Abraham Darby I
To the poor of England, the Worcestershire man gave affordable pots and pans, and to all the world he gave the industrial revolution.
1678-1717
King Charles II 1649-1685 to Queen Anne 1702-1714
To the poor of England, the Worcestershire man gave affordable pots and pans, and to all the world he gave the industrial revolution.
1678-1717
King Charles II 1649-1685 to Queen Anne 1702-1714
Seventeenth-century England’s industrial productivity had stalled. Her forests could no longer supply charcoal for smelting; iron was mostly imported from Russia and Sweden; fine metal kitchenware was a luxury of the rich. Government funded various barren initiatives, but Worcestershire entrepreneur Abraham Darby (1678-1717) made the breakthrough.
ABRAHAM Darby learnt his trade grinding malt in Birmingham, managing the brass mills and coke-fired malting ovens. In 1699, he founded a malt-mill of his own in Bristol, and branched out into brass cookware.
Together with his apprentice John Thomas, Darby developed a method for casting utensils in sand rather than clay, improving on techniques learnt during a visit to Holland in 1704. After moving his operations to Coalbrookdale in Shropshire in 1708, he used his experience in the malt-mills to begin smelting iron with coke rather than the increasingly scarce charcoal,* and soon Abraham Darby was England’s premier manufacturer of affordable, high-quality metal kitchenware.
Abraham died in 1717, aged just thirty-eight, but his light, slim, mass-produced cast-iron pots and pans had already improved the lives of the poor beyond measure, and without his painstaking research into the best coals for coke-fired iron, the bridges, railways and ships of the later industrial revolution would quite simply never have been built.
Darby should not be confused with his son Abraham Darby II (1711-1763), or his grandson Abraham Darby III (1750-1791), builder of the world’s first cast-iron bridge, at Coalbrookdale between 1776-1779.
Darby’s great-grandmother was sister to Dud Dudley, who claimed to have developed a method for smelting iron with coke in 1665, though it was never proven. Dudley’s notebooks came down to Abraham, and at the least may have captured his imagination. See our post Dud Dudley.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
How did Abraham Darby’s apprenticeship in a malt-mill help his later career?
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Darby visited Holland in 1704. He established a brass-works in Bristol. He employed Dutch workmen.