The Coal and Iron Industry Coal and iron were enormously important to the Industrial Revolution, without them the steam engines could not be driven and stronger bridges, ships and machines could not have been built. There were large deposits of coal and iron around Great Britain which helped let them become the first industrial nation. For thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution iron ore had been smelted by placing it and a fuel in a furnace that lacked enough oxygen to burn completely, meaning not all the oxygen in the iron ore combined with the fuel due to the incomplete combustion, leaving it impure and slightly weaker than pure iron. The most common fuel used just before the Industrial Revolution was charcoal as it was easy to obtain from the large hardwood forests, since the 1600’s however it had been used in many other areas and so there was a great demand for it. This resulted that by the early 1700’s charcoal had become so expensive that many iron makers in Britain quit the industry because of the high costs. Between 1709 and 1713 however, there was a revolution in the way of iron was produced. Abraham Darby, a Shropshire winemaker, successfully managed to smelt iron using coke (which is produced by heating coal in an airtight oven). This new method was much more economic and efficient than smelting with charcoal, but the iron produced was inflexible and most manufacturers didn't adopt the new process. In 1750 Darby’s son Abraham Darby II developed an improved method that made iron smelted using coke as flexible as charcoal iron. Ten years later coke smelting spread throughout Britain. Coal mining had been going on for a long time in Britain, however the main problem with digging deep shafts was the water had to be removed somewhere. The introduction of the steam engine greatly helped in the removal of water from mine shafts, allowing them to be made a lot deeper and more coal extracted. When James Watts’ more powerful steam engine was...