Dud Dudley

Dud Dudley, also written Dudd Dudley, was an English ironmaster and soldier who lived from about 1600 to 1684 and is remembered as an early advocate of smelting iron with coal rather than charcoal. The illegitimate son of Edward Sutton, 5th Baron Dudley, he left Balliol College, Oxford, around 1622 to run his father's furnaces and forges on Pensnett Chase. Short of wood, he turned pit coal into coke and claimed to have perfected iron smelting with it, which led to a patent taken out in his father's name and, after the Restoration, to his book Metallum Martis of 1665. Wikipedia adds that his claims are doubted: the coal he used was later shown to be unsuitable for coke, and one historian called him a wishful thinker. His furnaces were hit by the Mayday flood and by lawsuits, and his later years were spent as a Royalist officer and then, probably, as a doctor in Worcester. He is usually treated as a forerunner of Abraham Darby, whose coke smelting at Coalbrookdale succeeded a century later.