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by antonhowes
1441 days ago
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I don’t think this fits the evidence. At least for the 17thC. People in England did not know how to make good iron with coal, let alone steel, despite many decades of extraordinary government encouragement and special incentives - witness the many, many failed patents that had to be reissued from Sturtevant in 1612 all the way through to the 1660s and beyond. Cities like London made the switch early on to using coal as a fuel over the course of 1570-1600, but this was for domestic use. Industrial use lagged many decades behind, with iron very much last - long after glassmaking, saltmaking, brewing, and even baking. When the English iron industry struggled to adapt to rising fuel prices, the overwhelmimg response was just to import it from Sweden. And that was especially the case with the steel industry, which didn’t really take off in England until the breakthroughs of the mid-18thC (long after Newcomen or Savery). If there’s evidence I’m missing, however, I’d very much like to know. |
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Basically England was boosted by the energy input from coal.
One thing about Sweden for a long time. They had a lot of trees and very high quality iron ore. Which I think is the reason they were so powerful during that period. Sweden cut down all their trees to make steel.
When I think of steam engines I think also of simple franklin stoves and pressure cookers. People tried to make both of those long before steam engines. They are both much more efficient in terms of the amount of fuel consumed but the cost was too high for that to pencil out.