Swansea Copper

The first book to detail the global impact of copper production in Swansea, Wales, and how a major technological shift transformed the British Isles into the world''s most dynamic center of copper smelting.

Eighteenth-century Swansea, Wales, was to copper what nineteenth-century Manchester was to cotton or twentieth-century Detroit to the automobile. Beginning around 1700, Swansea became the place where a revolutionary new method of smelting copper, later christened the Welsh Process, flourished. Using mineral coal as a source of energy, Swansea''s smelters were able to produce copper in volumes that were quite unthinkable in the old, established smelting centers of central Europe and Scandinavia. After some tentative first steps, the Swansea district became a smelting center of European, then global, importance. Between the 1770s and the 1840s, the Swansea district routinely produced one-third of the world''s smelted copper, sometimes more.

In Swansea Copper