coal and had probably burned it). From 1325 there is a record suggesting that a British mine exported a boatload of the strange black material to Pontoise, in northern France.
At first the black and flammable stones were used mainly for iron smelting and lime burning. It was only in Tudor times, when the climate turned chillier and demand for wood for house building soared, that people began to use coal to heat their homes. After that there was no stopping it. Wherever in the country coal was exposed on the surface—near Gateshead, close to Mansfield, outside Sheffield, in South Wales, near the Scottish town of Lanark—men clawed hungrily for it. It was convenient if the coal remained close to the surface: It was easy to work, and cheap. But it became so important a source of energy and heat that, by the fifteenth century, if a coal seam happened to plungedeep into the ground, then, discounting all risks in the name of profit, they promptly dug after it.
Coal miners were very limited at first. Mines flooded, they collapsed, noxious gases poisoned workers or burst into flame. But then came technologies that allowed miners to dig deeper, to pursue seams for longer, and as a result through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the industry advanced at a prodigious rate. Chain pumps were brought in from Germany, and mines became drier. Thomas Newcomen invented the atmospheric engine, allowing pits to go deeper, and allowing drowned mines to be pumped out and worked again.
At around the time of Smith’s birth, as we have seen, James Watt came along with his condensing steam engine, and mines could be dug to reach seams four and five hundred feet deep; and then again a decade later, once Watt’s double-acting steam engine had been perfected and its rocking beams had been adapted to move huge iron wheels, so everything changed. Air could be pumped down to the miners, water could be pumped from where it gathered, elevators could be created that would speed workers down to the coalface and that would haul them and their coal back up to the surface again.
I n 1800 all Britain’s coal mines, in which men were now working as deep as a thousand feet below the surface, were producing a million tons of a variety of types of coal each year. Landowners realized that they possibly had beneath their lawns and meadows and forests huge seams of coal that could make them rich beyond their dreams. Everyone was suddenly on the lookout for dark rocks, for traces of blackness, for hints that somewhere below might be a lode of that rich, soft, sweet-smelling substance that was for England what emeralds and silver and diamonds were elsewhere. Pits were dug and quarries were clawed—but often recklessly, incautiously—at every spotwhere the earth seemed to offer up its dark temptation. More often than not the darkness was a chimera, a black shale, a slate, a mudstone, which had no more chance of burning than granite. Failures dogged the diggings of all too many countrymen: Some sort of guide, some sort of a map was needed, a way for men to forecast with some accuracy what might lie underneath them.
Men had been mining coal in northern Somerset since the thirteenth century—there is a cryptic reference in Roman writings to a house in Bath having been heated by such stone, locally mined. The Carboniferous Coal Measures that outcrop along the flanks of Pennine Hills in northern England, and in South Wales and southern Scotland, outcrop around the Bristol Channel too. The same hot dark swamps that eventually fossilize to produce coal existed south of Bath three hundred million years ago, just as they existed near Durham, Leeds, Mansfield, Lanark, and the Rhondda Valley and—since coal measures have been laid down all over Europe—just as they existed also in Silesia and Westphalia, in France and Belgium and across vast tracts of Russia.
The conditions in which they were formed were, miraculously for Europe’s economic development, much
At first the black and flammable stones were used mainly for iron smelting and lime burning. It was only in Tudor times, when the climate turned chillier and demand for wood for house building soared, that people began to use coal to heat their homes. After that there was no stopping it. Wherever in the country coal was exposed on the surface—near Gateshead, close to Mansfield, outside Sheffield, in South Wales, near the Scottish town of Lanark—men clawed hungrily for it. It was convenient if the coal remained close to the surface: It was easy to work, and cheap. But it became so important a source of energy and heat that, by the fifteenth century, if a coal seam happened to plungedeep into the ground, then, discounting all risks in the name of profit, they promptly dug after it.
Coal miners were very limited at first. Mines flooded, they collapsed, noxious gases poisoned workers or burst into flame. But then came technologies that allowed miners to dig deeper, to pursue seams for longer, and as a result through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the industry advanced at a prodigious rate. Chain pumps were brought in from Germany, and mines became drier. Thomas Newcomen invented the atmospheric engine, allowing pits to go deeper, and allowing drowned mines to be pumped out and worked again.
At around the time of Smith’s birth, as we have seen, James Watt came along with his condensing steam engine, and mines could be dug to reach seams four and five hundred feet deep; and then again a decade later, once Watt’s double-acting steam engine had been perfected and its rocking beams had been adapted to move huge iron wheels, so everything changed. Air could be pumped down to the miners, water could be pumped from where it gathered, elevators could be created that would speed workers down to the coalface and that would haul them and their coal back up to the surface again.
I n 1800 all Britain’s coal mines, in which men were now working as deep as a thousand feet below the surface, were producing a million tons of a variety of types of coal each year. Landowners realized that they possibly had beneath their lawns and meadows and forests huge seams of coal that could make them rich beyond their dreams. Everyone was suddenly on the lookout for dark rocks, for traces of blackness, for hints that somewhere below might be a lode of that rich, soft, sweet-smelling substance that was for England what emeralds and silver and diamonds were elsewhere. Pits were dug and quarries were clawed—but often recklessly, incautiously—at every spotwhere the earth seemed to offer up its dark temptation. More often than not the darkness was a chimera, a black shale, a slate, a mudstone, which had no more chance of burning than granite. Failures dogged the diggings of all too many countrymen: Some sort of guide, some sort of a map was needed, a way for men to forecast with some accuracy what might lie underneath them.
Men had been mining coal in northern Somerset since the thirteenth century—there is a cryptic reference in Roman writings to a house in Bath having been heated by such stone, locally mined. The Carboniferous Coal Measures that outcrop along the flanks of Pennine Hills in northern England, and in South Wales and southern Scotland, outcrop around the Bristol Channel too. The same hot dark swamps that eventually fossilize to produce coal existed south of Bath three hundred million years ago, just as they existed near Durham, Leeds, Mansfield, Lanark, and the Rhondda Valley and—since coal measures have been laid down all over Europe—just as they existed also in Silesia and Westphalia, in France and Belgium and across vast tracts of Russia.
The conditions in which they were formed were, miraculously for Europe’s economic development, much
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