The first annoying fact is that the coal-burning house was significantly older than the mid-sixteenth century, and had been invented not in London, but in the places — unsurprisingly, really — hundreds of miles up the coast, where the coal was dug. By as early as the 1300s, for example, monks at Durham, at Jarrow on the Tyne, and on the isle of Lindisfarne, were already using chimneys and iron grates to burn the very same sulphurous Northumbrian coal.
And there’s plenty of evidence that coal continued to be burned in the homes of people near to where it was mined. Foreign visitors to Britain always remarked on the burning of coal because it was so unusual, but they never mentioned London in this regard — not until much later. A visiting Venetian in 1551, for example, reported that it was in Scotland that “they burn stones … of which there is plenty”, while a Frenchman in 1553 remarking that the Scots “do not warm themselves with wood, but with coals.” A 1556 description of England drawn up for queen Mary I’s new husband, king Philip II of Spain, the north was likewise described as a place where “they burn a certain hard, black stone mined from the earth, which gives a great deal of heat, and which they call ‘sea-coal’”. We can also just look at a drawing of Newcastle in 1545 to see that every single home had a chimney, almost certainly for burning coal[.]
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So if coal’s conquest was not launched from Londoners’ homes, and cannot be explained by a shortage of wood or by the growth of the city’s population or wealth, where then did it start? What I’ve unexpectedly discovered, when carefully sifting the precise sequence of events, and by reading many of the archival sources for myself — one of the main reasons for the long delay in writing this piece is that I first had to teach myself to read sixteenth-century secretary hand, in which most of them are written — is that coal’s conquest was actually launched instead from Germany.
Unlike in England, in Germany supplies of wood fuel really did feel the strains of increasing demand. Lacking England’s long coastline, many centres of population and industry in the German interior could not so easily import more wood from further afield. In 1617, for example, when the salt springs of Reichenhall wanted to expand production, the brine needed to be piped for 30 kilometres, and pumped over a mountain, in seven stages, to a height of 300m, just to get to a forest where there was enough wood fuel to evaporate it into salt. It was in inland Germany that the pressures to save fuel, and to invent new ways of doing so, were at their most intense.
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At Strasbourg in the early 1550s the carpenter Friedrich Frommer and the Swiss Protestant preacher Konrad Zwick, a religious refugee, both invented a process to significantly save on wood fuel. [...] What the holzersparungs kunst always involved [...] was to separate the flame and smoke from whatever was being heated, warming things indirectly via the pipes of the flue, and recycling some of the heat that would otherwise have been lost in merely venting smoke — a method that saved about a third of the fuel.
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It was natural that the process should have been tried by brewers, because theirs was a large and profitable industry, their product second in importance only to the bread, and requiring stupendous amounts of fuel. [...] London’s beer-brewers testified that Bräutigam had not only saved them a third of their wood fuel, but had taken two hours off the whole process, presumably in the time it took to bring the liquids to a boil.
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[B]y adopting the holzersparungs kunst, the brewers had discovered a way to save far more than a third of the cost of their fuel. They had discovered that instead of burning wood, they could now use much stinkier, but much cheaper coal. The original inventions of Frommer, Zwick and their rivals had introduced the principle of heating things up via the flue, achieving their fuel saving by separating the smoke of the fire from whatever was being heated — something that would immediately have allowed coal to be burned in brewing instead of wood, by no longer risking the thick, heavy coal soot tarnishing the brew. And I suspect that after Bräutigam’s successful demonstration in 1565 it did occur to brewers to try. Indeed, many of the supposed problems with their invention as used in the rest of Europe, largely to do with not having enough space in the furnace chamber for the wood, would have been mitigated by using coal because it’s so much denser a fuel by volume — it would have taken up roughly half the space in the furnace chamber.
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[...] after Neuner introduced Michael Kogmann’s improvements, the use of coal by brewers had soon become universal in London, and become major source of complaint. Less than a year after the Privy Council’s letter to admonish brewers using the invention, in January 1579 the offensive stench of coal smoke had apparently become so common that it was too much for the queen to bear, the Privy Council ordering London’s brewers to no longer “burn any more sea coal during the Queen’s Majesty’s abiding at Westminster”. When this order was ignored — switching back to wood, especially on short notice, would have been extremely costly — fifteen brewers and a dyer were even hauled off to jail. The brewers protested, pointing out the vast amounts of wood that the switch to coal had saved, but a month later they had reached an agreement to no longer burn coal on specified days when the queen was in town, so long as they were given advance warning.
But seven years on, the sulphurous stink of London’s breweries had become so great that it put the queen off from visiting the city at all if she could avoid it. Apparently assaulting her senses whenever her barge wended its way down the Thames, in early 1586 the authorities ordered the brewers to cease their burning of coal along the river. This time, however, the brewers responded in a way that reveals just far the use of the wood-saving art had spread. The city’s dyers and hatmakers, they said, as well as the brewers, had now all “long since altered their furnaces and fire places and turned the same to the use and burning of sea coal.” Dutifully, they offered to switch two or three of the breweries nearest to the Palace of Westminster back to burning wood, though pointed out that even just this would have a huge effect on the city’s fuel supplies, consuming a whopping 2,000 loads of wood per year.
Nothing more is heard of the matter in the state documents, so presumably the queen accepted their sacrifice. But it’s also possible that she simply gave up: given the huge cost savings to such a vital industry, there was no holding coal’s conquest back. By the late 1570s, given the sheer quantities of beer and ale being produced in the city amounted to some 400,000 barrels a year, the breweries alone would have required a near doubling of the city’s coal total consumption, adding some 10,000 tons of coal per year to the 10-15,000 tons consumed by the city’s blacksmiths and lime-burners, not to mention the amounts consumed by the dyers, hatmakers, soapmakers, and others who could most readily adopt the holzersparungs kunst.
And, crucially, with that doubling of demand for coal from Newcastle, the mines had to be dug deeper, soon striking coals that were much larger and less crumbly, with less sulphur than before — coals that, with the grates and chimneys that had already been in use elsewhere for centuries, were much more easily burned in the homes of Londoners too. Indeed, based on the experience of the century and a half that followed, it was believed to be a rule that the deeper the mine, the larger coals — a myth only busted when the adoption of the steam engine allowed miners to drain the mines of their water, reaching far deeper than ever before.
From the article:
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