Abraham Darby I

Abraham Darby, in his later life called Abraham Darby the Elder, now sometimes known for convenience as Abraham Darby I (14 April 1678 – 8 March 1717) was the first and best known of several . Born into an English Quaker family that played an important role in the Industrial Revolution, Darby developed a method of producing pig iron in a blast furnace fuelled by coke rather than charcoal. This was a major step forward in the production of iron as a raw material for the Industrial Revolution.

Abraham Darby was the son of John Darby, a yeoman farmer and locksmith by trade, and his wife Ann Baylies. He was born at Woodsettle, Woodsetton, Staffordshire, just across the county boundary from Dudley, Worcestershire. He was descended from nobility; his great-grandmother Jane was an illegitimate child of Edward Sutton, 5th Baron Dudley.

Abraham's great-grandmother was a sister of the whole blood to Dud Dudley, who claimed to have smelted iron using coke as a fuel. Unfortunately, the iron that Dudley produced was not acceptable to the charcoal ironmasters. However, this may have inspired his great-grandnephew Darby to perfect this novel method of smelting.

During the early 1690s Darby was apprenticed in Birmingham to Jonathan Freeth, a fellow Quaker and a manufacturer of brass mills for grinding malt. As well as the understanding of metallurgy necessary for the manufacture of products in an alloy like bass, Darby would also have picked up in Birmingham the use by brewers of coke to fuel malting ovens, preventing the sulphur content of coal contaminating the resulting beer, but also avoiding the use of the scarcer charcoal as a fuel. The combination of these two insights was to lead to Darby's development of the coke-fuelled blast furnace in 1709.

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