On the British Government Decision to Ban Coal: Biofuels Implications.

In the Summer of 1306, bishops and barons and knights from all around England left their country manors and villages and journeyed to London. The came to participate...in Parliament, but once in the city they were distracted by an obnoxious odor. These nobles were used to the usual stenches of medieval towns - the animal dung, the unsewered waste, and the rotting garbage lining the streets. What disgusted them about London was something new in the air: the unfamiliar and acrid smell of burning coal. Recently, blacksmiths and other artisans had begin burning these sooty black rocks for fuel instead of wood, filling the city streets with pungent smoke. The nobles soon led popular demonstrations against the new fuel, and King Edward I promptly banned its use. The ban was largely ignored, so new laws were passed to punish first offenders with "great fines and ransoms." Second offenders were to have their furnaces smashed...

...those trying to sell coal could not have been helped by the products resemblance to one of the most unique and grisly symptoms of the Black Death: The buboes, or black swellings of the lymph nodes...

...These grim associations came on top of medieval society's longstanding belief that foul-smelling air on health, perhaps one reason the English so quickly decided that coal smoke was a threat...

...However, there was a serious threat to that economic growth- the trees on this small island nation were once again disappearing...the iron industry was gulping down huge amounts of charcoal, using up the forests wherever the ironworks were located.

During Elizabeth's, reign, dozens of commissions were sent out by the central government to investigate the wood shortage around the nation, and each one confirmed the serious decline of the forests. Contemporary writers were alarmed about the loss of England's woods, and they wrote of huge forests that had been greatly decayed and spoiled. This destruction meant not only a fuel shortage...but also of the most important building material of the time...

...By 1600, London's population had reached 200,000, nearly twice that of 50 years earlier..."

Watt thrived in mathematics, though, and studied the art of making mathematical instruments. It was in this capacity that he was asked in his late twenties to fix a small model of a Newcomen engine kept at Glasgow University.

Like the larger version, the model was extremely wasteful, needing lots of coal to keep it going. Watt realized that as steam was injected and then cooled with water, heat was wasted in the constant reheating and cooling of the cylinder...

...one day...the solution suddenly flashed into his mind...

...but turning...his idea into a working steam engine would prove to be an ordeal...

...Then Watt found a new partner, the irrepressible Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton, and one of the most celebrated business partnerships in history was launched. Boulton was more than a manufacturer; he was an industrial visionary who had surrounded himself with people who shared his fascination with technology and his faith in how it could transform the world...

...Boulton's manufactory was called Soho, and there his skilled artisans made an odd assortment of precision crafted goods ranging from fancy decorative items...to serious scientific instruments...Soho became a symbol of modern, high-quality (sic) British manufacturing , and it actually drew tourists; Catherine the Great was among the man...

Boulton had a longstanding interest in steam engines, in part because the water wheels that powered Soho were unreliable. He had earlier performed his own unsuccessful experiments with the steam engine, and he even corresponded with his friend Benjamin Franklin on engine design. Boulton knew of Watt's work in Scotland and decided to back him...