Abraham Darby

Abraham Darby was an English ironmaster from a Quaker family who developed a method of producing pig iron in a blast furnace fuelled by coke rather than charcoal, first successfully firing his furnace at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire on 10 January 1709. Charcoal-fuelled ironmaking was constrained by the supply of wood that could be burned into charcoal, and Darby's coke-smelting process freed iron production from that limit, helping to preserve England's shrinking forests while allowing iron output to expand to meet the demands of the Industrial Revolution. The coke-smelted iron his furnace produced became a foundational raw material for the steam engines, machinery and, later, the world's first iron bridge that his descendants built nearby at Coalbrookdale in 1779.