Today, we find out why it's useless to take coals
to Newcastle. The University of Houston's College
of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the
people whose ingenuity created them.
Coal found its way into the
European economy in the 13th century. Isolated
reports tell of coal-burning by the ancients. But
Marco Polo was still suprised by Chinese
coal-burning in the late 13th century. He'd also
have been suprised if he'd travelled to Northern
Europe and England. By then the English were
already using coal for smithing, brewing, dyeing,
and smelting. They were even exporting some of it
to France.
13th-century millwrights had spent 200 years eating
up European forests to make windmills and
waterwheels. Wood was becoming too precious to use
as a fuel. Wood was first replaced by surface coal
-- often called sea-coal because the more obvious
outcroppings were found on the coast. By far the
largest sea-coal deposits were English ones.
The reason we don't bring coals to Newcastle is
that Newcastle, in particular, was surrounded by
huge fields of sea-coal. It was mined in open cuts
30 feet deep. And Newcastle was soon girdled by a
dangerous maze of water-filled trenches.
Sea-coal was filthy stuff -- loaded with bitumen
and sulfur. It created environmental problems from
the start. An anonymous 14th-century balladeer
vented his anger at its use:
Swart smutted smiths, smattered with smoke,
Drive me to death with din of their dints; ...
The crooked caitiffs cryen after col! col!
And blowen their bellows that all their brain
bursteth.
But the medieval population explosion
drove people to use this foul fossil fuel anyway. For
a hundred years medieval environmentalists fought
with medieval industrialists over its use. Then
famine and plague ended their argument until the
middle of the 15th century. When the repopulation of
Europe drove people back to coal, they were armed
with the new techniques of metal mining.
Metals demanded a lot of charcoal for smelting. So
wood shortages reappeared, magnified by rising
populations and even greater demands for metal. But
now people followed the coal seams into the earth
-- mining it the way they mined metal. That led
them to the much cleaner hard coals we use today.
These deep coals also served to replace wood in the
smelting process.
So coal and metal drove one another deeper into the
earth -- until 17th-century miners were stopped by
the underground water table. With their whetted
appetite for fuel and metal, our 17th-century
forbears became desperate to keep that appetite
fed.
But by now our story sounds all too familiar. Human
ingenuity creates new human appetites which are
eventually met by new ingenuity. It's as
frightening as it is heartening to see how we can
always find 11th-hour ways to keep those appetites
fed.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
