Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
easily transported to boats on the river by slides and early railways. Since almost the
entire transport could be made by ship, coal, termed by contemporaries
'
sea-coal
'
to
distinguish it from (char-) coal, was still cheaper than
re-wood on the London
market.
44
By mid-16th century 250 coal ships from Newcastle unloaded in London
each year, by 1690 this had increased tenfold to 2,500.
45
Coal replaced
re-wood
rst for industrial processes with high energy requirements such as salt-making,
smelting iron ore, brick-making, but eventually spread to other uses including
domestic
replaces. Its wider introduction for domestic heating required a techno-
logical innovation, the diffusion of a new style of house, the
'
coal-burning house
'
.
This house had a special masonry chimney, a
re-place (or several) which partly
enclosed the coal-
re for better draft. This innovation occurred in London during the
rapid population growth of the 16th and 17th century, which was accompanied by a
massive rebuilding boom.
46
Introducing coal as the main fuel massively changed the
quality of the environment: Since coal from Newcastle contained a higher per-
centage of sulphur, coal fumes produced sulphur dioxide and led to a signi
cant
degradation of urban climate. Thus air pollution was already a massive problem of
17th century London.
47
John Evelyn, a famous landscape architect and philosopher
at the court of Charles II, published a critical pamphlet on the ubiquitous air pollution
of London under the title
in the 1660s.
48
Air pollution must have
been so bad that the new king William of Orange, after the
“
”
Fumifugium
'
'
,
did not take his residence in Westminster Palace but preferred the more rural and less
polluted suburb Kensington.
49
London thus experienced the transition from wood to
coal as basic energy resource, a major feature of the Industrial Revolution, occurring
in continental Europe normally in the middle decades of the 19th century, already
more than 150 years earlier! This eventually meant that a huge area otherwise
required to grow
Glorious Revolution
re-wood, was released and became available for other uses;
economic growth could thus delink from the limited availability of renewable energy
resources and make use of the energy treasure of fossil fuels which had accumulated
over a very long period of geological history.
50
6.8 Crisis of the Cities and Public Health
It was pointed out above in Sect.
6.6
, that the material metabolism of urban dwellers
tended to create a rather unhealthy urban milieu with high mortality rates and
considerable individual insecurity about future perspectives. In the
rst half of the
44
Sieferle (
2001
) and Middlebrook (
1950
).
45
Boulton, London, S. 323.
46
Cf. Allen, Industrial Revolution, 90
96; Allen (
2013
).
-
47
Brimblecombe (
2011
).
48
Jenner (
1995
).
49
Braunfels (
1979
).
50
Sieferle, Forest.
