Natural Resources

The Industrial Revolution couldn't have been possible withou coal and iron, the two most important natural recources of the Industrial Revolution.

Coal

Coal provided the power to drive the steam engine and was also used to make iron. Coal was dug from open pitsand used mainly for smelting and forgin metals, but most of Europeans regarded coal as a dirty fuel and objected to its use. Wood, and charcoal made from wood, were the preferred fules in Europe until the 1600s when a severe shortage of wood occurred in Western Europe. England, and other Western European countries, sharply increased their coal output to relieve the fuel shortage. Before the Industrial Revolution charcoal was used to made bricks, glass, salt, soap, and many other products, but by the 1600s factories were forced to switch to coal because of the shortage of fuel. England, by the early 1700s, produced 80% of the world's total coal output. Great Britain's iron industry was forever freed from any dependence of charcoal by many improvements in the smelting of Iron ore. *read section Iron Ore*.

Iron Ore

Iron was used to improve machines, tools, and to build bridges and ships. Iron is made by separating the nonmetallic elements in the ore. This seperation process is called smelting. Before the Industrial Revolution, smelting had been done by placing iron ore in a furnace with a burning fuel that lacked enough oxygen to burn completely. Oxygen from the ore combined with the fuel as the pure, melted flowed into small molds, often called pigs. These pigs then had to be hammered into thin sheets by hand. In the 1600s the pigs were shipped to rolling mills. This pigs, at the rolling mills, would be softened by reheating and then rolled into sheets by heavy iron cylinders. Abraham Darby, an ironmaker, succeeded in using coke to smelt iron. Smelting with coke was much more economical and efficient, although many ironmarkers continued using charcoal because they thought the coke-smelted iron was brittle and couldn't be worked with properly. Darby's son, Abraham Darby II, developed a process to make coke easier to work with as charcoal iron. Then another important breakthough discover was found in the 1720s in the rolling of the iron. The grooves were added to the rolling cylinders, allowing manufacters to roll it into different shapes rather than paper thin sheets. Also the puddling furnace was improved allowing coke to be used for smelting. This finally broke Great Britain iron industry off of any dependence on charcoal. Iron marking continued to improve and iron production expanded enormously. In 1788, 76,000 tons of iron was made wherein, in 1806 that number was more than tripled.

(Iron Ore)