast furnace technology also improved with the application of steam which created a blast hot enough to smelt efficiently with coke rather than charcoal. Henry Cort patented his famous puddling and rolling process in 1783-4 and it was rapidly adopted in the 1790s. By using great heat in a reverberatory furnace iron could be produced more quickly and with less fuel costs and this iron could pass straight to the rolling mill to produced plates or bars ready for further processing. This innovation made the industry much less reliant upon high quality imported ores because domestic

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Julius Caesar Ibbetson, An Iron Forge at Merthyr Tydfil, 1789.
Source: Peter Lord, The Visual Culture of Wales: Industrial Society

iron could be now be used to much better effect. The fall in the price of pig iron also meant that cast iron was substituted for other metals, stone and wood in a great variety of engineering products and in construction.

Once coal and coke were widely used in all the processes of iron manufacture, it saved enormously on costs to integrate the different stages of iron production and manufacture in massive iron works on coalfield sites. Iron masters began to invest heavily in coal mining and large combined coal and iron firms emerged such as the Derby's of Coalbrookdale, the walkers of Rotherham, the Wilkinsons of Bersham and Broseley, the Crawshays in South Wales and the Carron company in Scotland. Such firms included iron and coal mines, blast furnaces and foundries, forges, rolling and slitting mills, and produced finished iron goods such as machinery and steam engines, as well as bar iron. They employed thousands of workers under one roof in a disciplined and arduous working environment but there remained many much smaller units in the industry employed, as in cotton, on a subcontracting basis or in specialised niches which required more hand work. Also, as with cotton, the iron industry was increasingly concentrated regionally in Shropshire, Staffordshire, South Wales and in Lanarkshire with lesser centres n Derbyshire, West Yorkshire and Tyneside.

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Richard Wilson, Richard Crawshay, c. 1800
Source: Peter Lord, The Visual Culture of Wales: Industrial Society

Further improvements in blast furnace technology in the first half of the nineteenth century (including J.B. Neilsons' hot blast process) and in forging

(including James Nasmyth's steam hammer) improved efficiency in the industry and brought down the costs of iron goods of all kinds. Most of the output went to the home market where iron was becoming the main constructional material for machinery, steam engines, boilers, cranes, machine tools, water wheels and agricultural equipment. Less than a third of the output of the industry was exported in the 1840s compared with around 60% of the output of the cotton industry. Major expansion of furnace production for military uses during the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815) was followed by post war overproduction and a weeding out of less efficient firms which went bankrupt. The slack was absorbed as the economy expanded in the 1820s and 1830s and particularly as the railway industry began to take off. The latter demanded iron for lines, stations, bridges as well as locomotives and quickly became to dominant factor in the industry's expansion. Transport improvements were closely linked to the success of the iron industry enabling heavy raw materials and finished products to be moved around more cheaply and, in turn, iron was the foundation of revolutionary new transport technologies including railways and iron ships, and iron bridges.