When the eighteenth century Duke of Bridgewater’s fiancé gave him what we might today call the push, he decided that not only was he secretly pleased to be rid of her, but to be honest, he was also bored by London, which took up too much of her time through the London Society she frequented. Moving north, back to his estate outside Manchester, the Duke of Bridgewater didn’t take long to come up with the idea of what to do with his spare time. He also decide how to use his growing wealth from the coal being mined beneath his estate. This growing fortune we must realise had come about at the start of what became known as ‘The Industrial Revolution’. What had once been carried out mainly by hand, was now increasingly mechanised, run by entrepreneurs such as Richard Arkwright on steam-driven spinning and weaving machines, machines demanding mechanical power. That power was provided by steam engines, engines driven by coal. The Duke of Bridgewater supplied a large share of the coal, but it had to be carried to the mills on the backs of mules, an extremely slow process. So slow was the movement of coal over the comparatively short distance that mill-engines were frequently running out of fuel in their attempt to keep up with the insatiable demand for produce. The duke had the coal and the finance to develop his side of the business of producing cotton fabrics. There were thousands of tons of the stuff lying a mere hundred feet or so beneath the ground; access to it was comparatively easy, but it was one which eventually led to a new industry, together with an expansion of the duke’s coal sales. The answer to the problem of how to reach Manchester in the shortest possible...
