Abraham Darby I

Abraham Darby (1677–1717) was an English Quaker ironmaster, born near Dudley in Staffordshire. After an apprenticeship in Birmingham, he settled in Bristol in 1699 and developed casting iron pots in sand moulds.

In 1709, at his Coalbrookdale furnace in Shropshire, he became the first to smelt pig iron successfully using coke instead of charcoal, a breakthrough that supplied cheap iron for the machinery, engines and bridges of the Industrial Revolution. He died at Madeley in 1717.