Abraham Darby I

Born into an English Quaker family that played an important role in the Industrial Revolution, Darby developed a method of producing pig iron in a blast furnace fuelled by coke rather than charcoal.

[1] Abraham's great-grandmother was a sister of the whole blood to Dud Dudley, who claimed to have smelted iron using coke as a fuel.

In Birmingham in the early 1690s, Darby was apprenticed to Jonathan Freeth, a fellow Quaker and a manufacturer of brass mills for grinding malt.

This enabled pots and cauldrons to be mass-produced and to be thinner than those made by the traditional process of casting in loam moulds.

[8][9] A young Welsh apprentice, John Thomas,[10] solved the problem by using sand for the mould, with a special casting box and core.

[13] For this he used a reverberatory air furnace of a kind developed by Sir Clement Clerke, initially for smelting lead near Bristol, and applied by him or his son Talbot to iron founding at Vauxhall.

[14] In 1700, another group of Bristol Quakers (including Edward Lloyd and Charles Harford) had agreed to set up a brass works 'somewhere in England'.

It is not clear where, but by 1712, Caleb Lloyd, Jeffrey Pinnell, Abraham Darby and his brother-in-law Thomas Harvey had brass works at Coalbrookdale.

This is likely to be linked to an increase in shipment of 'Callumy' (Calamine) up the river Severn from 1704 and Darby's agreement in 1710 to open a copper mine at Harmer Hill in Myddle, on behalf of a 'Company of the City of Bristol'.

[21] The business was partly financed by a loan from Thomas Goldney II of Bristol and by Graffin Prankard and James Peters becoming partners.

[26] The company also secured Vale Royal Furnace in central Cheshire, but this did not come into their possession before Abraham Darby's death.

[27][28] The Company embarked on a similar venture at Dolgûn, near Dolgellau, where John Kelsall was appointed as clerk, but it is probable that the furnace there was not finished until after Darby died, when his widow and the other partners sold off their lease.

Richard Ford, who married Abraham's daughter Mary, had two shares and became manager, but on the widow's death Thomas Baylies took out letters of administration as a creditor and sought to sell the works.