Birth of Europe: Coal, blood and iron

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] in the last 200 years life in Europe has been utterly transformed from an almost exclusively village based farming society we have become an industrial society this was a revolution not born of politicians and princes but driven by a group of faceless entrepreneurs whose enterprise and ambition pushed Europe for better or worse into the Industrial Age the iron the revolution needed was part of the Earth's original structure but the coal that fired all this was created from geological upheavals 400 million years ago records of those upheavals can still be seen in Europe's rocks which buckled and contorted in a great collision of drifting land masses the slow but relentless geological pileup had resulted in the creation of Europe itself to see how it happened we can reverse the map of this sector of the planet by 200 million years and watch Europe's familiar outline vanish [Music] this was year of 500 million years ago running forwards once more the ancient continents start on their collision course the force of that collision was so great that as they're drove into each other the land surface was folded up into great mountain ranges [Music] most of these mountains were once the size of Everest and even after 200 million years of where my water and ice they're still impressive northern Spain speak us to Europa still rise about the clouds the heights of 3000 meters [Music] in there deep valleys they held warm swamps and by chance in a future an imaginably distant these swamps would provide the substance of a social metamorphosis [Music] 445 million years the swamps stood [Music] plants and animals died and rotted and in a constant simmering cycle gave nourishment to new plants and animals [Music] it was a world in which life had different dimensions along with huge amphibians lived giant insects monstrous cockroaches carnivorous dragonflies with enormous wings heavily-armored millipedes grew over two meters long there were forests of ferns and mosses the size of us [Music] as the plants died and sank down to the swamp bed vast amounts of organic debris piled up this PT debris from the ancient Carboniferous swamps would eventually turn into cone and this is the origin of all the coal deposits in modern-day Europe [Music] to make coal the peat was buried under tons of silt and compressed further and further compression was so intense so unrelenting that one meter of coal represents twenty meters of swamp [Music] as the continents continued to sharpen heave and rise and crack some of the coal was pushed to the surface and like anything at the surface was lost to erosion but a lot of it a huge amount is still stored in underground seams in Europe alone about 4.3 million tons of coal are hacked out of the earth every day [Music] yeah there is still enough left to last at the present rate of burning for over 200 years this staggering consumption reflects Cole's crucial position in today's European industry yet 700 years ago it was hardly considered a resource cold or Seco was first traded in a small way back in the 13th century as the poor man's substitute for wood one reason it hadn't been used before exposed as it was on beaches and in River cuttings was that this seed cone made fluffy smoke laws were passed against burning it in towns and medieval opinions about air pollution were definite in 1306 one coal user was hung drawn and quartered for fouling the common air supply but in time coal became increasingly valuable that was pursued beyond the beach and into the earth it was mine and by the middle of the sixteenth century a German writer Agricola considered it worthwhile to publish a manual for diggers of coal and other minerals carried in this way said trucks rolling on wooden planks held in place by pigs precursors of Railways [Music] by 1600 about 50,000 tons a year were being brought to the surface its main use was still domestic as a substitute for wood though it was increasing to us by industry for producing line for glass making the brewing and dying as they delve deeper underground the early miners came up against another serious problem flooding but here Agricola was particularly ingenious suggesting a wide range of pumps and rotating sponges and chains of buckets to get the water after the surface such pumps needed a source of energy to drive them and the greeter recommends manpower horsepower even goat power to keep your mind driving but in terms of Europe's total energy requirement 50,000 tons of coal contributed about as much proportionately as wind power does today wood was still the fuel and the reason they were still wood to burn was the familiy centuries the woodlands had been carefully managed so that natural growth could keep pace with demand [Music] [Music] many large European forests Oh their existence today to their careful management by local industries hundreds of years ago paradoxically industry was a great force for preservation [Music] would was needed for both building and burning for burning raw and burning as charcoal for use in the making of iron [Laughter] charcoal provided heat for both the ironmasters who smelted iron from its ore and the an Smiths who made it into useful objects mainly farm tools at this stage [Music] charcoal provided the heat but water provided the power for early industry driving cutters grinders spinners fans and pounders of all descriptions and useless but water couldn't provide heat and the only source of clean intense heat the ions Lewis had was charcoal coal had been tried as a source of heat but it was useless its impurities would contaminate the iron and make it brittle and difficult to work [Laughter] [Music] by the start of the 18th century the Anne Smith's had to live with a chronic fuel shortage the forests which had provided wood to be made into charcoal were in danger of over exploitation another supply of high energy fuel for industry had to be found lying in an unmarked grave in a tiny burial plot in the center of England is the body of the man who solved the problem his name was Abraham Darby and he joined together the emerging iron and coal industries for the first time making possible the Industrial Age Darby knew that many odd masters and iron Smith's had tried to use coal and failed but in 1709 he began to use a special sort of coal if coal was carefully heated without allowing it to catch fire the impurities could be driven off as gasses leaving an almost pure source of carbon this pure form of comb is called coke the use of coke opened up as if by magic a vast new store of energy to the iron industry the whole epochs worth unburned plantlife iron Smith's used coat to work iron and iron masters used it to extract it from its ore in the first place Barrow loads of coke and iron ore were fed into furnaces water wheels drove great bellows which blasted the fire with oxygen and raised the heat so high that iron would tamely use out of its ore and gather in pools at the bottom of the furnace then the furnace would be tapped and the iron poured out to cool lows because the modes looked a little like piglets suckling a sow the an became known as pig iron [Music] with its new apparently unlimited supply of fuel the 18th century iron industry was free to expand the principle of smelting iron ore with coke developed by Abraham Darby in 1709 underlies the whole of Europe spine industry today instead of men with wheelbarrows the coke and iron ore are delivered automatically at the top of the furnace [Music] the air blast which raises the temperature of the coat is provided by enormous fans and ducted around the furnace [Music] modern blast furnaces have tapped every two hours and the molten iron allowed to run off daddy's eighteenth-century fellows produced just 300 tons of iron per year this one produces that amount every two hours and in the year well over a million tons all this because of one man's simple idea the resulting marriage of emerging industries and what's known as a quantum leap the rare almost miraculous occasion when one and one make much much more than two now that they went plenty of hitches along the way flooding for example as the miners dug deeper the flooding got worse far beyond remedy by any other britainís prescriptions in 1711 Thomas Newcomen an ironmonger from Devon created for the specific purpose of pumping out flooded mines the first steam machine this was a new departure for coal until now coal burned and produced heat now it burned and produced heat which produce steam which produced motion [Music] the steam was raised in a boiler underneath the actual engine the whole machine was controlled by a complex system of valves these periodically opened and shut injecting steam into the cylinder causing the piston to go up and down the piston was connected to one end of the beam and the other end drove the pumps down in the mine drawing the water after the surface although it looks primitive to us in 1711 these coal powered new common engines were the cutting edge of high technology there wasn't long before the sound of the crank a new comin could be heard all over Europe it was 1760 the foundation for the Industrial Revolution was set but that was all [Music] as cylinders for the new coming engines were carted to another mine the country they crossed was still strictly agricultural the whole of this country a German said of England in 1761 it's not unlike a well-kept garden there was in fact another revolution underway an agricultural one a new understanding of selective breeding and doubled the weight of cattle and sheep and the enclosure system vastly increased yields [Music] [Laughter] [Music] and the private concentrated agricultural wealth was now pumped into the emerging industries but all the new machines had one factor in common they needed a source of power and this was it the water rotating steam engine new Cummins pumping engine had been the first to transform heat and emotion but the engine designed by the Scottish engineer James Watt was much more sophisticated and powerful instead of simply going up and down it went round and round it was thus capable that a system of belts of driving all sorts of industrial machinery in 1790 for the first time a watt engine was installed in a weaving Factory and from that point on Britain led the world in industrial production with its vast reserves of coal and iron Britain shot into a position of industrial supremacy it wasn't to be challenged for a hundred years industrialization spread like a flame across the British coal fields and soon Europe began to follow suit Belgium was the next country to industrialize but the sparks that lit her coal came from Britain British entrepreneurs drove across Europe looking for new opportunities and dreaming of filling the world with machines one such was John Cockerill and a contemporary record gives a vivid account of what was happening all over Europe John Cockerill travels on great highways and his coach here he builds furnaces their chimney stacks when his preparations have been made he wrecked steam engines which breathed life into the great piles of brick and the next day the peasants hear a rhythmical noise coming from the factory like the breathing of some enormous monster who once he has begun to work will never stop they did not realize that this silent man is far more likely to turn their old world upside down than any revolutionary with his pockets stuffed with political manifestos [Music] the wonder of steam engines was that they could work anywhere you put your factory wherever you want to do their raw materials near markets near labor the world belonged to the European industrialists productivity was up profits were up all of us keeping them from making twice as much was the unfortunate phenomenon of nightfall but after 1802 even that stopped being a problem another British engineer Murdoch had had the brilliant idea of using the gas driven off coal during the cooking process as a source of lighting almost as soon as they heard of the idea European entrepreneurs realized that the gas lighting could indeed keep their factories going all night John Cockerill was one of the first to lay in piping [Music] [Music] gas lighting was much better news for the owners than it was for the workers [Music] by now all the social ills commonly associated with the early Industrial Revolution were well in place [Music] though it was theoretically possible to put factories anywhere be overwhelming tendency was to put them in towns there was a great migration from the land to the cities to the slums the profit motive had overridden humanity and all hands were needed at the coalface children as young as five were down there making six pence a day their mothers made two shillings carrying the full sacks up vertical shafts in 1841 the French prohibited children between eight and twelve from working for more than eight hours a day it was all right there for twelve to sixteen year olds to work for the full 12 hours [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] Cole was now the basis of three important industries iron steam-driven manufacturing and gas lighting it was overloading the transport network the canal system coped until the rise of Napoleon in France made war imminent and the British Army requisitioned the barge horses in some areas the canals lost their source of power and lay idle but industry desperately-needed cheap transport to move heavy coal and iron the mother of invention was there and so soon was the invention in 1804 the year before the Battle of Trafalgar Richard Trevithick a Cornish engineer imagined another way of transmitting heat to steam to motion and produce the first viable locomotive for a Welsh ironworks [Music] [Laughter] Trevithick time locomotives worked in various corners for the next decade but ravillious inventive genius was not coupled with a great business sense and it would be left to another engineer George Stephenson to really put steam locomotives on the rail [Laughter] [Laughter] in 1825 on the 27th of September before a crowd of tens of thousands Stephenson's locomotion made its first run the train it pulled weighed 90 tons and was 400 feet long it arrived at Stockton key to the cheers of 40,000 people a salute by seven cannons to bands playing god save the king and a chorus of church bells the railways had arrived [Music] driven by the railways industrialization stretched even further across Europe fanning out like a miasma from every coal field Cole had become the universal power source it was used everywhere smelting iron making steam making motion hauling itself all over the continent [Music] but coal was bulky and heavy what was really needed was a way to transform it into another sort of energy altogether one with no weight and no bulk in a word electricity in 1867 Verner von Siemens effected the Dynamo and created a whole new industry [Music] fons Eamon's dynamos were used in the world's first commercial electricity generating power station in 1882 now power could be delivered anywhere at the end of a simple cable gas lamps were replaced by electric streetlights but to develop beyond a scientific curiosity into a commercial industry electricity had to be taken off the streets and sold into the home lighting was the first obvious domestic use for electricity in the form of the new filament lamps electrical balloon heaters seemed almost other worlds in now but they weren't there were cigar lighters and gadgets have produced what the makers claimed was therapeutic electrical massage there were electric kettles that plug straight into light sockets then as you got into bed pre-warmed with an electric blanket you could let electricity carry on working for you in the form of the ruthlessly efficient electrical mousetrap Germany was at the forefront of the electrical industry and yet it had been born as it were with an industrial handicap it's coal and iron reserves were widely separated the arrival of the railways suddenly solved that problem linking them together by 1871 Germany was the world's second-biggest coal producer and was soon chasing Britain as the world's number one industrial nation speciality was steel steel is refined iron iron with its nated impurities removed steel is for all practical purposes almost pure iron with a few carefully controlled additives and the principles of purification that the Germans were using at the end of the 19th century are no different than the ones that he used today [Music] first the impure molten iron from the blast furnace is poured into a converter over 200 tons at a time then a water-cooled Lance is dropped like a giant swizzle stick into the molten iron next pure oxygen is bubbled through the lands and into the iron as the oxygen bubbles back out it combines with the impurities turning them into slag and gases should driven off every so often the batches sampled and once the impurities have thought to the right levels the metal is poured out of the converter [Music] [Music] the molten metal now transformed from I understand is cast into ten talents land as the slabs are cooled they're squeezed between huge rollers and flattened so many times their original length [Music] the sheets family a rolled out and wound up into gigantic coils when they're and want again these coils of mild steel will be turned into typewriters and toasters cars and caravans microwaves and washing machines all the paraphernalia of modern life but back in 19th century Germany not all of those things had been invented yet what had been invented the kind of products that in human history have always been among the first to emerge from a new technology were weapons modern weapons Europe's leading purveyor of these was Alfred Krupp whose factory this was the competition among Europe's nations for economic and manufacturing advantage had easily boiled over into an arms race which crook and others were happy to accommodate [Music] with the enthusiastic support of the Kaiser crop showed off his latest steel weaponry two representatives of all the European nations who eagerly bought the latest offerings all of Europe was now swept by industrialization even the backward giant Russia Russia suddenly had factories and peasants serfs were about to be coerced into an industrial workforce [Music] the patent was the same railway lines linked on reserves to coal reserves with ironworks at either end to the peasants it was like being propelled 800 years into the future and after a nice future they even had to be taught how coal was supposed to be mine [Music] [Laughter] the social consequences of the time-warp or crushing but the Russians did have an abundance of the industrial revolutions twin supports iron and coal [Music] [Laughter] at the end of the 19th century as industrialization gathered pace Karl Marx wrote that in Russia all the horrors of the early days of the British factory system are still in full bloom [Music] this [Music] [Music] nevertheless these exhausting Russian peasants drove the industrial revolution forward drove it so hard that by 1914 the growth of the Russian industry and matched that of the Germans and the Germans became nervous tension between European nations reached a crescendo the first world war was truly a war of Steel every yard of the disputed front had to be supplied with tons of munitions the human creativity and ingenuity that had been the driving force of the Industrial Revolution was no longer used for the benefit of humankind but its destruction [Music] this war for European supremacy pitted the industrial might of nation against nation factually against Factory the technical challenge now was to create ever more effective weapons of death [Music] Cole had been the power behind the whole Industrial Revolution but the same upheavals that had created Cole and created another resource over a million times more powerful a force for good or for evil uranium during the formation of the mountains that have created the coal swamps the plates of the Earth's crust have become multiple as the melted rock cooled uranium ores are concentrated together the same geological processes which had been responsible for producing coal also created concentrations of uranium which is scattered throughout present-day Europe the uranium was in solution in water and under enormous pressure it was either deposited at surface vents or left behind in the same vents deep underground [Music] it was first identified in 1789 by a German pharmacist he got ours from a mine in Czechoslovakia and after a long struggle refined a previously unknown metallic element calling it uranium after the recently discovered planet Uranus by the 19th century uranium was being mined commercially it was used to make special Steel's and almost unbelievably as a medical cure-all for eczema ringworm spots and headaches [Music] but its main use was to color glass producing some beautiful effects [Music] from iridescent greens and velvety black to lemon yellow and salmon pink Queen Victoria herself was presented with a set of uranium colored glass [Music] today because they're radioactive these lovely pieces would be classified as nuclear waste [Music] but the full implications of the term radioactivity surfaced very slowly early researchers were intrigued when they held uranium near photosensitive screens and saw flashes of light they realized that the atoms in uranium were unstable constantly flying apart as showering the near neighborhood with invisible high-energy particles the first attempt to harness this energy was in 1942 in America in an experimental nuclear reactor built on a squash court at the University of Chicago as control rods were eased out of the pile of 56 tons of uranium and the reaction began students set on top with buckets of chemicals to pour onto it if anything went wrong [Music] on the 2nd of December 1942 the first ever man-made nuclear chain reaction was underway [Music] for better or worse the immense potential energy of uranium was under the all too palpable control of man [Applause] [Music] when in 1945 the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima uranium entered politics no nation could feel secure with houses in Europe the ancient uranium vents are still followed deep underground here in central France the searches for fuel for nuclear power plants the rock is drilled for explosive charges and blasted the amount of uranium in the rubble is miniscule but the metal is so potent both energetically and politically but mining continues at full tilt particularly here in France which has the biggest nuclear power program in the world the huge lorries and dumpers race around an underground maze of tunnels like some howling medieval monsters in search of their prey [Music] for all its high-technology at a fundamental level the nuclear power station does little more than an old steam engine [Music] the fuel rods full of enriched uranium are packed together in the core of the reactor and that causes a chain reaction and that makes heat the heat boils water nothing more and water turns into steam the steam under high pressure turns the blades of giant turbines the turbines drive the generators not far removed in principle from von Siemens original dynamos which make electricity and send it down the wires to the filament lamps and all the other electrical paraphernalia which is such an essential part of 20th century life at the start of the Industrial Revolution energy from coal was harnessed simply as heat for smelting iron when coal again provided the energy to drive industrial machinery European society was transformed energy from coal uranium oil and gas now drives the whole of the continent those first hesitant European steps at burning coal to smelt iron touched a fuse which 300 years later has lit up the entire world [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tim Atkinson

Views: 61,003

Rating: 4.8230958 out of 5

Keywords: Industry, coal, revolution, 18th century, fossil fuels, cities, engineering, iron, steel, steam, engine, spinning, weaving, manufacturing, Manchester, coalbrookedale, Ironbridge, Birmingham, Sheffield

Id: SFAhFgpLkEE

Length: 53min 44sec (3224 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2017