556 GEOLOGY OF OHIO. 
coke is a question upon which we have no precise information. Dr. 
Percy records that Jeremiah Buck obtained a patent in England in 
1651, for the manufacture of iron with coal not carbonized, and he infers 
therefore that coke must have been previously known. Plot published 
in 1686 a history of Staffordshire, and there speaks of the carbonization 
of coal in heaps, as is done in the making of charcoal, and the produc- 
tion of ‘ coak,” which was used for drying malt. Swedenborg visiting 
England in 1734, mentions that coke was used in some districts for the 
production of iron. 
M. de Gensaune, in his “ Traite’ de la Fonte, etc.,” published in 
Paris in 1770, described and illustrated ovens erected at Sultzbach by 
the Prince of Nassau, for the production of coke, and in 1774, M. Jars 
gave illustrations of the furnaces used at New Castle for reducing coal 
to “‘ coaks.” 
The use of raw coal, however, in the production of iron in the blast- 
furnace was already well known. Lord Dudley, commonly known as 
Dud Dudley, in 1619 had experimented with it, but was unsuccessful, 
and it was left nearly a century later, in 1713, to Abraham Darby, who 
succeeded in the attempt at the Coalbrookdale Iron Works. 
Owing to the increasing scarcity of charcoal about the year 1750, 
the production of iron in England fell considerably, and there was much 
solicitude expressed at the large amount of iron then imported from 
Sweden, and from about the year 1775 is to be dated the more general 
manufacture and use of coke in the production of iron in England. In 
1783 the authorities state that the use of coke had become general’ in 
England. 
In France the application of coke dates from 1769, when it was 
used for smelting copper ores, and in the foundry at Villefort, but in 
Belgium, though begun in 1811, its use was not well established until 
1823 in the Liege coal basin. 
In the United States the iron manufacture in the earlier periods of 
our history was exclusively carried on by the use of charcoal, but with 
the increased scarcity of wood it has been driven in most cases to the 
margins of the thickly settled regions, and from this cause and the in- 
creased demand for iron, the place of charcoal is now being supplied by 
mineral fuel, anthracite, bituminous coal and coke, and in the larger iron 
regions these are used exclusively. 
The application of anthracite in the manufacture of iron in the 
