All right, and I happy 2025. Happy New Year, Ben. How are your holidays? Lots of Christmas songs, the fireplace crackling, and lots of questions about Santa, and he knows when you've been good or bad, and my son asked, "Well, what happens when you're bad?" And I was like, "I guess you get a lump of coal in your stock," and he's like, "Well, why do you get coal?" And I'm like, "Well, let me tell you about coal." Five hours later, he's asleep. (laughing) It's a good question, like, "Why is coal a punishing gift to give?" It's this gift of energy and heat and light, an industrialization and abundance and capitalism. (laughing) All right, well, let's get into it. (upbeat music) All right, welcome to the first episode of the StepChange podcast. This podcast covers the stories of human progress, and we're here to understand the technologies, systems, and infrastructure that shape our world. I'm Ben Eidelson. I'm a co-founder of StepChange Ventures, a fund that invests in the companies that are accelerating today's biggest stepchanges, and I'm based in Seattle, Washington. And I'm a Nyesha, also a co-founder of StepChange Ventures, and based in Los Angeles, California. And so here we are with the pilot episode of the StepChange podcast. So Ben, tell me more about why you wanted to do this. At this moment in time, we are in the middle of upgrading so much of our world, and that's what we do in our day jobs, is helping it upgrade that world faster. Studying history provides us the best potential resource to motivate and study what works and what didn't. I'm a very avid listener and fan of another podcast called Acquired, which is a show that expertly tells the stories of companies. And Ben and David, I think, really pioneered and defined a format that they call a conversational audio book. It really tries to bottom out the core story of a company, and everything about it. As I've moved to work on climate and infrastructure and think about these problems full time, I've been hungry for that same historical understanding for the major systems that run our world, whether that be coal or steel or fertilizer, from energy sources to the major transportation unlocks to the grid that powers much of our life. How did all of this come to be? What was the human effort that went into it? And no one was doing it, and I was on a walk with Ben Gilbert talking about the lack of long form content going deep into some of these topics. And he turned to me and said, you should just go do it. Very excited to finally give this a go. Perhaps due to either a overabundance of excitement on our part or a total underestimating of the task at hand, we have inadvertently walked into the mother of all upgrades, didn't we? Yeah, or a combination of the two. Both underestimated the story of coal and maybe overly excited to just dive and have had first. So today is episode one. And if you haven't garnered by this point, we're here to talk about coal. And before we get into it, we have to thank one person in particular, Barbara Fries. She wrote in 2003 and published a book, "Cole, A Human History," which has really become the backbone for our story today and the background for a lot of our research. And second, she generously spent some time with us unpacking some of the nuances of her view on the long story of coal and some of her reflections over the last 20 years since publishing the book. So thank you to Barbara. And if you're following along and want to understand all the episode sources and all of the research done that went into this, head to stepchange.show. And we have links out to everything there. All right, well, let's get into it. Let's get into coal. So it's a fitting beginning. Coal is the story of a step change. A transformation so profound that it reshaped the course of human history. And in this episode, we'll explore how coal was the foundation of the Industrial Revolution and therefore the foundation of the modern world. But this step forward came at a high cost. It had profound impacts on society, on the environment, and on the individuals' wing around minds, working in minds, and powering this transformation. Along the way, we'll uncover how ancient plants locked away the carbon that powered entire empires, how coal mining, set in motion, century-long conflicts between labor and power, and how the race for coal laid the groundwork for both modern industry and the revolutions that reshape nations. We may think that coal is just a part of history. But in preparing for this, we came to realize that coal and the technologies that spawned as a result of it are truly the foundations of the world we live in today. And also the foundations of many of the problems of our modern world as we see it today. I'm trying to zoom out and look at where we are today. The world used more coal in 2023 than any year in human history. It was primarily used for electricity generation, but it's also the primary input into steel and cement. So just this morning, I was thinking about how many objects I touched that in some way used coal. And so we might think of this as a relic of history and we'll spend most of our time on the historical story. But the relevance of this echoes to today. And the combustion of coal is the largest single source of CO2 emissions. And so we're not by any means just operating in the realm of history. There is very little in our world that was not shaped by the discovery of abundant coal and the profound implications we had in putting it to use and creating the modern world. It's interesting because I think of our generation tend to think of oil as the primary energy source narrative. But all roads begin with coal. Where did coal begin? So let's get in our time machines. And we don't go back to pre-industrialization London. We have to go back much further. We're going to go back around 400 million years. The earth was in a pretty different state than continents were in different locations than there weren't mammals. There hadn't even yet been dinosaurs. And we're talking before the dinosaurs. I was talking to a seven-year-old about this last night. She leaned in and was like, is this a true story? And it is. At this time, there were dragonflies with three feet long wingspanes. Dragonflies were larger than many birds. There were millipedes that were as tall as us. This is a wild time on planet Earth. This was around the time that seeds first begin to evolve. The first reptiles and amphibians were coming out of the water. A lot of these changes in plant and animal life were driven by growing photosynthesis. So what was going on with oxygen then? So you think about today's atmosphere is about 20% oxygen concentration. And it's been stable at around 20, 21% for hundreds of years. But this wild world of the carboniferous period 400 million years ago was largely due to some of the highest oxygen concentration history at 35%. And so this level of oxygen drove the explosion of growth of these massive plants and early sources of life that existed in almost a way that we can't believe it's right for your daughter to wonder if this is a fictional story. Because it's a land that looks very different from today. And as I mentioned, this is Pangaea times. This has been all the continents were more closely linked and where water was actually covering a lot of today's landmass. Well, one thing you mentioned was this is called the carboniferous time. And I actually just think that's a funny echo of how we think about this. This is like an 100 million year period when all these animals evolved, all these massive changes happen on planet Earth. And yet we name it carboniferous, which literally means coal bearing in land. So we look back at this time. And the fundamental thing that we care about as a human species to name this moment on planet Earth is that it's the time that gave us coal. Well, a lot happened, but yes, it is the time that gave us coal. And what happened was that massive plants are going, it ferns with 30 foot wide trucks. And those plants were growing in this really swampy period. And so the plants would die, break down in the water, and begin to form what's called peat. Of note, the locations where this was most active, the swampiest kind of largest plant growing areas were all around the equator. There's a more tropical environment. That's confusing to us because if you think about it, you're like, where does coal exist today? Where are the big centers of coal? We'll get into Newcastle, England. You could think about in the US, all the coal mining and Pennsylvania and NYO mean and here in Mongolia and China. And all these regions you don't think of as being tropical regions. But it's that point that you said earlier, the continents were in a different configuration then. And I found this amazing tool where you can go back in time. It's like a 3D view of there. You can put in your hometown. You can put in all these locations and scrub back. And these were all the tropical regions. Like Newcastle, England was in the tropics, 250, 300 million years ago, which is amazing. And so those were these swampy areas, these massive forests. And plant matter would grow and then decompose, but not decompose on land when these swamps would start to decompose in water. And this is important because plants are holding the carbon. And so these plants would fall and here they'd fall on land in our normal life and they would decompose and release some of that carbon. But when it falls into the swamp, the nature of it falling underwater means it can't decompose.
And so the carbon doesn't get released. And then over literally 100 million years or more water, more plants, more water, more plants, more mass compresses these plants down and the carbon stays trapped and compressed and compressed. And the first thing it forms is what's called peat. So in those first thousands of years of compression, it kind of, you know, it's not that it doesn't decompose at all, is that the carbon's not fully released, right? The bacteria is a fun guy, I can't fully digest it. And you know, what is peat? The best image I kind of have in my head around is it almost is like coffee grounds. It's like this very absorbent, dark, very brown material that as you compress, becomes this very rich soil. And it turns out like peat is still a concern of interest. Today, there are 1.5 million square miles of what's called peat land, which are the millennia of peat that's formed. And that's actually one of the largest carbon sinks today. 550 gigatons of soil carbon is in that peat land. This episode is not about peat, but it's an important stepping stone. Peat became a fuel used by people over time because you could directly chop peat up and burn it. And this is particular popular in Scotland. You know, today when people go and say, oh, they really want to go buy an earthy scotch and really like that flavor profile is because we're still burning peat to make those earthy flavors when you're brewing the earthy scotch. So love me a peatie scotch. I don't know if I ever really sought the peatie scotch, but I think if we get through the whole episode today, we should add the day. It's still early morning right now, but maybe by the end of the day, we'll have people be ready for a peatie scotch. So the layers keep coming. There's more and more compression over millions of years. And what happens with the compression? Well, first of all, the water is squeezed out. The other volatile gases are squeezed out. So carbon dioxide squeezed out hydrogen. Anything else that's essentially not carbon starts to get squeezed out of the peat. And eventually it starts to become various layers and stages of coal. So there's going to be some terms around coal that you'll hear throughout because there's different types of coal that have different properties and burn differently and have different energy sources. And it all starts with this process of compression hundreds of millions years ago. So tell us a little bit about the names of the different types of coal. Yeah. So I mean, fundamentally, I almost think of it as a guess of these distinct types, but they're really on a spectrum, right? You really have like peat on one of the spectrum and anthracite on the other end of the spectrum. Anthracite is like a shiny rock that is in the 95 to 100% carbon. It's this almost crystalline structure. In between on the peat and you have peat and you have lignite, you have sub-betuminous, betuminous than anthracite. And so when you think about the kind of more porous coal rock in your mind and most of the coal that's still actually burned today now for electricity, you're probably thinking like a betuminous coal. We'll get into the important roles that anthracite did play, but each of these different types of coal has different properties in terms of how it's burned, where it comes from. And as you can imagine, the anthracite, the most compressed, actually only forms when there's that mountain range is built on top of it. So when you get into the Appalachians and you get into that moment, when the contents collided and really, really deeply compressed coal down, that's when you get that crystalline structure. But in the Midwest, that never happened. And so you have these coal fields that are still that betuminous or sub-betuminous coal. All right. So let's jump back into our time machine and push the button for 399 million years forward and bring us to closer to present day, we'll take a whirlwind tour through the last couple thousand years. But there's been coal used across early human civilizations, right? Yeah. There's what we know and what we don't know, right? If you just burn a piece of coal, there's not necessarily a deep record of it. So we're going off of what archaeologists have been able to discern over time. And so I suspect we'll even find earlier uses than this. But through that time machine, a bunch of evolution happened. The contents drifted some hairy apes eventually evolved into homo sapiens. And some of those homo sapiens, they figured out to burn wood and that was a great way to stay warm and cook food into all these things. But in some regions, they found these dark rocks and turns out that those could burn well too. And so the furthest record I could find was that what is now the Czech Republic, there's some kind of carbon dating that you can see that a settlement was using coal as early as 25,000 BC. Right? So we're talking 27,000 years ago from now. In China, there's indication of some surface mining and some scaled household to use 5,000 years ago, 3500 BC. In Greece, we start to see more written record, right? We see record in around 370 BC to using coal for metal working. People talk about a stone that burns like charcoal. You're starting to understand that, okay, this is starting to be used in some industrial sense and some of the early metal uses. You know that the Aztecs used as a fuel and for some jewelry. They cut down the black stone and make beautiful objects out of it. And then in Britain, we know that in the kind of Roman era in Britain, it was being used as a fuel and being used to heat public baths, heating villas and even sometimes smalting iron. Again, it was never at the scale that we'll get to later in the story. But when the Romans did leave Britain around 400 AD, there kind of was a slowdown in any coal use until the 12th century when it picked up again. Probably the most interesting early use that's underappreciated was what was happening in China. We have Marco Polo, which some people just think of a fun game to play in the pool, but it's actually the game is named after this Italian explorer who left Italy, went to China for 17 years in the late 13th century. So this is around 1271 to 1295. And he brought back to Europe from that trip documentation of what he was observing in China and it shocked many in Europe to understand this. And China was way ahead at that time. And a lot of that was powered by what he was seeing in their use of coal. And so he wrote directly that a kind of black stone existing in beds in the mountains, which they dig out and burn like firewood. If you supply the fire with them at night and see that they're well-kindled, you'll find them still a light in the morning. And they make such capital fuel that no other is used throughout the country. And so he saw in China, again in the late 1200s, this use of coal, which he had never really seen before back in Italy. And he's like, what is this magic stone they're using that could burn through the whole night? Part of that use was probably driven by already the beginnings in some of those regions of firewood scarcity, which will be a pattern that we'll see again and again, which is people turn to coal for the basic heating and cooking when firewood supplies go down. And so that was already happening again in China. And we also see that China is probably the largest iron producer at this time in history. And so this is this era when China was just way ahead of anyone in the West. And we'll get into a little bit about why iron and coal are brother and sister later in this episode. But China has, as you noted, had using coal and even making iron long before it took cold as a cornerstone of the European empires. And in this time period in the UK, it started to pick up again. And I think in particular what we see in London, the beginning of coal is a specialty fuel. It was not being used yet in people's homes. They didn't really use it to cook or anything like that. It was really being used almost by certain small businesses. It was brewers, blacksmiths, and line burners. And line burners are making materials for construction of homes and buildings. Maybe there was some light trade. It seemed like in the mainland Europe, in this era from the UK, but it was very light and very kind of specialized use. So we'll continue in this time machine and come forward to where we're going to spend a lot of this story. And that's in the islands of the United Kingdom or Britain. And the story focuses on Britain because it is the first nation to be fundamentally changed by coal. Britain led the world in coal production for centuries and largely as a result triggered the industrial revolution, created the industrial society, and created more wealth and power than it was previously imaginable. There's a notion when you look into the history and read some of these direct accounts of coal taking on this transcendental divine, almost supernatural quality. It was, the thought was that it was divinely placed so man could realize their fullest potential. It was there to help rise up civilization and our souls themselves. It was a tool to enable us to control our physical world and even God's desire to use coal to elevate humanity. And in some records, in Eurocentric historical records, it was given to the Anglo-Saxon man to dominate the world. And so British coal was kind of a divine intervention. And it allowed Britain and Europe and much of the world to escape poverty of pre-industrial society faster than ever imaginable. And it's truly one of the more magnificent stories of transformation in recent human history. And in order to get to those moments and some of those key inputs, we'll go back to the days of the Magna Carta and then come right into the 1617 and 1800s. Yeah, I'll do it before that though, man.
a hundred million a year period on earth, the coal-bearing period, just how self-centered we are as a species. In particular, that Eurocentric rewriting of history to say, "Oh, well, this was God's works that we can rise up." And then echo forward to today when we're like, "No, no, please don't burn coal in all these other places," because that was art divine, right? Not yours, right? Anyways, it's a lot to add back there. But yes, as you said, let's zoom back. The Magna Carta happened in 1215. This reaction against extreme royal power. And as part of that, essentially, as an appendix to the Magna Carta, a document called the Forest Charter was sealed in 1217. And what the Forest Charter did was it started to give landowners their rights back. To say, "Hey, it is not just the crown that owns the trees and the peat and whatever else could be on this land." Actually, as a landowner, you own the stuff on your land, and coal fell into that category, even though it wasn't a big concern at the moment. Now, what was interesting is not all land was owned by private landowners, it turns out that what will become the central important coal region of our story right now is the area around Newcastle, was actually owned by the church, the Roman Catholic Church. And they controlled the digging, the production, the output. Now, I'll be tended to outsource that, as you imagine, but it was them as the property holders and they would have surfs on the land doing the labor. I think it's a wild fact to me, the bishops, monks, and nuns. Were the coalbearers of the time? The church, once again, exerting its power and having divine right over what will become such an important input in the society. That's right. And so we start to get the sense that there was in London, pretty mass, or growing use of coal, again, in those specialty industries in the late 1200s. Even in 1285, we started to hear about a commission that set up in London to deal with coal smoke, which becomes a repeated pattern, people concerned about the air. And at the time, this type of coal was actually called sea coal, because all of it, especially into London, was coming via sea from Newcastle. Versus what we know as charcoal, which is actually what happens when you take wood and you burn it without oxygen. That's how you actually produce charcoal, which was probably just called coal at the time. What was then sea coal became the dominant thing. We swaffed the names and said, "Let's call that coal," and the wood produced thing charcoal. But charcoal was actually in this era a pretty important fuel and was used in a lot of these same industries and then it got displaced. And the reason for that displacement, of course, was growing issues around firewood. In this era, the forest near cities, the forest all around London, in the 1300s, were being chopped down, either for direct use as firewood for building in timber, or for making charcoal to then run these specialty industries. As you look at maps, you just see the forest regions just getting pushed further and further out from the cities, which then made firewood more and more expensive and more laborious to transport in. All of a sudden, there are stories of people transporting firewood for miles and miles to get it to London. That would have continued and probably coal would have picked up pretty quickly if that were the case. But something also actually happened around then. We think of the rolling British hills. The English countryside is always there, but actually it was because we needed to massively clear the wood as we have done so many other times in history. It was all forest. It's all forest. And as you mentioned, that wood clearing and movement would have continued at that same pace. But then the Pobonic plague hit or the Black Death hit Europe. I'd actually originated in Central Asia and traveled into Europe and there were multiple breakouts of the plague. The one in the mid 1300s lasted for four years and killed one in three Europeans or 25 million people. It killed up to 200 million people globally, although the numbers and the records are obviously very hard to come by. But throughout these multiple breakouts, the population of England was more than half. It was we had six million people in the mid 1300s and declined to less than three million people in 1400. And London's population itself went from a hundred thousand this large city at the time to down to less than 25,000 in one generation. The scale of the decimation of human life was unprecedented. The plague was actually so deadly within less than five days, 80% of people who were infected would be dead. It was absolutely brutal. Cannot imagine a city being cut and halved even more. London was a growing kind of booming city. A hundred thousand was a big city at the time to then be cut by three quarters, either for people fleeing and dying from a percentage basis, one of the biggest tragedies for the human species. Now the flip side is all those forests and lands that were cut down for those species. This was a boom time. No longer were people in high demand. And so the forest could grow back. And there's this big kind of second wave of regrowth of forests. They grew back and this of course started to reduce the pressure on wood and fuels the source. The population didn't really recover for almost a hundred years. And so really it's not until the 1500s that the waves of the plague is really behind London. And the population growth has picked up. But during this time, we should remember the Catholic Church still owns these mines. And the church was willing to invest in some things, but better mining technology and figuring out how to build deeper mines and expand was not quite there for a day. Had the land stayed owned by the Catholic Church, it's very possible that coal would have never really had the big uptake in the following centuries. It was one of those like knife points of history, but it so happened that this was the era of King Henry VIII. 1527 he got frustrated in his marriage to Catherine, the marriage frustrations, changing the course of history yet again. And you know, the main complaint, there might have been others, but his main complaint was that she was not producing a male heir for him. And so he wanted to separate. And so he went to the Pope and said like an omen of my marriage, so I can move on and marry someone else and have a male heir. And the Pope denied his request. And so this certain course, King Henry's famous break with Rome. And over the following years, he basically kicked a church out and said, "That land is no longer your land. That land is our land." It was pretty wild because at the time, the church was actually like from an economic perspective, quite a bit wealthier than the crown. Right, the church owned a fifth of the nation's land and wealth. And I think there's something like maybe three times the economic holdings of the crown. But the king was the king. So he managed to kick them out and dissolve the monasteries and pass a ruling with parliament that said the property is no longer theirs. Just like that, the king takes the land. And if we look back at this time, early 1500s, something on the order of 10,000 to 15,000 tons of coal we're heading to London each year for specialist trades. Again, still not widespread adoption. What does 10,000 tons of coal look like or feel like? At that scale, 10,000 tons of coal. There's enough power to power maybe 3,000 US homes today. Could power us a small little suburb. From a volume perspective, a ton of coal was kind of like filling up the back of a pickup truck. So if you took your Irivian R1T and filled up the back with coal, which would be quite an image, or your cyber truck for those that are cyber truck fans, imagine 10,000 of those heading from Newcastle down to London many year. Which kind of sounds like a lot. But on the other hand, that's just about 30 a day. So if you're like, okay, major city London has all this production going on. 30 trucks of coal to power all of that and pretty limited firewood. There's not a lot of fuel going to the city. And so as the population began to grow, this firewood problem came back. We chopped down all those forests that we grew and actually became a pretty active political concern. The mayor of London, there's these records of him, he would do a daily standup at the warves and put pressure on the merchants who were bringing the wood in. Particularly concerned that the poor weren't going to have wood, right? This was a climate where you needed heating or you would often freeze to death or have major concerns. And so there were laws passed that would try and keep the price of wood down. Wood was being shipped from up to 50 miles away, which would grow the price. And then of course, if you came into defense concern, the Navy got quite concerned. They weren't going to be able to build ships. And so they're just passed more and more laws around restricting the use of wood and trying to keep prices in the control. But it was like, there was no real plan in sight. And all those industries that were starting to use coal were also still using wood, right? Just the London breweries, suppose they were burning 20,000 wagon loads of wood each year. And so just became a huge concern. The English love their crackling fires. I love this image of the mayor of London coming to the warves every day and standing over the wood. But as you mentioned, it was all of life. A wood shortage at that time, it came to like a gas shortage today. It would become the dominant conversation topic with anyone you met. And it was both this national security threat as well as an individual threat, particularly because this time in Europe was going through what's called the little ice age. And it was the coldest period in history since the previous ice age. And wood was used to heat homes, to cook food. It literally kept people alive. And so if wood prices went up or there was a wood shortage, there was a crisis and people needed alternatives. Enter coal. This is the step change, the beginning of that curve where coal went from just being used by these specialty industries to starting to dominate domestic life. And so by 1581, pretty dramatic rise was underway. We went from that 10,000, maybe 15,000 tons of coal year up to doubling, almost 30,000 tons of coal into London. And then by the end of the decade, another doubling. And an onward and an onward until over the course of that century, we're up to
to nearly 500,000 tons of coal. And so this is this dramatic shift that's more than 20x growth over that century. Or to put that on more like per-person basis, I want to remember out a quarter a ton per capita at the beginning of this period, to three quarters of ton per capita, while that same population was also growing by a factor of two. And so it really shifted as the central kind of fuel in life in London. - Yeah, and as we'll hear later, it's central, metaphorically and central in your home, sitting in the middle of your home. But another per capita kind of perspective, as coal became more and more dominant, it would consume anywhere from 10% to 50% of a household income. Because again, it was heating and it was food. And so when prices roll or there was hiccups in the coal supply chain, the population would come to the brink of violence. There would be fuel famines because of rising prices. And this pollution was, as mentioned, like kind of an in and out concern, but it was hardly as important as dying of cold, which was the risk when you didn't have the coal and you no longer had the wood that they normally loved. - That's right, I mean, there's this repeated pattern of kind of complaints about coal smoke. And yet people were not ever sacrificed. Their needs for energy over air quality. I mean, is there is the pattern again again, whether that's at the kind of city government level or just in people's homes? One question you were starting to ask is like, why didn't this happen sooner, given the wood shortages and the 1500s? And it turns out actually using coal, what like people's lives were not set up for this. They needed new technology. They needed to actually upgrade their homes in some way to use coal. You know, you can't just take coal and throw it into a pile and light it. And all of a sudden it's just like firewood, right? Wood had this great, people were used to it. They knew how to store it. They knew how to cook with it. They had the right cooking instruments. They had pots and pans that really worked with the temperature of wood. I ended up reading this whole book about cooking them in a voice versus coal. And there's this discussion about how people could control the fire and create fire from different zones and the recipes that were really designed around wood cooking and the brass pots at the time and tin pots at the time were really designed for those kind of controllable fires. So all this in your own coal, which was first of all getting it lit was not a given. You actually needed this great that would raise coal off up the ground so you'd surround it with more air to get the coal lit and get it moving. And then the smoke that came out of coal was quite different. When people were burning wood in their homes, typically and historically, would just be in the middle of the home and it would heat the home and it'd be where you cook. And the smoke would just rise up through the fairly porous roof. And you actually didn't really need to design your home around smoke control 'cause there's just a way that your house was already, your home is already working. And he had a little smokey if you stood up and you certainly wouldn't build a second floor on top of that 'cause the smoke had to rise up. But it turns out that being on ground level was cozy and comfortable and your bed would just kind of sleep on the floor, you'd sit on the floor and that was all reasonable. Well, all of a sudden you're burning coal and two issues. One is you need more air coming through. Two is the coal smoke was different. It wouldn't just go up and out. It would kind of sit at a heat level. And so this is when you started to see chimneys actually become a thing. And there's this massive wave of renovation inside a London where 1550s, 1560s London, a couple chimneys here and there. By the end of the century, chimneys are a common place and that's really connected to this fuel switch. Now, just to emphasize the like, the draft issue a little bit more, when you have a chimney you're losing a lot of heat and it's really not that effective for firewood if you're trying to be efficient. But with coal, okay, they make that sacrifice but you would need, you would cause this big kind of floor level draft. It would come through the house as you used a chimney to burn your coal. And that makes the floor no longer a cozy comfy place. And so all of a sudden people actually started, this is when furniture with legs became a thing. 'Cause it was wild. You wanted to sit off the ground. You wanted to sleep off the ground 'cause it was very cold on the ground. And so it's just this like connected shift in domestic life that changed the shape of homes where you had a chimney. Now all of a sudden you could have a second floor or some little like nook on it. And then all of a sudden you're no longer sleeping on the ground, you need beds. And then you got to cook with a different type of pan that can actually work with the coal heat and not break. And so yeah, I don't know. It was such a struck me with the transition in one's home through this period. It was quite an upheaval to go through this change. And the English in particular had this love of the crackling fire. And who can blame them, right? My son this morning actually said, "Hey, Papa, when I come home from school, can you start the fire and put on the Christmas music?" And it's like, "Absolutely, we love the crackling fire." But it really, it changed so much of just daily life. And another part that you've mentioned that you've gone deep on, but it actually has this really interesting kind of engineering and an economic and societal impact is how it changed cooking. And so the switch from wood to coal changed how you heated your home and changed how you cooked your food. And you would really, I would never really think that the story would unfold so dramatically in terms of how you cooked what you used to cook your food. And so how does this unfold from just changing how you're gonna heat up your chicken to transforming society? I guess fuel switches, at least consumer fuel switches maybe often are fought hardest in the kitchen. I think there's a reason why the stove of battle maybe is like the pinnacle today. And then this is back to our opening of the show where like looking to these upgrades. This is not the first time in history we've changed how we cook our food, right? Going to induction stoves. It turns out there's been long fought battles and transitions over time. And I think this one from what to coal was one of the bigger ones because the nature of a coal fire was that it burned a lot hotter. And it burned with much higher sulfurous fumes. And so the brass and copper pots that were popular at the time that a family owned us, like some of their only metal possessions wouldn't last long over a coal fire to actually crack and break. There was some rot iron. Rot iron is when you hand pound to make iron together was made using generally charcoal but it's still very light and thin. And so what you wanted was that thick. Today you think of that kind of like cast iron that thick iron pot to cook it with. And that was being made at the time. Generally actually it was charcoal and charcoal needed a lot of wood. And so you're stuck. Like we're burning coal. We need cast iron to use it in most effective way but to make the cast iron were using charcoal which is gonna require the wood. And so there's a bit of kind of a stock point there. In fact, Britain was actually just not great at making iron at the time because it did have a lot of trees. And so it was actually importing most of the iron from places like Sweden. They were deeply wooded. And so iron was not just a core competency because it was so linked. And you couldn't make it in mass yet, right? Iron was made in very small quantities in very small batches because it was made through this process of burning the wood. And so it's quite expensive. And changing the composition of iron was not something that was readily known how to do as you mentioned. And so I think now it's time to introduce one of our first real direct human protagonists in the story. The inventor Abraham Darby, this is a guy who was born in 1678 to a Quaker family and he worked in a malt mill maker in Birmingham. Malt mills were used to crush the grains for the stories. And so he stayed in metal manufacturing for the rest of his life. He set up, when he was 21, he set up his own shop to make brass and copper. And the British at that time, again, they were making this stuff but they also weren't that good at making brass. And they actually were just not like an advanced European. They were a second tier European power at this time. They had not really unlocked anything. And they were short on wood and they were small. Island had still ultimately recovered from the plague. And so he actually took a trip to the Netherlands and kind of did some industrial espionage. And some 1704 he went over there and he's like, you know, the Dutch are the best at making this stuff. How are they doing this? And he figured out that they're using this technique, using dry sand to make these cast iron molds. And that result was really beautiful smooth pots. And so he studied that and understood that's how they were, they were making it. And that also is this moment he got really deeply interested in cast iron over brass. And so he came back and in 1707 was issued the patent for that method in the UK. And it turns out most of his investors and the original brass and copper business, we're not happy about this. Like what are you doing messing out with cast iron? We thought you have a good thing going. We don't really know how to make this stuff. And so most of them pulled out of the business because they wanted to focus on the original business. He wanted to keep going. And so he set up the first scaled furnace in a town called maybe appropriately cold Brookdale that was the first not just to use this cast iron method, but perhaps even most importantly was the first to use what's called Coke to smell iron. So Coke is simply coal that's baked to remove the impurities. And it's this solid,
Carbon-rich material that you derive from the coal and you remove a lot of the tar and impurities. The best analogy is that you're charcoaling coal. The same thing we did with wood where we baked it and then it turned into charcoal, which is this kind of harder carbon-rich material. If you do that with the coal, it's only that supercharged. The right type of coal is a little bit softer and it's softens and then re-hardens in a more porous structure. And the key things about that is you've removed the impurities, right? You've removed a lot of the kind of gases and volatile, the water and the other things in it. And made a higher, more carbon-dense fuel. Number one, number two is it's porous, which we mentioned. Is that actually helps it get hotter and light better because air can flow through the coke as a natural byproduct of its structure? And then also it's actually stronger. You can stack stuff on top of it. And so these elements really unlock coke as the fundamental fuel going forward for iron, eventually steel. And then in the long term, still used today because of its special properties of being the kind of strongest carbon source thing that can get the hottest in these environments. To get concretely into iron making with coke, which is I think a really important piece to understand, what is a blast for us? Like, what do you actually make iron? First, people are mining iron ore. And iron ore is rock with iron particles within it, right? And those iron particles are often like iron and oxygen in different configurations that are locked into the rock and minerals. And so what you're trying to do is get the pure iron out to then a metal that you can work with. And so you put these iron ore rocks into a really hot environment and you need to stack it and stack it with the fuel and allow the gases to flow through the fuel. And you actually need the carbon monoxide to flow through to react with the iron ore to strip away the oxygen. So carbon monoxide would flow through, react with the iron oxygen molecules and strip the oxygen off. So that you have this pure iron that would be extracted from the iron ore to drip down. And then you could actually take it out and work with it. And you would take it out and it's called these molten iron inglits and the way you'd kind of drip out and you'd pull these out, it looked like a central channel with these little lines lined up. And it looks like little piglets suckling out a pig. And so that's why that's called pig iron. If you ever hear about pig iron, that is that pure molten iron extracted from this iron ore blast furnace process. That's wild. So you've got a couple things here. You've got coke, which is coal that's baked to remove the impurities that allowed Darby to make kind of iron in larger batches. And you've got this iron process you're mentioning is like very energy intensive. And so it's done in small quantities. And what it sounds like the unlock for Darby is where you now you can finally make iron at larger and larger batches. And so you can bring down the price, you can increase the scale. That's right. And it really does take, like we're talking about from a timeline perspective, this all is happening with Darby figuring this out. And the early 1700s, I had 1710, he's he's set up this first blast furnace and really pioneering the use of coke for iron. But that doesn't mean the rest of the iron production had kind of tipped over. And if you look like at a timeline perspective of this, in 1720, there's something like 20,000 tons total of cast iron produced with charcoal. And only 400 tons produced with coke. So it took a long time. It wasn't really until, you know, like the later end of that century, kind of 1770s, 1780s that coke became the dominant way of doing this. Right, which is a pattern that we see in any of these new technologies. Like this is it, this is the innovative new thing to do. That he had just discovered, just pan to just figure it out. And but it ends up being this massive unlock to scale, which, you know, iron, the basis of steel, is the basis of everything we're going to go forward and talk about. You don't have the steam engine without this. You don't have locomotives. You don't have railways. This is the crazy story of coal and what it unlocks, right? Not to beat an iron pan further, but you've got this switch from wood to coal in the home. And you've got pots and pans that aren't useful to use on the coal. And so you move from charcoal to coke. And then this key innovation that ends up sparking the industrial revolution is the cooking pots. And the ability to now have an invention to cast iron in stronger shapes that are more co-produced. And this cooking evolution turns out it was just what our next protagonist needed for his steam engine parts. And then it's what George Stevenson needed for his iron rails and what architects needed for their construction. And so this unlock that you're mentioning around iron that comes back through to cooking, which is just do the transformation of what we were using to cook our foods is this kind of theme that you see with coal over and over again of how it just is able to unlock step change functions of different quality of life throughout throughout a society. Coal meet this problem of your old cookware doesn't work. So you need new cookware, but you actually can't make that new cookware with charcoal because you're out of trees, which is why you're using coal, but then coal unlocked the mass production of the new cookware from these pots and pans in this cast iron process Darby actually got another big quarter, which was to help with the iron for the first ever steam engine. And this kicks off. Perhaps this is the moment we consider kicking off what's now known as the industrial revolution. Ah, the industrial revolution much ink has been spilled on this and it could be its own book, but it plays such an important role not only in society, but in the story of coal. The industrial revolution think of it as the dramatic increase in production through the use of machines powered by coal. That is what the industrial revolution is. And it is this is the time period where we talk about everything across the fabric of society changing. And so up until this point, most people lived on or close to the land that provided them food, right? 80% of people were farmers feeding themselves and the other 20% of people that weren't farmers. Life expectancy didn't really fall below 25 and didn't really rise above 35. Formal education was very limited to the rich as a privilege. The weapons that we had designed couldn't kill more than a couple dozen people at once. We moved at the speed of horseback, right? For the previous 15,000 years, most of what people owned was made in the communities that they lived in. And the industrial revolution changed the advent of electricity, the access to the types of food we could eat, modern plumbing, sewage, medication, nearly every aspect of life is characterized by this change in the increase of production powered by machines through the use of coal. And the theme that we're going to see time and time again is coal creating a problem and then coal solving its own problem. And so let's go full steam ahead into perhaps one of the greatest modern inventions of mankind. The steam engine. Prior to this moment, if humans wanted something to move and wanted to move something, it was either being moved by a human or by a different animal, right? We, as you said, it could ride on horseback. We could have horses or oxen pull something along. We use the animals all the time as some mode of force. So we grow food to feed the animal to have them do work or we'd grow food to feed other humans to have them do physical work. But if we wanted something to move, if we want water to move, if we wanted material to move, we want food to move, we or our animals had to move it. Right? And yes, we used combustible fuels, but really only directly, we either use them to heat our homes and heat our bodies or heat our food. We didn't have a way to take a fuel, burn it, and then have it move something. And that is what is about to happen. And of course, as you tipped up, like why now? Right? Like, of course, like, you know, unlocking the power that is stored underground or stored in firewood even for some other physical movement seems kind of largely valuable at any point in time. So why now? Well, the why now is actually because we want more coal. The why now is it even in the 1600s and newcastles in those early days of kind of expansion and ramp up in the domestic use of coal in London, we were digging deeper and deeper for coal. And what else is down deep? Water. And the water isn't our way of getting the coal. So we got to get the water out of the mind so we can get to the coal. And we, you know, did it humans and everything they could do to get the water out, right? They first they would carry it out with buckets. And and first century is they would dig these amazing tunnels that are horrifying to think about to drain water out of these minds. So if the mind was up enough and there was a valley, you could dig
a tunnel to, they would dig these tunnels that were no more than a foot and a half wide and four feet high. Some of them went for up to five miles underground to dig this little tunnel to connect up. And so they would start in the valley. They'd dig the tunnel up. They'd then break it through to the mind wall and water would come gushing down and they'd hope that they could get out of the way before the water pressure would break through in the tunnel. That's amazing. A five mile tunnel simply to get the water out shows us how big of a problem it was. Our appetite for coal was increasing and we literally could not get more coal without draining the water. It was a fundamental bottleneck. That's right. There was minor inventions people would put buckets on a chain and pull the chain up. But again, a human was pulling that chain or an animal was pulling that chain. By 1700, the nation was dependent on coal and at this point mining more than five times of us the world. The Britain was at this point now the center of coal, again, still primarily for this domestic and some industrial use and still limited in what coal could get you to what wouldn't be water logged leading into this. London had formed what's known as the Royal Society. The Royal Society was this group of scientists that later were led by Isaac Newton and who's two of the British scientific establishment. These are the people who would graduate from Cambridge and Oxford and the leading theoreticians of the time. They looked to the water problem as a problem to think about. There are early experiments. There's Robert Boyle. You might know him for Boyle's Law, which is how the pressure and volume of a gas is consistent if held at a given temperature. He had someone working with him named Dennis Papin. One of the first things he made was a steam cooker. He would demonstrate how under pressure food could be digested in a new way and he demonstrates the first steam powered piston where you can use some steam to push a piston up. This is the beginnings of saying, "Hey, if we can heat up water and create steam, a piston can be moved up." But it stayed in this particular experiment relatively about the theoretical demonstration. His goal was to publish the paper that you could push steam up and it was cool. Thanks for proving that you could push steam up. That's a useful contribution to our knowledge. It didn't get the water out of the mind. That's the difference between publishing the paper and actually executing against the problem. He left it at that and didn't take the project all that much further. The next first movement was a more practical device that was getting Thomas Savry in 1698. Just another five years later. He made a device focused on this. It was called the Miner's Friend. It was, I think, about less about it. It has no moving piston or cylinder. He just figured out how to essentially create a straw, a vacuum-powered straw. They could start to take some water out of a mine. The steam would be used to create a vacuum in the straw and then it would draw water up and out using that vacuum. The problem with this was fairly depth limited. It could only move water about 25 feet and it required high pressure steam, which was actually very dangerous to use at the time. One of these exploded in 1705, just nine years after he invented it. At that point, people were like, "This is not worth it. This isn't doing enough for us. Let's go back to the buckets and chains." We're desperate to get the water out, but this straw isn't working. Right around this time, the time that the Royal Society was actually founded, a young man was born Thomas Newcomen. He was born in 1664 to an emergent family and he was essentially an iron monger. He would make some little tools and sell them and he worked near a coal mine making tools for mining. He was not at all part of the scientific establishment. He would just have coal miners come through asking for tools and hearing about their problems. He would frequently hear about miners getting tired of pulling water out of the mines. We think he learned about the miners' friend and savory had family in the same part of England where Thomas was living and working. He started to explore this more and became obsessed with this problem. He teamed up with another very practical guy, a guy named John Cawley, who was a plumber, a metal worker or a glass worker, so a very physical hands-on experimenter. They just started chipping away at this. Newcomen figured out is that if you take this piston design and you steam to push the piston up, the question was, "How could you pull it back down?" What do you do is he'd push up the piston with steam, shoot cold water into the piston. That would cause condensation of the steam and pull the piston back down. I'd pull the piston down. What do we mean? We actually mean that the atmosphere would push on top of the piston. This became known as the first ever atmospheric steam engine. This is the first real practical moment, I think, of unlocking stored energy and firewater, coal or whatever you want to burn, turning that steam into useful locomotive force. The first time in human history, we've used heat as a force, as a power, as an energy source to move a machine. That's right. This is them tinkering away and obsessing about this problem. Why would they obsess about this problem? Remember, if you're in and around coal workers, the town is functionally designed around the coal mine. Coal mines are full family operations. We've got the children working in them, the women working in them, a certain point, and the men hauling coal. So, Newcomen and his friends are just surrounded by folks who are talking about this problem. It seems like the most important problem to solve, and it was, and here you have it, the first time in human history, we're using heat to power a machine. I think the scientific establishment was a little frustrated that they didn't get more credit to figure this out because it was what they were trying to do. But I think it took some really practical living in the problem and building it and trying to just build it to solve the problem that really unlocked it, which is fascinating. And it worked. In the first one was installed in a coal mine in 1712, and all of a sudden, as people found out about it, they started demanding it. In fact, in 1726, one was installed in Paris to help lift water from their sun, and it started being used in iron ore mines in Sweden. Good news spreads fast. When you've solved something this way, people want it. So within a decade, around 100 of them were installed across Europe. Now the problem was, despite it working, it was extremely inefficient. It only worked if you had essentially coal just coming out of the mine directly into the machine. And this was such a problem that some people, some of the miners even complained. They're like, this thing is using up too much of my coal, but they wanted the water out. So they're kind of stuck using it. This is that first example of the desire for coal that need to mine deeper. Meaning they had to get more water out. They had to invent the steam engine to pump more water out. But then you needed more coal to power the steam engine to pump out more coal. And it's the problem and the solution all in one. That's right. And so what do we need? Well, I think we need the next inventor to figure out how to make this better. And so in January of 1736, the lowlands of Scotland, the city of Granite, to Agnes, Murehead, and the older James Wat is born, the younger James Wat, who I suspect most of our listeners have heard of. His father was a shipwright, young ships, contracted ships, and some of the father's wealth that led to the young James Wat, being able to be educated, likely came from his trade in slaves and slave produced goods. Granite at that time was a trading port and treated in sugar and cotton and dispatched ships to West Africa and the slave people in the colonies. Young Wat appeared to be pretty strong at math and he headed to Glasgow, the major city and university, to make math instruments. He's also not your typical boy, right? As legend has it, as a teenage boy, Wat was sitting in his aunt's house one day and she accused him of just being so idle, doing nothing but watching the kettle boil for an hour. And according to a letter that was later discovered, the aunt exclaimed, "I've never seen such an idle boy. Take a book or employ yourself usefully." And then being the well-manored lad that James was, he didn't respond. He just, he thought he was doing something useful. And what he was doing was he was staring at the kettle, trying to understand the power of steam. Maybe this legend was made up to further James Wat's legendary career status, but it fits in with his personality. It's a nice story. It's the Apple Heid Newton's head or these special moments that we want to like encapsulate to like, "Ah-ha." At this point, he's 21. He locked out. The University of Glasgow had gotten a gift of all these astronomical instruments and they were broken. And so they needed someone to fix them. And so they didn't require the kind of credentialed apprenticeship degree to do that work. So he set up a little workshop and began working on them. Pretty importantly, I think that he was in a university doing this because he quickly became friends with a few of the professors there. And this was quite a moment in Glasgow. So he paired up with the physicist and chemist Joseph Black. Black is the chemist that discovered carbon dioxide and discovered the concepts of specific heat and latent heat, which is understanding the phase transitions from things like water to steam and dice. Pretty important that he's already
around these professors. Also, you came buddies with the famous economist, Adam Smith. Adam Smith, you know, considered the father of capitalism in economics. You get Newcomans surrounded by these co-workers. You've got James Watts surrounded by chemist and physics who are discovering the transition of heat and CO2. And then you've got Adam Smith designing the future of economic structure of society. He's really steeped in formative knowledge. The right conditions were there. And so he's at this university. He's around these amazing scientists. He has the skill set of working with these mathematical instruments. And kind of an entrepreneurial drive. So what does he go do? He starts a toy business. That important toy business that we're here to talk about. He did start a side toy business with 16 workers. And they made toys and musical instruments to sell to people in the city of Glasgow. But his partner, his business partner, that business died a few years into it. And at that point, he was no longer interested. And so he sold the business and moved on. And he had taken too much from Adam Smith and found the arbitrage of demand for toys being ever present. Being limited. Maybe he wanted to participate in a new market. Who knows? And so in 1763, the university had one of these new command engines. We just talked about and asked him to fix it. Because he was the handy guy fixing all the issues instruments on campus. And so he barely got it working. And he's like, this thing is interesting. Well, this can't be an efficient way to do it. And so he did some measurements and figured out the each cycle of this engine about three quarters of the energy that was going into it. The thermal energy was wasted. And so what was going on there, well, he figured out that, you know, what you're doing is you're heating up this steam to drive this piston up. And then you're throwing cold water into the piston, cooling it down, driving it down, then you're heating up again. And so so much energy is in the heating and cooling of the piston. Which isn't actually what you want the energy to be doing. You want the energy to go into rising and lowering the piston and nothing else. And you don't want it to be in this kind of temperature changing. And so he came up with a concept on how to change that. And he got some capital from Joseph Black and he got to work. He had an idea ultimately to separate the creation of the steam and the condensation of the steam out of the cycle so that the piston could stay at a constant high temperature. And that became the core innovation. Again, going from that innovation and that idea to a working thing took a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of capital. And so fortunately, there was a guy nearby in John Robuck who owned an ironworks, meaning one of these facilities that's making iron and who had a coal mine nearby to supply his ironworks. And he was using a new command engine at the coal mine, but he was frustrated with it. It wasn't working well enough. And there was a noise that he was using so much coal. So he had heard about Watts design by a deal that was maybe classic at the time. He said, I'm going to own two thirds of your idea of your invention. And I'm going to assist you and give you space to work and give you the capital you need and a mind to go do it at. And so he set up a little workspace at Cottage that became known as James Watts Cottage and he built that out and started to work. And so from there, it was a straight line. It just worked. No, it turns out that unfortunately, John Robuck went bankrupt and had to repace in debt. And in particular, he owed 1,200 pounds to a Matthew Bolton who had set up a manufacturing works in a town called Birmingham. And Bolton actually knew something, not what in his invention and was intrigued by it. And he said, you know what? Instead of finding a way to give me the 1,200 pounds back, how about you get me that patent? And you let me take this team engine over here. And at this point, John Robuck was bankrupt and didn't have a use for it. And it spent 10 years kind of funding this thing because like sure, go for it. Ah, amazing. What a deal. I mean, the thing wasn't working still. Wasn't a deal or not. It turns out Bolton's partner in his business disagreed and thought that was an insane way to spend their money at the buy of his fans. So he actually split off. He said, no, I'll take the payout from this. I don't want anything to do with this kind of nonsense. Bolton was running this manufacturing in Birmingham. Bolton grew with the factory under his father. He became a partner in the business at 21 and was running it. And then his dad, of course, also a Matthew Bolton. You'll find a patent people like naming their kids after themselves in this era, retired and died two years later in 1759. Matthew and his wife had had three daughters in the early 1750s, but tragically, all of his daughters died and his wife Mary also passed away in the same year that his father died. So in one decade after his marriage, he had grown, taken over the family business, his father retired, his father dies. He's lost his wife, his father, and his three kids along the way. Maybe oddly, maybe not for the time, he became pretty interested in his, now deceased wife's sister Anne. And so he woulder a year later into marriage. So he and Anne went on to have two children. What do you think their names were? Were they Matthew and Anne? They certainly were. Creative time for baby naming. What's your name? What's your wife's name? They were boy naming a girl named, just keep going. So Bolton took his newly married life and capital, and he leased 13 acres of land and built this Soho manufacturing, this kind of industrial complex where it had 19 bays for loading and loading things and places for clerks and managers to live. And at this time, this manufacturing, they weren't in steam engines or any great industrial product, but they were making what was becoming very popular at the time, which were silver plated goods. And so he was figuring out how to scale this factory and work with metals and expand. To power this factory, he did need mechanical power. And there was one other source that we haven't talked about of mechanical power at the time, which was water. And so around his factory, there was a stream that flowed and he used power from this flowing stream to run his manufacturing. The problem is, in summer, the stream would not flow as quickly. And so he got frustrated with the fact that in the summertime, his factory cannot be as productive. So he had started to hear all what, started to hear about this idea of a more efficient steam power thing that could run in a factory and not just near the head of a coal mine. And so when he heard about Robux debt, he swooped in, bought the 2/3 of the earth of the patent. His partner thought he was crazy and left. And took him a little bit of time, but in a couple of years, he convinced what to move to Birmingham. And what was not, he wasn't the best business guy. Now, this guy was an inventor. He was tinker. He was staring at the kettle, trying to figure out how steam works. And there's a quote where he confessed that he would rather face a loaded cannon than settle an account or make a bargain. Bolton, on the other hand, was the opposite. I mean, he swooped in on this moment of debt. And so these two went on to become perhaps one of the most important and productive partnerships in the history of the Industrial Revolution. And so he convinced what to move to Birmingham, live there. Now, the patent itself was already six years into its 14-year life. They had this patent, but they didn't have any working steam engine. It's kind of a problem. And so Bolton was deeply connected at this moment. He had kind of a scaled business. And so he lobbied parliament and convinced them to extend the life of the patent another 15 years to 1,800. So they had more incentive to go and do this work. And so they went to work. And at this point, they had, again, the kind of-- the physics figured out the underpinnings of it. But there was still an open problem. They needed the piston to fit really well if it was going to sit at steep level and be effective and efficient. And it just had not been people working and kind of making accurately machined things at that time. And so they just didn't know how to do that. They didn't know who to do it. And Bolton, I find this so interesting. It's not just they had created the kind of manufacturing center for his own business and say, can Birmingham. He was driven with a small group to make Birmingham kind of a center of thought and execution. Maybe a counterpoint to London and say, you know what, this is kind of this place of builders and people. And so there's this group. They call themselves the lunar society, where they would meet their kind of the intellectual elite. Yeah, you've always heard of the French salons. And during this time of philosophizing and scientists and mathematicians and professors getting together, you had these societies form in different countries. The lunar society, why is it called the lunar society? Well, during this time, you don't have street lights. And you know, if they're meeting at night, it's hard to get around. So the name arose because they would meet on a full moon. And the extra light of the full moon made it easier and safer for them to journey back and forth. And as a result, they cheerfully referred themselves as lunatics. So these lunatics would go from house to house to pain on the month. Sometimes they'd get Matthew Bolton, Soho House as part of his complex. Erasmus Darwin is an ancestor of the famous Charles Darwin. Live there and was a figurehead. It was not a formal group where they had rules, laws, it was an informal gathering that they continued. But it gave this network of kind of problem solvers and connectors. These folks were writing letters to Ben Trinfrinklin at the time, talking about experiments electricity. A key figure was this guy Joseph Prisley, who was both a theologian and also a recorder of history and what it would do with electricity experiments, these kind of polymathic folks. Joseph Prisley ended up being an important connection because his wife Mary had a brother named John Wilkinson, also known as John, the Iron Mad Wilkinson. And he does-- He sounds like the right guy.
guy to solve this problem. If you're trying to get the best shape piston, you got to talk to the Iron Mad Wilkinson. And it just so happened that around this time Wilkinson had developed a brand new technique called a boring machine. It's the way I think about it. It's a boring company. That's right. But this is maybe the founding moment of this concept, which was interesting. He developed a technique first for cannons, right? You want a nice cylinder that's really straight to shoot out a cannonball. Of course, the cannons had existed before this time, but the way that those would work is they would cast a tube, the external cylinder of the cannon, and they would try and drill a nice hole in the middle. As you imagine doing that, you don't get a nice straight hole. You get a kind of decent one, but not the best one. And so what Wilkinson figured out is, instead, you take an iron block and you stick it and you spin the whole block, you can actually extract a much more symmetric shape. And so you get a nice tube with a ball that fits right in it. You know what's quite similar to a cannon tube? The piston. Exactly. So this unlocked the piston. And so then it was time. And finally, in 1776, right as the founding fathers were signing the Declaration of Independence in America, the partnership erected two engines and one for Wilkinson and one at a mine. And both engines led to a mass wave of publicity. Now these engines, you remember the original goal here was to take this, the concept of the Newcomen engine and take out the condensation unit that it should be more efficient. Well, how much more efficient should it be? They were so confident in their design that their whole business model was you're working to price the engine based on how much more efficient based on the savings of coal, the cost of the input into the engine. It was actually pretty genius. It's must have been Bolton's idea, right? This was certainly not Watts idea, but there you have the level of conviction to say we're not going to do a rev share. We're going to we're going to take a portion of your savings. And if you don't save anything from the efficiency of this, we're not making any money. So a complete incentive alignment here and their ability to, I mean, we were starting at a fairly low bar because as we know, this original engine was known to be highly inefficient, but they stake their name and their design on the ability to have a step change function on the efficiency of the Newcomen engine. That's right. And I think, I think their actual contracts, the customers would sign would give them one third savings on the fuel costs into the engine compared to the Newcomen design. So the next 25 years of operation. And it turns out these things were radically more efficient. I was trying to look at the number. I think it was something like four times the output per given, you know, amount of coal. Four times more efficient from this evolution of their design. And then it got even better as time went on. So at this point, just to just remind you what this thing is doing is it's moving up and down. It's using coal to drive steam to drive this mechanism that would move something up and down. And in this case, they would use it connected to a pump down in the mine to move water and push the water out. That is great. But there's a bunch of uses back to bolted original desire. It wasn't really to pump water out of the mine. Bolton was trying to drive processes inside his factory that were today driven by a water wheel. Right. And that requires a different type of motion, a rotary motion. And so in 17, two, so this is now six years after the first deployment of the core design, they figured out how to take that engine and give it rotary emotion, which made it useful not just in pumping, but now in mills and factories. They continue to iterate on the design after this rotary and eventually got to something five times the efficiency of the new command engine. This included things like have a cycle that not just pushes the piston up, but also pushes it from the other side. One thing for a number of reasons what never believed in was high pressure steam. They thought that high pressure steam was going to be just too dangerous to work with. And they had a third partner that joined later, this guy, William Murdock, who wanted to build high pressure systems. And even what sought, I think, to go get a patent on that at some point, and they actively stopped him and discouraged him. And it almost became reminds me of the Edison Tesla AC versus DC debate. But to know that new thing is too dangerous and it's just never going to work. And they were right for a time, of course, and then until it does work. The last fun fact that I really like about what is on units, we now today talk about kilowatt hours and kilowatts and what as a measurement of power for all of this work. But funnily enough, what is the person who devised the term horsepower, which became the standard of when we talk about when they talked about power at the time and the strength of an engine. And so that was the strongest power they had at the time. That's right. So of course, so the great irony of replacing his own unit with his with him in name, what a set of marriages and business partnerships and being born in certain areas and associating yourself with the coal miners around you and the meeting professors and and all of this coming together to not only invent what changed my anxiety and steam engine, but also went on to propagate across the economy. So you know, if we were to zoom out now at this moment in the late 1700s, this is when we have this big unlock. So we move from coal, not just as a heating source or a way to pump out water to drive more coal mining, but to then start to drive the process of industrialization. This in turn attracts more people to adopt the steam power for their own factories, increasing the demand for coal and for iron and so on. So this very kind of this extremely strong feedback loop that then ripples across and you would mention the powering of water mills. This is this is really just previously factories were powered by water, water moving downstream through gravity. And so water wheels were located in these diverse rural settings. And so factories came about in these in this very disparate network and was dramatically constrained by the power of the water by the season that the water was running, right? If you wanted to cut wood or mill grain, you would go where the power is. The water mill was what was generating power. The amount of production, the size of your factory, the amount of grain you could mill was directly limited to the power of the water that you were located near. But then enter the steam engine and enter coal and not only do factories get incredibly more efficient and get do they get larger as you introduce more efficient and larger steam engines, but they could now move away from the water source and they could now start to centralize. And so this changes the shape of modern life where people lived, the timing of the workday, the introduction of the school system, the way labor is organized, the way streets are made to move things, the entire process of urbanization around factory life driven by the steam engine powered by coal. And this is what propels Britain onto the global stage to become the manufacturing powerhouse. Now at the turn of the 1800s, Britain had a good half century head start and industrialization and it would end up holding its lead for the better part of the next century. But it wasn't entirely obvious that the small island of Britain would become the manufacturing superpower of the world. This was not a preordained and if you were a betting person, you not necessarily would have bet on Britain at this time because China and India were all roughly at the same place in terms of industrial production. Britain had a few things going for it and one of the most unique game changers for it, the advantages that it had was coal, specifically the abundant coal at surface, which made it cheaper to mine. And we talk about how you had to go deeper, you had to mine more of the water outens, the abundance of coal that they were able to get through surface mining and then near surface mining with the steam engine was what enabled them to leapfrog ahead. Steam engines were powered by cheap coal to make mining more efficient to keep coal cheap, which then enabled them to produce cheap iron and steel, which we'll talk about as a need to move the cheap coal. All powered by steam engines that weren't terribly efficient at the time. So Britain rises up to be this manufacturing superpower through the 1800s and very quickly by 1830 it's producing four fifths of the world's coal. And by the mid 1800s it produced more iron than the rest of the world combined. And so the big moment here 1851 is the world's fair in London and Britain is hailed as the workshop of the world and its markets and empires start to reach this global scale. It's come a long way since importing iron from Sweden where there is enough trees for the charcoal for the iron where it burns like yeah we don't really know how to do this stuff. What you look back is really about a century from Darby to then want to these big unlocks that then said no we're now the exporter. And you hit it on exactly the movement from where is there water power to where can the steam engine be to drive.
drive the factories and that leads all this organization, but there's still a big constraint there, right? Which is you need the coal and the coal. Moving coal is really interesting to think about. Like on one hand, it's almost nature's battery stored from 300 million years before into the plant, into the coal. Now we can take it out and use it. But it's also on the other hand, a heavy rock that you have to move. And at that time, it was really still moved by water. It's very hard to move heavy rock on land. Now this is time before roads, before diesel trucks, when you move something over land, you're pulling it via horse and carriage and you can't move that much. And so just like put a finer point in this, if you spent a pound on coal in Newcastle, it would cost you about three pounds to ship it to London, right? So the same pound of coal would be three pounds to buy in London. Okay, three X markup, because transportation on ships, it's got about 250 miles on the ocean, fair. Well if you ask someone to move it on land, that three pounds would get you about 10 miles of transport to Newcastle. So if you think about Newcastle's export, it's either needs to be on the shipping route to London or kind of within maybe 10 to 15 miles around. You can't really get it anywhere else with any economic sense. And so in that sense, London was lucky and London's luck is what enabled it to be this city, Newcastle on the water. And it just built this feedback loop of shipping as the core way in which fuel moved across the island. That's right. There wasn't a better way at the time to move large amounts of heavy rock than to load them onto ships and move them over water. And so the need to move coal drove this massive investment into shipping and into a naval fleet. And coal essentially created the British Royal Navy's, this national asset that goes on to help Britain dominate the world through colonization. You have the private fleet in England that was built around being able to move massive amounts of coal, getting routinely called in to war because they were the abundant shipping source, the coal ships. Coal was such critical asset that you would have armed merchant ships escorting coal ships so that you could safely get to harbor when those working on the coal ships were called into duty. You can't refuse the call to go and help your country at war, even though this was an incredibly dangerous time. And so already in the 1600s, you had more ships that were moving coal than everything else combined. This is the birth of the global empire driven by the need to move this heavy rock that was so desperately needed in London and throughout England. And so in this time, we're talking about around 500,000 tons of coal leaving Newcastle by sea every year to head to London. And some of that would be used as various supports that would take some of that coal, but it was largely still heading to London. And as we said earlier, the land transport was just not a viable option. It's a little bit surprising why you can only move 10 miles on land for the same cost that you can move hundreds of miles over sea, but the land transport across Britain was notoriously muddy and essentially what you had with these deep grooves that would be formed over decades and decades of people traveling on horseback. And it was very arduous and risky. Often the royalty would rather move on horseback than on carriages because the carriages got so easily trapped in the mud. And so goods that were shipped overland were often sent by pack horse rather than even by carriage. It's very difficult. This the horse hooves and the wheels and the foot traffic would over generations and generations would turn rows into essentially deep trenches. And in the 1700s in Birmingham, there's this image of the roads leading into Birmingham were often 12 to 14 feet deep because of how much traffic was across them. You really couldn't move safely, efficiently or quickly. We really needed something that we changed. And that's obviously look at, no, it's canals. We're good at moving stuff on water. We found that if you put something on a floating surface and you drag it, it actually can move. So what did they start doing? They started digging canals all over the place. And so in the kind of lead 1700s, there's this big boom of canal deline that allowed boats to be pulled by horses right alongside them on a canal. And so there's a guy, the Duke of Bridgewater, who's considered one of the greatest canal builders. He said, every canal he builds must have coals at the heel of it. Meaning coal needs to be on one end. That's the primary purpose of the canal. Everything else moving is secondary. And this is also when they started to build the first rails. Now what do we mean by rails? What we mean is solve this kind of buddy trail problem. People would start to put down rails so that the horses and the carriages could ride along and the carriage could ride on a stable surface. So these smooth rails would often connect to canals, right? You'd have a road, you'd have a rail on it, and that would bring it from maybe from the coal mine, which didn't make sense unless they had the canal right up to it for whatever the geography of the region might be. Bringing the coal down to the canal, then use the canal to transport over land. That's right. This network of ways to transport coal that would then enable them to build out, to be able to have commerce. And so as you imagine, a lot of this is happening around Newcastle. Newcastle is still the coal mining center of the world at this point. And so it's all happening in that 10 mile radius. Well, about nine miles from Newcastle, there's a boy who grew up in a cottage that was facing right in front of one of these rails. He saw every day these horses and carriages carrying coal back and forth up and down these rails. We're now going to introduce our next protagonist, George Stevenson. He is considered the father of railways. And he was born to this very humble working class coal mining family, neither of whom knew how to read and write. And his father was the chief fireman for the local coal mine, which at that point really meant that his job was to shovel the coal into the Newcoman steam engine to pump out the water. And George became fascinated by the steam engine and how it worked. And so when he was 14, he, I mean, again, he wasn't in school at the time. He started working as an assistant to the fireman to his father. And turns out he had just a deep intuitive mechanical skills by the time he was 17, he was put in charge of his own steam engine, and often repair it if anything happened. He also had a hunger for understanding how it worked. And so he wanted an education. So he for himself paid for night school at the age of 18 and learned how to read and write and do arithmetic and was illiterate up into that point. Maybe in what echoes some of the Bolton story, George also had a lot of family tragedy before his most productive phase of life. He was married in 1802 and 1803, his son was born, 1805, his daughter was born, but his daughter died at three weeks of age and his wife passed the next year. So it was then him and his son. And shortly thereafter, his father, who was working at still as a fireman at the steam engine, was scalded and blinded by escaping the steam. And so there he was in his mid-20s, trying to figure out how to support his baby son and his father, who had some debts, and sure enough, the Napoleonic war breaks out. And he has to take whatever savings he has and pay someone to go take his place because he has to be there for his family. Ugh, just awful. Awful time. But he kept at his role and started to become known as one of the most handy mechanics in the area to be able to fix all these pumping engines. And so he was promoted through the ranks. And it turns out that there is this coal-mining cartel that had formed from the wealthiest coal-mining families, called the Grand Allies. By 1812, he decided to put Stevenson in charge of all the machines across all their coal mines. And they had a lot of excess capital. If they were convinced of some improvement that could be made to their operations, they had the capital to fund it. They deeply trusted Stevenson. And Stevenson started to look at this transportation problem and started to explore, could they use steam engines instead of horses to move coal down the tracks? There's grow-ups staring at these tracks. And you see horses and carriages move on them, transfer them to canals. And you go through decades of seeing that we're not going to stop moving this coal. There's got to be a better way. And I think a lot of us also are like, that perfect context and perfect conditions. You had the capital provider and the customer. He was embedded with the customer. Here he worked for the customer. This is kind of in-house. And it wasn't a brand new idea. There's a Cornishman Richard Trivitchick, who actually made the first steam locomotive called the Puffing Devil back in 1801. And it worked. So there's a high pressure steam and had a pretty innovative design. But he wasn't in a place to put it all together with the customer. And it's not just about making it better.
steam engine on wheels. You needed to think through the entire thing 'cause now you had a heavier device than the carriage. So what tracks does it go on? And who's gonna build all those tracks? You actually kinda had to build the locomotive and the railway at the same time. Otherwise it doesn't work. - You need both the product and the distribution mechanism. - That's right, classic product distribution entanglement. And so, Stevenson set off and designed his first locomotive in 1814 for hauling coal in this killing worth mine region. And it worked. The first one could haul 30 tons of coal up a hill at a blistering pace at four miles per hour. But it was the first that we leaked end to end put everything together. Had the flanged wheel design. That really was like the steel wheel touching the steel rails. And they could give it the traction that it needed. And he figured out a bunch of issues. Like, you actually can't use cast iron. You just rot iron's a little bit more flexible, not as brittle for these rails. He is the person in this moment that started to design what became the standard gauge. Which is now four foot eight and a half inches that is used on every railway basically in the world today. I mean, it's like 55% of the rail that's out there today is still the standard gauge. There was set into motion in this moment on 1815. Wow. Now, this was still kinda early days. There was like this one mine, this one little track of rail. This one little locomotive. Then in 1821, Parliamentary Bill passed to build the first real railway connecting Stockton and Darlington. And the original plan was to do what they've been doing this whole time, metal rails with horses pulling coal on the metal rails. But George Stevenson got in just in time and convinced them that actually they should use a coal powered locomotive. And so he got the contract to build the rail and then he set up a company, Robert Stevenson in company, which was George's son, Robert, to actually build the locomotive, right? Kind of so there's some arms distance, no nephatism there. Well, Robert has obviously grown working with his father. He was an elderly 18 years old, contracted to build the first locomotive. But he did. And by 1825, they finished the locomotive and they called it simply locomotion. And it's successfully called 80 tons, nine mile distance in two hours and reached a maximum speed of 24 miles per hour and one of the stretches. And this was pretty wild 'cause this is the first time that really humans had gone that fast in a machine, right? Hauling heavy load. I mean, it's amazing. This must have been a scene that attracted a tremendous amount of attention. I mean, there are thousands that came just to watch it go. And this was the first one they actually had carried 600 passengers on the locomotive. So it was a really like big moment, right? This 1825 moment, it reminds you of the first moment when they turned on the steam engine. This was a turning point in human history to actually transport ourselves via a machine. But it was still, you know, I'd consider a pilot stage. It was really 1830 that the scaled launch happened. This was the Liverpool to Manchester railway, which was the first fully locomotive driven railway that was publicly accessible. And it launched the frenzy, the railway mania to come. Steven sends his now 50 built the track and he convinced the owners again to just use locomotives for the whole thing and another four-strong carriages. And then there was an open contest to design the best locomotive and surprise surprise him and his son won the contest to provide the locomotive. So there's a full nice lock in there that he got. It is. I mean, this is the buzz of the town. It's hard to appreciate how exciting this moment was and the quantum leap in speed and mode of power that these engines represented. And even the horror that it inspired. Moving from horse-drawn speed and power to steam engine was just unimaginable. And this is the beginning of the growth of railways across Europe and Asia. Much later in the US as we'll see. But it really kicked off a revolution in the way people and goods were transported. - Yeah, that's right. And so this launch was an exciting moment. 400,000 people lined up around when it launched in September of 18th. It's a lot of people, especially in the United States. - A lot of people. - So this was a big deal and there was all these political dignitaries and there was like a whole complicated issue that happened not due to any of the technology but maybe some of the coordination and a pretty important member of parliament ended up getting crushed by one of the trains. And he was a very pro-trained supporter. So there was a little bit daunting but the thing worked and this railway kicked off and started moving hundreds of thousands of people and lots of coal. This railways also the first railway to have no voice-round traffic permitted. It was the first to be double track. It was the first to use a true like signaling system, the first to have a timetable and the first railway ever to move mail. So all of a sudden this was, this, yes, like the motivation of this was coal mines and to move coal. But once you're moving coal and you're doing the effort to build in the railway, you have this thing set up, let's move people, let's move mail, let's move food, let's move all these other things and let's build a system around it. Also the locomotive they built for this time was called the rocket and it became the standard in Britain at the time. It's a very famous locomotive. Maybe the equivalent is the Model T of trains. There was really the first one to unlock. And it took a lot of the things that was a high pressure system, it turns out what and Bolton were wrong and that you actually could build a high pressure system that was safe and innovated on top of the past experiments but actually really worked effectively. So hundreds of thousands of passengers would ride on this railway and by 1845, just 15 years after this moment, Britain had had over 2000 miles of track and over the 10 years beyond that, 6,000 miles of track. So this moment really kicked off over the next 15 to 30 years just the real build out of railway in Britain. The difficulty of hauling coal was a huge drawback and then the invention of locomotion in the rail and using coal motivating the invention to haul itself. Coal created a problem and it helped power the solution and the solution had revolutionary consequences far beyond the coal industry as we've mentioned. We now have the steam engine which can give power both up and down and rotary power wherever we want it, enabled by coal which we can now move wild distances. We can we've called thousands of miles across the island and we've sophisticated mining going on in Newcastle, we can pump the water out so we can get coal anywhere, we can put steam engines anywhere, we can build the first truly industrial cities and I think no city represents that more than the city of Manchester. So what was going on in Manchester at this time? We Manchester started out as a quiet town and quickly became the symbol of industrialization. You had cotton shipped from slave plantations in America and coal from all the nearby mines, just incredible interconnection. As we mentioned, the supply of coal fuelled increasingly bigger steam engines which fuelled increasingly bigger factories which needed increasingly bigger workforces which then because you now didn't have to be sitting near the water mill, created these increasingly bigger cities. And by the 1830s, Manchester had seven cotton mills with more than a thousand workers each. And the steam engine had created this new incentive to build and build bigger factories, bigger engines, bigger cities, and extract more and more out of each lump of dirty coal. And to put this colorfully, our good friend Alexis the Tokeville visited Manchester shortly after publishing his classic analysis on America in 1835. And he described the dual nature of this unprecedented city in the words of from this foul drain, the greatest dream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows, here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage. It's quite this juxtaposition that we're gonna continue to unpack of what coal is able to produce in terms of wealth and uplifting society as well as how it changes the fabric of society and its starker side. We now live in a time where kind of automation, not entirely, but increasingly decouples human labor. This is almost a time in which automation amplified human labor or accelerated human labor or created this, you have to keep up with the machine. It was not like the cotton mills or the steam engines stopped human labor. It enabled you to go deeper into the mind, it enabled you to produce more, not to stop producing. Right, you could produce more, but not without human assistance. That's right, so now the humans are then tethered to the machine. There's another quote on this, which is around the same time. It's like, while the engine runs, the people must work. Men, women and children are yoke together with iron and steam. The animal machine breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering, is chained fast to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness. That's right. And now you have factories.
is running when the sunlight is not running. - Right, so you have this big investment in a factory and a mill, you have all these people. The last thing you wanna do is turn the thing off when it's dark, what a silly reason to stop production. And if only we had a solution to that. Well, it turns out, didn't the process of making our friend a coke out of coal, as you heat up the coal, a gas comes off the coal. And traditionally, that gas was just thrown away. It was just waste gas. - The byproduct. - The byproduct turns out, you can store that gas, pipe it through and light it. And it is, in fact, at the time, a pretty good source of light, much better than dealing with whale oil or candles, which were expensive and messy. And you're doing it anyways. It was effectively zero cost if you were gonna throw this stuff away. And so, coal gas light ramps up in the same time. By 1805 coal gas lights were keeping factories bright. And so, in this moment in Manchester, you have the additional confluence of lighting that could keep the factory running 24/7. And this coal gas light becomes a major source of lighting across Britain, across later in America. Like, this was really the first industrial scale lighting. And just like a side point on this, in a way, this was the first fuel that we treated almost like a utility. Because instead of needing to deliver the product kind of one by one house to house, you would actually start to build up, it started to create the need to build up piping underneath a city to deliver coal gas light. There's various remnants of this if you go into old houses and Victorian houses. There's kind of old coal gas lighting to be inside of homes sometimes that you can trace and track down. So in addition to being terrible labor environment, 'cause you're working at the pace of the machine, there were terrible health conditions in cities like Manchester, right? These were dark skies. And in 1842, the government issued a report that it's an appalling fact that for all that are born, the laboring classes in Manchester more than 57% are dying before they attain the age of five. Right, so yes, in the long term, we think of the industrial revolution as this progress on human life expectancy, all these things that we were talking about in this moment is a low point of that, right? It is driving life expectancy down in these industrial cities. And this could be an issue. I mean, there's a war that broke up that the Crimean war in 1854 and 42% of the urban recruits were rejected, 'cause they were not physically strong enough to join the war. In particular, there's a disease called Ricketts, which mostly hit infants and toddlers. And it led to these kind of bowed and stunted legs and stunted development amongst urban children. And it is horrifying. In some neighborhoods, doctors reported that basically every child they saw had signs of Ricketts. And so this disease became known as the English disease because it was so pervasive in these kind of cold, smoke-filled places. And I believe basically the fundamental causes are not getting any vitamin D. You're not getting any sunshine because the skies are so filled with smoke because your inside factory is during all daylight hours. And so these are the conditions, this early wave of industrialization are just these, I mean, one would argue kind of at scale, the largest kind of accelerated divide between the owners and the labor, right? This language sounds familiar, a division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the owners of capital and the labor creating the capital. What could be happening here? Well, one of the owners was actually a bit of a radical. There was a German family, the Ingalls family, and Frederick Ingalls, kind of the up and rising son of the family, it was sent to Manchester to check in and learn about how they're caught in mill that they partially own and Manchester is doing. And Frederick Ingalls, he was more interested, much more interested in the condition of labor than he was in the efficiency of running the cotton mill much as families dismay. And so he wrote the condition of the working class in England in 1845 and around this time started to build this relationship with Karl Marx. And so they would be, you know, perhaps as faithful as Bolton and Watts partnership, Ingalls and Marx would be the foundational partnership that would underpin communism and underpin the generation of the theories there. So they collaborated and published the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and Ingalls' wealth from these cotton mills would directly finance the ability for Marx to publish his works and distribute his works over the following decades. After Marx's death in the late 1800s, Ingalls dedicated himself to preserving Marx's legacy. You mentioned this relationship was very deep. And he ended up editing and publishing Dascopital using Marx's notes and ensuring that Marx's theories reached the broadest of audiences. And of course, you know, we're not gonna spend the next hours going through the history of communism of the following hundred years. But I found this to be a moment that like, I didn't realize we were getting into this. There's a direct real line from coal enabling the power of the machine and the power of owners, whether it's factories or coal mines and growing economic divide, the then creates this philosophical underpinning that then leads to eventually Soviet Leninism and Stalinism and eventually the CCP and communism in China and the political underpinnings that set the stage for the central conflict of the 20th century. So, and this isn't a stretch, this is a direct through line, as you mentioned, it wouldn't have happened had we not discovered utilized and manifested coal into the central energy source of the time. Somehow we've spent, you know, however many hours now talking about all of this, but we have not really talked about how the coal gets out of the mine and who the people are and what they're experiencing. So now it's time to dive into a particular class of workers, the miners and their experience. And I think one common thread that I honestly, you know, I think even has echoes to this day is that coal miners were treated as social al-casts that were facing these astonishing dangers to give access to this like vital, vital fuel source, but they were never really treated as equals in their society. That divide often created a sense of camaraderie that increasingly bordered on the experience of soldiers in wartime, right? They were in the trenches together, they faced life-threatening issues together. And in moments when necessary, they banded together in ways that had also never been seen before and kind of really catalyzed labor movement. That's right, that's right. They were on the one hand outcasts from society and on the other hand, they were providing the lifeblood of society and of economy. And so there was this notion because coal had this aura of divinity to it and this aura of transcendental nature. They were the ones doing the work to uplift the society. So there was both this outcast and this pride. And because, as we mentioned, coal mining was a family affair. So the entire family was involved in the operations of the coal mine, the men hewed the coal, the women and children hauled it to the surface. The family was treated as property. When the mine was sold, so too were the workers. The families were sold with it. This is also at a time where across the oceans, we have a growing economy based on slavery. Here, coal mining started with feudalism and it's hard to imagine a workplace more dismal and dangerous than a 17th, 18th century coal mine. It was likely the most perilous profession at the time. That's right. And what made it so perilous? It's fairly, it's fairly intuitive that you're going in a depole and it's dark and that's hard. But it's not a place for human life to thrive. There are just multiple things trying to kill you at any given moment. So when it comes to the things that ultimately often did, these were called choke damp, white damp, fire damp, and then there's floods. So choke damp was the buildup of carbon dioxide in the coal and in the really dense cloud. So sometimes miners would drop into an area and they would just fall to the ground and die. And that would be because the carbon dioxide levels were too high for them, there wasn't enough oxygen in the presence. There's white damp, there's carbon monoxide. This can be a byproduct of incomplete combustion and oftentimes after fires or explosions, miners would face this. And so this is why carbon dioxide in particular was why you'd often bring the canary in the coal mine. You bring a canary down to see if they did OK and if they were, then it was probably safe to continue. And then you have fire damp, which is the deeper you go, the more methane there is coming off the coal and off the other organic materials down there. And that build up in these pockets. And we'll just sit there and that's fine. But you're going to coal mine, you need to see. It's dark. And you need to see in the 1700s, 1800s, you didn't have a flash. One way to do it. There's no LED lights. You had to light a fire and bring a candle with you down. And so if you'd bring a candle into a place where there was that fire damp, it would explode. And sometimes it would create master explosions and blow up the whole mine. So over time, they became a role of a coal mine fireman that would crawl on the floor, covered in soak rags, and use a long stick with a candle to try and essentially do little explosions along the way, semi-controlled explosions, it's like an insane job to try and reduce the risk of a larger explosion. But these large explosions were frequent and having so often than coal mining regions, the newspapers would like sometimes basically stop reporting them. And coal miners would say, please don't, like these causes of death were not, these were not rare of them.
events. This happened thousands of times a year that coal miners were dying from these things. And then of course, floods, we already talked about the water issues in coal mines, but oftentimes things holding back water would break and that would lead to flooding or being trapped in parts of the coal mine. And so these were terrible, terrible ways to die in tough conditions. And even when that wasn't happening, the core labor sounds like some of the hardest labor you can imagine. You're crawling into these tight spaces. And some of these coal seams where the coal is actually placed as not a big cavern. So you're sometimes getting these weird angles trying to chip away at the coal. Your back would be scraped up from these sharp rocks. And it got hot. At the deeper you went down, the hotter it was. And so it was just an absolutely. And you're not doing this game paid well. You're doing this game paid usually just enough to continue to do it. And your family would live near the coal mine in a town controlled by the coal the corner oftentimes and increasingly developing sophisticated ways to kind of keep you locked in. Would you be paid in dollars that you can go leave and use elsewhere? No, you'd often be paid essentially credit to use it within the coal town. It wasn't considered slavery directly. It was this system of entrapment around these terrible conditions that they kind of set the stage. Perhaps the hardest part to think and talk about that is is the role that children played for much of this time in coal mines. Yeah, you mentioned these aren't tunnels that you can move horses through or carriages through or wagons through these are really small seams. And the deeper you go, the harder you're trying to search for coal, the smaller the seams. And so as a result, kids are carrying the coal back. They're holding the trap doors. They're working and we're talking often five year olds as young as three year olds would work from before sunrise till after sunset. 12 hour shifts never seeing the sun for six days out of seven. And there was even debates at this time of whether sunlight was necessary. And there was a lot of arguments because coal was fueling society. There's a lot of arguments being made that actually it wasn't necessary to grow up and so you'd have multiple generations of people growing up working underground for 12 hours a day and under the conditions of imminent death as we mentioned. And I think that one of the things that enabled the ability for that to propagate is just what we talked about the beginning of this. People spoke about coal miners as though they were a different species. They spoke of them as though, hey, you can't learn to be a coal miner. You have to be bred by one. It was this treatment of the family and the multi generational lock-in of that that does remind me in echo a lot the language you hear on slavery around work and these people are linked in this intimate direct way, which is of course absolutely absurd. And this was the way it was in Britain up through and until 1838. And so this is long after Britain there was anti slavery and trying to this proud Victorian saying we're not for that. Meanwhile, four and five year olds are down in the coal mines all day bringing up this black rock. But what happened in 1838 was a particularly bad accident happened. A stream overflowed at a coal mine and at the deaths of 26 miners, all of which in this case were children. And so 11 girls died, 15 boys, all ages 8 to 16. And the disaster bubbled up to the queen. At that time said, okay, what is going on here? We didn't inquiry. So in 1840, a guy by the name of Lord Ashley went to the coal mines and started interviewing people and finally brought to the public's attention for the first time. I mean, if you're sitting there in London, just living your life, you probably have never been to a coal mine. And so brought to the attention for the first time and kind of public record what was going on there. And I think there's a couple quotes worth reading here. The first is from Sarah Goetter, age 8, whose job was, that's called being a trapper, which is opening and closing these trap doors to keep the ventilation of the coal. And so she says, I'm a trapper in the Galber pit. It does not tire me, but I have to trap with on a light and I'm scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning and come out at five and half past. I never go to sleep. Sometimes I sing when I have light, but not in the dark. I dare not sing then. I do not like being in the pit. I'm very sleepy when I go sometimes in the morning. Torf, and this is a situation where if you fall asleep, you could die or the other children in the mine with you could die. And so you're having five year olds stay awake and pitch dark for 12 hours at the risk of their life. That's right. And then another testimony that was probably even more impactful to the later legislation was a 17 year old girl, an impatience Kershaw, who said, my father's been dead about a year. My mother is living and has 10 children, five lads and five lasses. And all of them work in the coal mine in different roles. She says that she goes to the pit at five o'clock in the morning and comes out at five in the evening. I get my breakfast of porridge and milk. I take my dinner with me at cake and I eat it as I go. I do not stop or rest any time for the purpose. I get nothing else until I get home. And she says, I hurry in the clothes I have now. By hurry, she means the job is actually pulling her in. It's pulling the coal out. She says, I hurry in the clothes I have on nail trousers and a ragged jacket. The balled place on my head is made by thrusting. So she's using her head to push. And my legs have never swallowed, but my sisters did. Should I hurry for a mile and more under the ground? I hurry 11 of those a day. I wear a belt and chain to get them out. And the getters that I work for are all naked except for their caps. They pull off all their clothes. I see them at work when I go up. Sometimes they beat me. If I'm not quick enough with their hands, they strike me upon my back. The boys take liberties with me. Sometimes they pull me about, I'm the only girl in the pit. They're about 20 boys and 15 men and all of them are naked. I rather work in a mill than a coal pit. There's a combination of all of this. But in the Victorian era, the story of women in the coal mines, young girls in the coal mines and a naked man, but really, I think set the stage for this change. And part of what was going on, you know, why were they employed a 17 year old woman? Well, there's cheaper to pay her because the men at 17 could go and actually be, you know, it's called a hewers that the people shipping the coal out of the scene, which costs more than someone who's just moving coal. And so finally, a law passed. The mines and calories act 1842 outlawed the employment of women and girls in the mine. And I think set the age at 10 where no one could be employed under the age of 10. This sounds like a great, a great national reckoning. But as with many good laws, the enforcement of the laws where things actually happen. And at this time, 10 years after the law was passed, there was only one mine's inspector. And 20, 30 years later, an inspector candidly admits that he would not enforce the laws unless a child had died. And few inspectors even went below into the mine because they feared they'd be killed by the miners themselves. So the inspectors are not incentivized or equipped to actually enforce the law. And so you had this practice continue on for decades after we're talking into the second half of the 1800s, well after kind of some levels of moral reckoning in parts of our society. You know, even after this period, and there is some incentive here and there to make coal mine slightly safer if people figured it out, it was cheap enough to do. But the coal owners were the ultimate capitalist. We don't have great death statistics going all the way back. But even just between 1873 and 1953 and Britain nearly 100,000 miners were killed in mining accidents. So it was just a brutal deadly occupation. And so for the children and women and men working in the mines, the families living, entrapped by the coal industry, you had unprecedented levels of danger. But as we talked about in Manchester with the factories, there was actually a public health disaster that was looming. I mean, we have complaints of smoke dating back centuries when it was just being used at a small level. And now you're having a dangerous level of air quality that's affecting everyone. Yeah, I mean, let's go back to what's going on. You're burning a piece of coal. On the most extreme, we talked about Amphorysae, which is fairly pure carbon. And that actually doesn't result in very much smoke. It is a pretty clean, burning coal. Now it releases plenty of carbon dioxide, but from a long health perspective and a local perspective is on a major issue. Most of the coal being burned and certainly all the coal being burned in Britain at the time was not that it was the much dirtier, betuminous coal. And that has a bunch of other stuff going in. It has a lot of sulfur. So when you burn it, you get sulfur dioxide. It has a lot of other trace elements of mercury and arsenic and lead. So you're burning this and you're getting small particulates and smoke that have mercury and arsenic and lead and sulfur dioxide that is creating dark skies and fog. And initially, this was mostly talked about, I think, from a cleanliness perspective of, hey, these are dirty places to visit. But then we ripple through to the health impacts. And it's a whole nother dimension. Going back to 1661, you have this initial writer, John Evelyn, who brought this happen in the case of London. He said that the city of London resembles the suburbs of hell, more than an assembly of rational creatures. And certainly not the
of our incomparable monarch. And so there's lots of talk about smut being an issue, rain was a big issue because it would cause the sun to wash out of the air and get black on everything. One theory is that maybe that's why London became so associated with these large black umbrellas in the 1700s because of the cold smoke and the combination of rain. And there's just this view that at this time, Londoners would be coughing and stuffling and barking and spitting all the time because of the air quality. Oddly, the science still was not very good then. So there's also this contradictory belief that coal, heat the air and purify it. And so there's kind of confusion. Like people thought that the College of Physicians of London published a pamphlet saying, hey, if you have certain illnesses, you should actually go and breathe air burned with coal because I'd purify the air. So there's really a lot of confusion on like, what the health impacts are of this stuff. Wow. All of this leads to the growing sense that London is this smoky city and still to this day, some people call it the big smoke as a result. Occasionally, this would become so acute. They'd call it pea supers. When the city would come into this dense fog, usually it would happen in the winter. The air would get cold and the coal smoke would just kind of settle in as a fog, but a fog with these particulate matter in it. And sometimes it got so dark that you couldn't see for feet in front of you. And so it would stop the city. I mean, London at this point is a major city. We talked about, I think, it's where at 200, 300,000 people and all locomotion people on foot, the whole city would just stop in its tracks. And sometimes this would go on for days at a time. These really dense, smoky fogs. And we don't have great records of desatistics here. And so, you know, we know that there's hundreds or maybe thousands of people that were attributed to this period. But if you look back in time, it certainly was much, much, much larger numbers. And so we didn't spend any of this whole time talking really about Britain. I think it's time we need to get on our boat and sail across the Atlantic to shores of America. The beautiful, wooded shores of America. Wooded indeed, when early colonists stepped onto the land across the ocean, it was wooded to the brink of the sea. I don't think I fully appreciated just how densely wooded North America was. To the Puritans who followed the new continents trees would become a crucial piece of advertising, right? Because remember, the Englishmen were in love with their crackling fire. And there's one pamphlet that wrote, "A poor servant here may afford to give more wood for timber and fire as good as the world yeeds than many noblemen in England can afford to do. Here is good living for those that love good fires." You can feel the calling to this new land. And it was one of the largest stretches of woodland ever to grow on the planet. And in addition to this astonishing wealth of wood, turns out the great North American continent also held one of the world's richest coal deposits, including a coal field half the size of Europe laying right beneath the Eastern American forests. But just like we saw in Britain, when you have this wealth of wood, you use this wealth of wood. And so settlers began clearing the land quickly, burning the wood, shipping timber back to England, building log cabins and everything. Wood was wealth and they had no need to search for coal. And so despite us having the worlds richest coal deposits, it was largely fueled by wood, much like Britain was, until a fateful discovery. And then once we landed upon the coal, we would dig coal the way the forests had been cut, not just for survival and comfort and profit, but also with this larger mission of transforming the wilderness into something that transcended nature. So once again we have this divine intervention, as one theologian put it, the coal deposits had been scattered by the hand of the creator with very judicious care, as precious seed, which, though buried long, was destined to spring up at last and bring forth a glorious harvest. I'm going to feel like that theologian never went into a coal mine. Because if the creator really wanted us to have access to this great material, he probably here she would have probably made it a little easier to get to and not require five year olds to go down and carry it up. Maybe that's maybe, I don't know. Call me skeptical. And so at this time, there's this time where there's indigenous tribes and there's the French Indian war going on, the British and the French fighting. One of the areas they were fighting about was called forks. And the British finally won forks and the Philadelphia newspaper wrote it quote, this valuable acquisition lay open to all his majesty subject, a vein of treasure, which if rightly manage may prove richer than the minds of Mexico, they must be talking about the coal. Actually, they're talking about beaver skins. There was a raging fashion trend in Europe at the time where beaver skin hats were a valuable commodity. And so turns out there are a lot of beavers in that region. That was a good treasure outcome. Little did they know that that was actually one of the regions most valuable coal stores. And so this area forks was built a fort named after the British prime minister at the time, William Pitt. And so the fort was called Pittsburgh. And that is the beginning. I almost think it is will eventually be America's Manchester. That's right. Born out of nothing, Pittsburgh like Manchester would experience this incredible growth fueled by its relocation. And in this case, it was located in one of the richest areas in Pennsylvania. As legend has, we hadn't really understood what the coal was beneath our feet. There was a hunter, Netyo Allen, who was camping at night under a protective ledge of rock in the deep, in the steep mountains of Eastern Pennsylvania. He was, he built a campfire in fell asleep and later a woke and alarm as he put it, the mountain was on fire. And he had built his campsite, his campfire on an outcrop of anthracite. And this, this form of coal because it was so hard and shiny as we know it would be stone coal and that would trigger the realization that not only did America have this incredible density of wood, but also the largest coal deposit in the world. Yeah. And I've never lived in Philadelphia or on these coasts, even for that matter. So to pull up a map, I'd like really grapple with this. But there's literally a mountain range dividing the Appalachians and the Alling any range in that the divide, the anthracite region from the Batuminous region. And that ends up playing a big part in the history here on the eastern side on the Philadelphia side, you have anthracite, which is this really new to the world type of coal that burns cleanly, but as we'll get into not necessarily easily. And that becomes the eastern coal. And then to the other side, the Pittsburgh side of the mountains, you have the Batuminous coal. And that becomes the mass production coal, the dirty coal, the industrial power coal. But it was just an interesting, like it's worth it. If you're curious and you're listening like pulp a map and poke around, look at summit hill became the first real anthracite mine. Look up summit hill in Philadelphia versus the coal regions in the western part of Philadelphia. The summit hill region of anthracite led to this mine called the Lehigh coal mine. And there was a tremendous number of problems trying to actually use this coal in access. So first of all, it's not that close to Philadelphia. If you drove there today, it's I think in the hour and 45 minute drive from the Lehigh coal mines to Philadelphia. This was again a time before the trains, before mass canals, but there was kind of a river way to do it. And so multiple groups tried to build these kind of wood arcs to float the anthracite down. The boat would break. People died. It was the wilderness. Finally, they had a couple arc boats down to Philadelphia to try to sell their anthracite. And people try and light it. They're like, it's not lighting. This is useless. And so some of it was used as gravel for front walks. It was valuable anthracite coal. There was a quote from a customer trying to buy it said, if the world should take fire, the Lehigh coal mine would be the safest to treat the last place to burn. Which is very funny. And speaks of the frustration. And very much not true. It turns out in 1859, a fire started in that mine and burned for 82 years straight on its own until until 1941. And I was searching for information about that coal fire and ended up reading about the Centrelia mine, which has been active through the 20th century. And there's a centrelia of Pennsylvania. There is a fire that started there in the early 60s and 1960s. They basically had some landfill and they were trying to get rid of some trash. And even though it wasn't legal, the city pulled it together and started a fire to burn their landfill trash. And it started this fire in the 1960s. While they tried to put it out, didn't really work. It is still burning today. And so the city of a few thousand people who has been cleared out, they've been paid to relocate. There's like five people still living there. And there is a fire that's been burning since 1960. And supposedly there's enough fuel to burn for another 250 years in this coal mine. So anyways, let's go back to answer sight. So in 1810.
There are about 350 tons of anthocent mine. Basically, there's a group that did figure out how to actually use it. What caused increasing demand and really desire to figure out even though they had all this wood is the war of 1812 broke out against Britain. And prior to the war in New York and Philadelphia got most of their coal from Britain. Britain would take coal from places like Newcastle and bring it by boat or sell it in New York and in Philadelphia. And there's also some coal in Virginia. Well, during the war, the British certainly stopped selling coal to its enemy and blocked the access rate that the great British Royal Navy, we already spoke about, it blocked coal from Virginia on up. And so there you are in New York City and you need coal and you can't get it. And so there's a little bit more desire to figure out how to use this anthracite. And so two guys in the name of Joseph White and an earth con hazard really started to scale this up and formed a company in 1822 to navigate the river. And they got permission to do it. And again, it had been it had been failed numerous times, but the chair of the committee that gave them permission said gentlemen, you have our permission to ruin yourselves because it seems so many failed attempts to navigate this the summer river. They persisted and figured it out. And by 1840, 250,000 tons of anthracite were mined and brought over to Philadelphia via their the river system. And so let's talk about New York a little bit. Anthracite was key to the development of New York City. And so another company was built out called the Delaware and Hudson Company or D&H. They built a canal system, right? This is the same era as the canal era in that we saw expand across Britain, but to help bring canals into the Delaware and Hudson rivers and then bring coal from Pennsylvania into New York. And that was completed in 1828. And there's a good story where this company actually offered 1.5 million shares to the public is such an exciting time. It's like crypto, right? So crypto is building canals. They sold 1.5 million shares to the public in an afternoon in a coffee shop in New York City. Dogecoin would be jealous. There's a lot of money back then. And of course, what happened in Britain happened in the US. And so those trains that are good at moving coal a little bit better than canals. It was time to bring that to the US. And so remember time on 1830 we had the Liverpool line launch. And so all of a sudden that news definitely spread over to the US canal. Mania was done. And so one bubble bursts and the new one begins, which is the time for it's the time for rail. And so the same D&H company was the was one of the first to attempt to use seam locomotives in the US. And so they actually went and purchased one from England. So they could transport coal from the mines to the canals that they were trying to build. And they tested it. It was actually too heavy. So we need another we need another evolution of rail in order to make this work. And so as Ben was sharing, we have betuminous coal on one side of the mountain range and an anthracite on the other. And anthracite doesn't burn well in in the locomotive fireboxes as they were designed. And we hadn't yet fully explored the betuminous mines outside of Pittsburgh. And so in the US trains actually started running on wood. Even though they were moving coal, they were powered by wood. So the first few decades, Americans burned wood and we had plenty of it. Now these wood burning trains would also commonly set the fields and forests ablaze, right? It's a very wooded area. You've got these massive fires burning on on locomotives going. And some said that the trains burned more wood outside the firebox than inside the firebox. And one of worst problems was the train itself. And since many of the earlier passenger cars were ruthless, they were all made of wood. And as you have the the women traveling on this train, wood, wire, these large voluminous dresses that incidentally were also flammable. And the number of times you'd board a train powered by wood to get from one place to another and you'd board an address and then you'd leave almost denuded. There was a big rush of patents to find devices that would stop the trains from igniting themselves in the surroundings of their cargo and their passengers. But as one would have it, we were trying to move coal. Coal would replace wood as the fuel of choice and ignite the railroad revolution. And so by the 1850s, there's all these trains being able to move coal around. The US is in a great position to actually use that for iron production. They could use that answer site directly given that it was a high carbon content. It wasn't so much the iron industry trying to figure out what to use. It was actually more I think the coal miners saying that we need another industry. And so they found a technique to smelt iron from anthracite and bring that to the US. And so by 1849, there were 60 anthracite furnaces making iron and eastern Pennsylvania. And fast for the Y's Pennsylvania, the center of steel making in the US over time. And this will not be our episode about steel. Certainly that deserves its own place. But here we go. This is an artifact of where the fuel is. I think while we're on the topic of trains, the story of of trains is a really important one to this time and does play out differently than than what we saw in in Britain. First of all, the impact of price of coal. Just like in Britain, a transportation expanded that had this direct impact on the cost of the fuel. The same thing happened here. In 1840, it would be 3.6 times the price in Philadelphia to buy anthracite than it was if you bought it at the head of the coal pit. By 1864, 24 years later, it was down to 1.3 times. That was almost, there's only 23% of the cost to transport it versus three times the cost. So that transportation improvement led to dramatic cost shift, and which then of course changes the ways in which you can use the fuel. And so this makes the arguably the railway and the operators of the railway one of the most powerful positions in really mediating the production and supply. And I think it's time to introduce some may it say our first villain, directly villain of the story. Somebody say, "Hero." It depends how you feel about things. And that is a man by the name of Franklin Benjamin Gallen. He was born in 1836 in Pennsylvania and what would be a suburb of Philadelphia. And he was born to an Irish Protestant family, a James Gallen who owned a grocery store in his wife Mary Miller who was of German American descent, kind of classic makeup of families in Pennsylvania at the time. And he was he was apprenticed to a dry goods merchant cold dealer and started to get into the cold dealing business. He also had a keen interest in the law. And so he studied as a young adult, he studied law. So he was admitted to the bar and was disturbed attorney for a tea cold county in Pennsylvania in 1862. He left that position in '64 and represented the Reading Railroad. Also known as the Philadelphia Reading Railroad, there's a competing railroad called the Philadelphia Railroad. If these names start to sound familiar, it might be because you've played the game Monopoly. And why is the game Monopoly deal with these railroads? Well, we're about to get into it. And so he was young at this time, but the president of the railroad, Charles Smith, started to trust him. And Charles Smith needed to go on an ocean getaway for his health. So he appointed young 33 year old Franklin Gallen to be put in charge. Now this was just a regional carrier. It wasn't a massive railroad at the time, but it dealt with important coal routes. And there was competitors. There was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Also known as the B&O, the Erie Railroad. But the Reading was really formed for the purpose of hauling anthracite from this cold county to Philadelphia and to other points in between. Now the miners and operators wanted control over the price of anthracite. There's this kind of feedback loop where, you know, when the price dropped in the market for anthracite, the operators would take it out on the miners. They would say, you're way just dropped. You get paid based on the cost that we're going to sell the coal. And so this was a constant issue for miners and disputes. And so Franklin Gallen was asked to deal with this and stabilize it. And so there was this compromise called the Gallen compromise to create a sliding scale that tied wages in a more predictable way to the anthracite's market prices. Sounds like a friendly guy trying to solve problems. Well, he actually indirectly often fought any miners attempts to form unions. Anytime that happened, he would raise the freight rates for any co-operator that would give into a union. So if a co-operator on the train outside, yeah, we're going to like let the miners unionize. He'd say, okay, train rate is going to be higher. Wow. Wanted to keep unions under control. And so then wages fall. Exactly. And he realized what he wanted to do. Yeah, he owned the train route. He wanted to vertically integrate. He wanted to own the coal mines. The problem was there's actually a state law saying, if you're moving the goods, you can't own the production of the goods. A reasonable law to protect against this. He slipped a little off to the state legislator letting there be an exception for the redding rail road. And so even though the original charter forbade it, he made it happen. So he took out a bunch of loans and spent $40 million by enough the most productive anthracite coal mines in the region and kind of vertically integrating this business. But that wasn't enough. He wanted control of the whole pricing in the region. So he brought together a pool, also known as a cartel in 1873 of all the other big coal operators that were moving the anthracite in the region. And this was not a secret backdoor deal. You can find it in the New York City papers of the day. The reporting of this pool that was set up to stabilize prices of anthracite in the region. And this starts to kick off the negative image in the world of king coal, right? You're seeing this. I
idea that they're playing both sides. They're controlling the price on the consumer side and they're holding down the miners on the other side. And so the public started to sympathize with the miners. The line was that these coal cartel would, with one hand reaching the pockets of consumers and the other, the throats of the laborers. Not a friendly image for business in 1875. This kicked off in that same year, a large strike that lasted five months. And because of the public feeling at the time, the public and blamed Gowen and really kicked off this kind of negative sentiment. And so hearings began. And Gowen, remember before he was running the coal mine as a president of business, he was a prosecutor using the DA's office, right? He's not afraid of a trial or a hearing. And so he did something that, like I feel like echoes to this day. First, he made the classic case that it's in the public interest that large mining companies exist and can make better investments and improve production and stabilize these markets. That's what the public needs. That's why you need a big entity operating here. Classic argument. But then there's something even better he did, which is like, you know what? The miners are good people. And I don't exactly blame the unions, but there is a class of agitators amongst the anthracite miners. And this isn't just any class of agitators. This ripples back to the Irish Catholic community. There's a group that was starting the 1840s back in Ireland that has somehow swept into our happy community in Pennsylvania called the Mollymaguires. And this group does not follow the laws. It murders people who don't do what they say. And they're actually controlling the region. And that's what we need to be concerned about. And Gowen hired a set of secret agents to infiltrate this group and create this fake report of all these wrongdoings of this group. And so following there's actually a murder trial where they staged that the Mollymaguires were responsible for this murder. And of course, who leads the prosecution, but frankly, Gowen. As he was the former DA and exactly a special prosecutor for the state, lying in a book on this is that it would be hard to find another proceeding in the American history where a single corporation, indeed a single man, had so blatantly taken over the powers of the sovereign to make this case. And this worked, the public mind started to see organized minors as terrorists and support for the union swept away and the Mollymaguires became the enemy. And this radically pushed out the timeline for any unionization in the region. - Wow, you have notions of fear, be scared of this group of division. It's the Mollymaguires within the minors and divide the minors up. You have notions of otherism where it's these Irish Catholics that have come in and infiltrated our precious company and they are the ones that are at fault. - That's right. - That as you mentioned, still ring true today in how we divide ourselves and are shockingly effective. And so he puts that issue to rest and goes back to competing and tries to establish and competing rail lines to New York and Pittsburgh and teams up with the famous Vanderbilt to do this. It doesn't work. He overextends himself financially and the railroad was unable to pay its bills. And so they're trying to figure out what to do. And so they turn to a character who I think will ripple through many of our stories, the famous banker, JP Morgan, who was brought in to reorganize the railroad. And ultimately, he already held interest in many of the other Eastern railroads and was getting capital from London into this. But he wanted to control the railroads and remove what he thought was wasted competition. He ultimately forced Franklin, Gowon, out. And looking across all this, I think, at this time in history, Franklin Gowon was a name echoed similar to Andrew Carnegie or John Rockefeller, right? This powerful figure, fighting, creating noise and centralizing power. And I just found it interesting that it's not a name that we hear today, the way that we hear maybe Carnegie Rockefeller, perhaps because of how the story ended, not at all. All this coal is powering Pittsburgh to be the new Manchester, all this industrialization in the North, the beginnings of urbanization in the US for the first real time. Yeah, as we saw in Britain, the locus of industry shifts from small towns to urban centers as you have these larger factories powered by coal. And you have wage laborers that are easily found in these more densely populated areas. And so by the end of this time, in the US, while we were still a largely rural and agricultural nation, the US was producing manufactured because that even impressed and were sought after by the British. And society was, structure societies quickly changing. So by the 1840s, manufacturing had risen from 17% of national output to more than 30% of national output. So we're seeing a fairly rapid shift, just like we saw in Britain, but happening a lot faster than the US towards a manufacturing superpower and denser urbanization. Now, it's important to note, I mentioned the 1840s, the mid 1800s is also when a lot of upheaval was happening in our country. All of this manufacturing superpower was happening in the North. This wave of industrialization powered by coal and steam, the growing network of railways built on iron, this was all happening in the North and part of the country. The south of the US had stayed plantation and agricultural focused. It was a slave driven economy. And there wasn't abundant coal, nor was there a desire or need to shift out of the agrarian lifestyle. And so practically, what did this mean? This means that the northern regions became more and more economically powerful, more and more connected to the global economy, building larger and larger industrial bases based on factories and machines that did not require slave labor, but actually had wage labor. And so they had unlocked the energy of machines powered by coal and had catapulted ahead of the south in terms of their economic viability, their ability to produce iron and machines and weapons. And this plays a fairly interesting role, again, coal, playing an interesting role in one of the most defining chapters of American history, the Civil War. - Yeah, if you look at the lenses through which the southern states wanted to secede from the Union, you can argue whether it's economic, but it's all connected, right? Mississippi said in their declaration, our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, which is the greatest material interest of the world. So it was a belief that the institution of slavery was in will remain the greatest material interest of the world, completely missing the fact that meanwhile, just up the road in Pennsylvania, there's the material unlock of energy. They completely shifts what's going on in the world. And so, and for good reason, Mississippi didn't have access and was not utilizing that energy. And it's just the kind of this fork in the road of energy resources and fueling and industrialization leading to the conditions for which, you know, one region valuing this abhorrent behavior and another region being unlocked with all this new energy and transportation. - Yeah, just to put a finer point on it, the North's industrial advantage over the South was 10 times more factory production, 15 times more iron production, 32 times more firearms production, and most dramatically, a 38 to one advantage in coal. - And a little coal that maybe the South could access was in Kentucky, the Union held West Virginia the whole time. Kentucky was a bit of a battleground 'cause it was both a buffer state and a mineral rich one. Lincoln famously remarked, "I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky." (laughing) That's how important it was, I think, to keep coal out of the hands of the South in the war. There's a bunch of detailed ways in which you can look at how this played a role from steam powered ships to weapons and firearms manufacturing. It's also just economic growth. I used without a doubt that coal played a major role in the North's power over the South. The image that caps off this moment is the 1876 Centennial, right? This is Ulysses S. Grant, this president, and this is this big, almost world fair celebration. And there's a 14 acre room called the Machinery Hall, where they demonstrate everything that's just like steam powered and iron powered. And so 1876 is this moment 100 years, that's what's the Centennial, since 1776, is the U.S. coming online in the global world stage. And we are now in industrial superpower also. The workshop of the world, we are at equal now, playing at that power. And just put into context, coal consumption, as we're expanding South and expanding West Post War, was doubling every decade from 1860 to 1900. And so in 1876, would powered twice as much as coal, but by 1900, the U.S. was producing more coal than anyone else, more than the UK, more than Germany, and more than every other country. And so we, as has happened in other times in American history, we seized upon this and had just a rapid adoption of coal into our economy. All right, well, we've covered everything we've
We could learn between the carbon at first period through to 1800. And so I think we need a breather before part two. Now before we go on to part two, we thought it would be useful to take a step back. We've gone through millions of years of history and we've gone deeper into the last few hundred years. And so we wanted to reflect on some of the themes that we feel will stay with us long after this recording and set the stage up for part two and kind of the last hundred and twenty years of the history of coal in the history of our modern world. And so if that would got a handful of themes that have really stayed with us. The first one being this notion of serendipity or how much of this coal story was unexpected and maybe even accidental. You can look to Britain who was not destined to be a global superpower prior to the 1800s. And we're not for the luck of having abundant surface coal easily accessible. Britain may have never become the global superpower that it was. That geography and luck of geography between the major developing city of London and New Castle. And you have steam power that wasn't obviously useful beyond the theoretical and were it not for the numerous inventors and tinkerers and academics living near each other combined with this insatiable demand for coal and then this challenge that they faced of needing to mind deeper that confluence of factors was the perfect storm to take this invention of using heat to move a machine to become the foundation of the modern world. One way to think about this is accidental serendipity. Another framing in my mind is that there's so much rich energy accumulated underground from photosynthesis biochemical processes that stored useful energy for our species that it it almost is like a treasure that eventually had to be gotten right. And so all the invention and all the kind of things that feel happen stance are it's almost like a trees trying to find the sunlight in the way that they grow. Humans in the story of coal will just do whatever it takes both human cost health cost put to the side. If we need to invent something new, we will figure it out and keep working at it because it was so valuable that store of energy almost like an evolutionary view towards the desire for that locked up power. Another big theme, no surprise is the power of economics and how supply and demand and the price of goods drove so much innovation and a few examples of that from the story of coal is how just the sheer cost of fuel driving lifestyle changes when we were talking about the cost of firewood exploding because we were deforesting the lands around London. People loved burning wood. They knew how to handle it. The problem was we were running out of forest and prices shot up. Yeah, I mean, the cost of one fuel going up drives demand for a new fuel. Right? We see that all the time. And people are switching EVs in mass when gas prices go up and we ran through walls as humans when prices of a fuel grew. That's right. Yeah, I think the other element of that is that became the case even when the new fuel was harder or dirtier to use. So people bringing coal into their homes for the first time, they would need a chimney. They would need to redesign their homes. It would be sooty and dirty and ruin their clothes and they'd be coughing, but they needed the energy. They needed the heat. And so it's so fundamental that I think it's just a strong lesson in the value of the raw energy and the kind of things that will motivate that even if regulations were passed. They say, no, you can't burn this type of coal at this time. London is the story essentially in this era of people disregarding many of those laws in order to keep burning coal. Yeah. Another theme you see that coal so beautifully illustrates is that once fuel and energy is affordable and accessible, then human humans start to multiply the uses of that. It expands beyond its initial use. That's right. We initially saw coal was this relative drop in replacement for wood in its use cases. We want to cook something and we want to heat something, but eventually it got much more sophisticated and became a much better way to produce iron than the wood derived charcoal processes, not just cheaper but also more effective. This new fuel and energy source gets used and then it gets cheaper and then that unlocks new behaviors, right? And unlocks new markets. Seen Britain go from hayward importing iron and because we're out of firewood to hay, we no longer need wood for most of the things we thought we needed it for. And now we're the major iron producer of the world. It is a testament to that exact story of unlocking coal as the resource. We also saw the difficulty of moving coal being one of its greatest drawbacks as a fuel. And it was always a challenge. It was moving it out from the mines and moving it across land or across waters up until where we had locomotion and coal could move itself. And you kind of see the cost of transportation as a defining element of the story. If you remember how difficult it was to move coal over land because the streets were just muddy grooves led to canal mania, building canals all across Britain. And then in the 1800s came steam powered locomotion to move coal and that led to the railroads and set off the ability to move people from the speed of horseback to the speed of trains all driven by the extraordinary difficulty and high cost of moving coal. For a long time, in periods before the rail networks were fully built out or the shipping networks were fully built out, the primary cost of coal on the other side was the transportation cost. It would often be three times the cost of the thing at the mine would be the fully transported cost of it in the city that you wanted to consume it. You'd pay that because you ultimately wanted the good. But to go from that to then more like a 30% increase in cost once you had the full transportation network built out is a fundamental shift how accessible the product is. I also think understanding the transportation complexity of this helps you understand how geography and markets like why did Philadelphia become a major city in the US? Why did Pittsburgh become a major city? Yes, why did London become London? It is because London could consume coal from Newcastle much cheaper than other municipalities that could have formed in England. And so understanding that the economic costs associated with transportation of this energy could shaped where people now live and where businesses were rebuilt and where things could be produced. From the macro of changing economies and the resources we use to move goods and people across land to the very micro to how it shaped domestic life, how fuel source from wood to coal change so many subtle and not so subtle things about the way millions and millions of people lived day in and day out in their homes. Yeah, and this I think it's something we most understand and feel as consumers, right? In our life of how do you know how do we get around and then how do we do things like heat our homes and cook our food. And these are the battle grounds of every energy transition and sharing the stories right now you have people saying you can take my guest of my cold dead hands. The transition from wood to coal was wild. You potentially needed a chimney, you needed new cooking gear, but you needed to buy your first cast iron, cooked off. There's a major expense. You need to be remodeling your house to cook with this stuff. Your food tasted different. All of a sudden you can no longer sleep on the floor because there's a cold draft. That was a major fuel section and to be fair, it didn't happen in five years. It was over the course of a century that you really saw this fuel switch. So how do we accelerate the curve of that stuff changes? Interesting, but this battle over the domestic life around a fuel is not a new one. If I need me to. No, we've been through big, hard, personal changes before and we'll continue to go through them. And I don't think I'll ever look at the legs of a bed the same way again. Yeah, you've been lifted up from that cold draft coming through your house. So the theme that is so visceral and painful and poignant is the human toll. We talked a little bit about how the towns built around coal mines and the people working in the coal mines. It was a full family affair. It was all consuming. It was men, women and children working through some of the most horrific conditions imaginable. And it spawned an extreme need for labor justice that couldn't be ignored in the birth of organized labor. And we saw the beginnings of this in part one. We'll see more of it in part two. But the human toll that enabled the fueling of the industrial revolution is an appreciation that I think will stick with us for a long after this. Yeah, and this maybe connects to the centralization of power as well.
Perhaps this is some of the most powerful concentration history to say you're a mine owner or you're owning the railroads that connects to connect multiple mines to consumption, be the incentives then in place to keep miners down, either economically or from union power. I certainly did not appreciate until doing this research that either directly the coal miners experience or the industrial worker experience that kind of spawned from coal as an energy source led so directly into Marxism and labor movements that defined the 20th century. In retrospect, understanding how terrible the working conditions were in the mines makes sense that that would be one of the largest things to react against. Perhaps the only parallels I can think of are slavery and the major political and rights movements against that. I've seen these are some of the worst conditions we've put other humans in to do things for societal benefit and economic benefit, digesting all the stories that we've digested over the last few months of this has made that much sharper in my mind. - We'll close on one more, slightly more optimistic note, which is just the power of human ingenuity and the incredible innovation that happens when you have networks of people living and working physically together in the same spaces and what can happen when obsession turns into tinkering, turns into a great idea. We saw that with some of the protagonists of the story. We saw that with the lunatics in the lunar society. We saw that and how we were able to bring about how it drove the evolution from brass to iron cookware to making the steam engine actually useful. - Yeah, there's something that just takes shape in my mind as you were talking through that, which is on one hand coal and its rise and its impact feel very diffuse. There is coal spread out across the world and it feels unlike the stories, I'm an electricity and the light bulb and the grid that felt like there's Tesla and there's Westinghouse and there's Edison and there's these really central mentors. Yes, there's this diffuse energy source everywhere, but left without invention, it would stay in its current lane. Yes, coal could be a drop in replacement of wood in your home as major innovation in these leaps and these small communities of people that feel like the modern day startups so the manufacturing and Birmingham and the lunar society and all those things you mentioned, you need these collection of people solving these problems over decades. Perhaps the biggest example of this in my mind is the railroad and yes, there's various attempts at this, but then seen George Stevenson and his son unlock this complex coordination problem. It's maybe a little bit more like an alphabet Google X Waymo project because you needed the capital, you needed the coal cartel to find this major unlock of transportation and this new technology. You needed alphabet to find the moonshot that became the railway and solved all these problems. There's something really interesting about these major unlocks and how coal would have played a big role but then it played a massive role with those unlocks. And coming full circle to step change and where we spend all of our waking hours, the notion of how you had fits and stars, you had multiple startups, you had multiple people obsessed with these problems and we don't know the countless number of folks that spent their lives tinkering and couldn't quite get it to work. Couldn't quite figure out the product, the innovation, find product market fit, get the distribution, find the capital, find the people to work with them to do it and it was Watt and Stevenson and Darby and the protagonist that eventually had all the pieces come together that was that startup that grew into the large enterprise value. It is very very reminiscent of Deco's the startup landscape we see today and how many attempts we need to actually achieve this level of step change growth in economies and society. - All right, well, if you step back and you're just now thinking about Cole, thinking about this work, thinking about this time in history, what is your primary takeaway, your real like? - Oh man, I am just floored by how Cole was the driving force for the industrial revolution and how much that changed everything and it created this feedback loop of Cole creating a problem and then solving its own problem. I have a new appreciation for how we have moved from an agrarian society into industrial life and the role that Cole played and for the 15,000 odd years before that most people lived on or close to the land that produced most of their food, right? And then we had the wood shortage in Britain and people turned to Cole for heating and cooking. We moved from charcoal to coke that allowed iron to be produced in larger and larger quantities and this then drove the demand for coal, which then those demand to pump water out of the coal mines to get more coal, which led to the critical use case that enabled the steam powered piston to actually find its home. And then the steam engine was born to pump more coal out, to make more iron, to make more steam engines, to pump more coal out, to transport coal, to power more machines that produced more goods that created these industrial centers that transformed society into this industrial behemoth and increase the levels of production, the access to goods and the ability to transport them beyond previously imagined human capabilities. - It's a big takeaway. - Yeah, that resonates deeply. And I think the other image that I'm left with in addition to that is just the scale of human suffering that built that world along the way. In the kind of acute suffering, you go into the stories of the miners and just in this time period recovered, hundreds of thousands of miners died in the most horrific ways. As you said, many of those were entire families impacted and birthed into multi-generational trapment in doing that work. The burning of coal in this era led to particularly miserable lives in some of these cities and killed millions hearing about times in Manchester where half the kids had rickets. This is a dark time in this transition to this, to the progress of industrialization on one hand and then this human suffering on the other. And so I look back at all of this and everything we just talked through in the last three hours. And I just see the great tension of that that to unlock this great power that was buried underground just has this deep downside of human life and cost. I think I just sit in that tension when I now look at the infrastructure we take for granted as well, coal probably powered that and to get to that coal was some suffering. And so in a way, I'm left with gratitude for all those that put their life into building that, not a gratitude that they wanted. I don't think most of these families wanted this life, but it's the life that they had. And yes, we're talking about time pairs that sound longer ago, 1800s. And times but like the suffering continued and we'll get into part two, like just 100 years ago, it's not that long in the scale of history. I'm just left shaken by the stories of kids in the minds and the lives they lived that were just built around extracting this power from underground. Very well put. It's this profound juxtaposition on a scale that's really hard to comprehend both from a scale of progress and a scale of suffering. - Yeah. I think let's wrap part one of coal there. We made it from carboniferous period to 1900 in from that time scale, a relatively short three hours here. And we still have plenty to cover in part two. We got world wars ahead of us. We have the rise of China and India. We have where we are today, but I think it's time we take a pause. We got more books to read before we get into that. - That's right. Other than coal research, what have you been reading your listening to in your world? - Oh my outside of this, the turn of this year, find myself in a pretty interesting head space. I did need a fun story over the holidays and I read Billion Dollar Whale, which is a super engaging real story of the largest, one of the largest individual white collar crimes in history took me out into into different world, which is nice. Beyond that, I've got this really interesting confluence of I've been consuming a lot of Brian Cox. He's this British physicist who's helping me understand the quantum universe and really helping me internalize what it means to live in a multiverse, which is a thought that continues to burrow deeper into my brain and soul. And it matched up with this over break, Google announced Willow, which is their new state of the art quantum chip that dramatically increases the supercomputing powers that we have and learning about that and what that could unlock really took me into a futuristic mindset, which led me to Ray Kurzweil's, the singularity is nearer because we're gonna merge with AI. And so I'm right now in this space of futuristic singularity, super computing combined with the multiverse and I'm not exactly sure who or where I am. (laughing) Oh, that's great. I love going from coal, which feels now, this point, very tangible to the multiverse.
multiverse and quantum computing. On that point, I want to go back through it and I started to with the willow announcement. But if you haven't already, go to quantum.country as Michael Nielsen's free book out there that's a very cool format where you read and quizzes you along the way. It's both a great writing about quantum mechanics leading the quantum computing, but also a really interesting format to explore learning. - Yeah, what are you consuming these days? - It's fine. I didn't get as much reading time as I would have preferred. (laughs) But I didn't need to also breathe there from the deep nonfiction. And so I read a memoir by Andrew Wilkinson who started Metal Lab and then Tiny called Never Enough from a breeze to the billionaire. I just appreciated his open book approach talking about his journey and kind of his relationship to ambition and achievement and finances. I'm excited to see on Ezra Klein this week as all of her Berkman who wrote 4,000 weeks, which is one of my favorite synthesized reflections on how to think about time. And it looks like Oliver Berkman has a new book out. So that's probably one that I will consume in between Cole, Part Two research and other things we're doing. Wolding to all of those in the show notes. So if you're curious, you can follow along. - A big thank you for spending this time with us and going on this journey. We're deeply appreciative for making it this far and stick around for Part Two. - Yeah, if you enjoyed this first episode of The Step Change Podcast, we have a couple quick asks for you. I think the first is thank you and we'd love to hear from you. So please shoot us a note at
[email protected]. Second, subscribe or follow in whatever podcast player you're listening in or head to our site, stepchange.show and you can subscribe to get emails directly from us. That's the best way to know that Part Two is out. And lastly, and most importantly, if you know anyone who might want to nerd out on Cole with us for three hours, like you just did, please send them a text about the episode. We think that's the best way for folks to hear about this. I always take recommendations from friends to mean so much. So thanks for spending the time and until Part Two. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
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