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The Birthplace
ofthe
ModernWorld
I ronbridge, England
is one place where
it could be said that the modern world
began, it is this little town, which takes its
name from the old bridge that spans the
river Severn.
Before the bridge was opened on New Year's
Day, 1781, nobody had ever seen an iron
bridge. Bridges were made out of wood or
stone-not iron. Iron was too heavy, too brittle,
too expensive and too hard to work with.
So when it was proposed to build an
iron
bridge
over the Severo, people mocked.
It
couldn't be
done- and even if it could, it would certainly fall
down, or be swept away in the first flood! They were
wrong-i t's still there- as much a symbol of its age
as the space shuttle is of ours.
lt's a quaint old thing. No bolts or screws were
used in its construction- the various pieces were
joined together by cast dovetail, tenon and other
joints more reminiscent of woodworking than metal.
In the late 1700s engineers were still experimenting
and did not fully understand the potential of iron as
a building material. Nobody had ever tried to make
a bridge out of iron before.
Men had been using iron for thousands of years,
of course, but not for building. There was not
enough of it. The problem was not the raw material,
for Britain had ample reserves of iron ore. But
extracting the metal from the ore needed vast
quantities of charcoal- up to 10 tons for every ton
of metal.
By the end of the 17th century, for various
reasons England's forests had become severely
depleted, and the remaining reserves of hardwood
24
suitable for making charcoal were far off the beaten
track. lron smelting in the early 1700s was thus
virtually a cottage industry and iron almost a
semiprecious metal.
Then about 1710, Abraham Darby, working in his
little foundry at Coalbrookdale, just up the road from
Jronbridge, showed that iron could be smelted by
heating the ore with coke (baked coal). Britain had
plenty of coal, but hitherto all attempts to use it in iron
making had failed. Sulphur and other impurities in the
coal combined with the ore in the furnace, and the
resulting iron was of very poor quality.
When he learned the art of u$ing coke, Darby solved
the essence of the problem. By the late l700s the iron
makers of Coalbrookdale had mastered the techniques
of producing good quality iron in Jarge quantities and
had provided the key to the industrial age. And so
toward the end of the 18th century, England, like
America and France, was convulsed by revolution.
This revolution was not fought with the same
patriotic fervor as the American Revolution, nor was
it as bloody as the French. No territories were
seized, nor kings or queens executed.
lt
was a
revolution in the way people worked and made
things, and it altered the lives of nearly everyone on
earth. We call it the Industrial Revolution.
As soon as engineers had an abundant supply of iron,
they used it to turn once-rural Britain into the world's
first industrial society- and thus, the most powerful
nation of its day. Work once performed by hand could
now be done on machines; powered by massive steam
engines. For the first time they freed the
manufacturers from depending on the waterwheel or
the windmill for their source of energy.
ln 1800, 80 percent of the people in the British
Isles had lived and worked on the land. Fifty years
later, more than half the population was to be found
in the new towns that had sprung up around the
industrial centers. Britain's mines, factories and
foundries began to produce more than any country
had ever done.
During the l820s British engineers solved the
problems of making the steam engine mobile and the
railroad age began. By 1850, there were 5,000 miles
of track laid in Britain. No longer was man
restricted to the speed of a galloping horse, while his
goods trailed behind at the rate of a plodding ox.
Now man
and
goods could race across country, at
30, then 60 and soon 100 miles an hour.
The engineers learned fast, and there seemed to
be no limit to their wonders. When John Wilkinson
launched a little iron boat on the river near the iron
The PLAIN TRUTH