ABSTRACT
Iron was, after cotton, the fastest growing industry in late eighteenth-century England. A nation which in 1700 had been a great net importer of iron was by 1800 exporting more than five times as much as she imported. The first official iron statistics date from 1839, when the Treasury Department instructed the Museum of Practical Geology to begin keeping complete iron output records. The earliest sources for the number of blast furnaces in Britain date from the seventeenth century. Dud Dudley, a relation of Edward, Lord Dudley, the inventor of the process of smelting iron by pit coal (instead of by timber) quotes an estimate of Simon Sturtevant for the number of furnaces and forges in England in 1615. There are several sources before 1854 for statistics of the output of iron. Several writers, contemporary and modern, provide regional and national summaries of iron output since 1740. Railways were linked to both the coal and iron industries.
