Called “the rock that burns” by Aristotle, coal was the first major industrial fuel, created about 300 million years ago as heat and pressure compressed pools of decaying plant matter. Burned to generate heat to boil water and make steam to move a piston in a Watt “fire engine” or a giant turbine in a modern power station, the industrialization of manufacturing, transportation, and electric power is examined from beginnings in the United Kingdom to today’s increased use of coal combustion in developing countries despite the limited thermal efficiency and harmful combustion by-products.

A transition simplifies or improves the efficiency of old ways, turning intellect into industry with increased capital – when both transpire, change becomes unstoppable. The transition to a more efficient combustion fuel changed the global economy when coal replaced wood (twice as efficient) and oil replaced coal (roughly twice as efficient again). The history of the Industrial Revolution is explained through the energy content of different fuels (wood, peat, coal) from the 1800s, early steam engines that produced power for manufacturing and propulsion, and the political, economic, and social consequences of industrialization (wealth, health, and globalization), culminating in Thomas Edison’s 1882, coal-fired, electricity-generating, power station in Lower Manhattan.

There is much to do to create a modern energy paradigm, one that is clean, sustainable, and economically viable, but the changes are coming as overall efficiencies improve and manufacturing costs decrease for today’s renewable technologies. In 2000, 0.6% of total global energy production was generated either by wind or solar, a 50% increase in a decade; by 2010, the amount had doubled.1 By 2013, Spain had achieved a global first as wind-generated power became its main source of energy (21% of total demand, enough to run 7 million homes2), while both Portugal and Denmark now regularly produce days powered 100% by wind.

Historically cloudy England scored a first, as solar became the largest source of grid energy during an especially sunny 2018 spring bank-holiday weekend,3 while in the midst of high winds from Storm Bella on Boxing Day in 2020, the UK was more than half powered by wind, a new record.

After one year, Henry Clay Frick quit the university he was attending and, with two cousins and a friend, founded the Frick Coke Company. The plan was simple. Using a beehive oven, they would turn coal into coke fuel. Coke is an important ingredient in making steel.

Henry’s father had been a farmer and an unsuccessful businessman in Pennsylvania, and Henry vowed that his life would be different. Soon after establishing the Frick Coke Company, however, disaster struck – and it seemed that Henry would follow in his father’s footsteps. A financial crisis in 1873 had reduced the price of coke to 90 cents per ton and Henry’s business partners wanted out. But Henry chose to stay on, wrote a letter to an old family friend, Andrew Mellon, and received a loan of $10,000. For him, depressions were times of expansion; with his new loan he bought out his partners and acquired several coal mines from timid competitors at very low prices.

This chapter is concerned with two fundamental driving forces of the process of modern economic growth: capital accumulation and technical change. The importance of these factors as drivers of productivity growth underwent a major acceleration with the First Industrial Revolution. This chapter surveys the available evidence on capital accumulation since 1700 in different countries, highlighting the expansion of fixed capital. The chapter then outlines the main contours of technical advances of the First Industrial Revolution, noting the critical role played by two technological trajectories: 1) mechanization, and 2) the development of steam power technology. Finally, the chapter discusses the main sources of technical progress in this historical period, flagging some directions for further research.

Steam power, railways and steamships; communications with India via Suez; the opium trade and Canton; the First Opium War.