The World's First Large Blast Furnace

Up until the late 1700s, society was able to smell metal but not on a large scale. In Britain in particular, furnaces that would be used to melt metal and to make things out of metal were powered by charcoal. This made charcoal quite expensive because wood was scarce. A fellow called Abraham Derby in Colbrookdale figured out how to use coal instead. He built the world's first big blast furnace which produced iron at incredibly high temperatures.