The Iron Bridge, Coalbrookdale

Assembled from 15 blocks · 1 evidence · 5 related

1. Story
2. The first bridge in the world built of cast iron, cast at Coalbrookdale under Abraham Darby III and opened across the Severn gorge on New Year's Day 1781. It is an argument in metal rather than an efficient structure: the members are joined with dovetails, mortices and wedges copied straight from carpentry, because nobody yet knew how to detail a cast-iron joint, and it uses far more metal than the span requires. That was the point — it was built to demonstrate publicly that iron could do work reserved for stone and timber, and the demonstration succeeded, iron becoming a structural material for mills, aqueducts and later rails within a generation. The Ironbridge Gorge, including the bridge, the Darby furnace and the surrounding industrial landscape, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986.
3. Knowledge
4. Iron
5. The Iron Bridge, Coalbrookdale
6. Connections
7. Iron
8. The Iron Bridge opens over the Severn
9. The organic economy and its ceiling
10. The Iron Bridge, Coalbrookdale
11. Darby smelts iron with coke at Coalbrookdale
12. The Iron Bridge opens over the Severn
13. Cort patents grooved rolling and puddling
14. Evidence
15. Supports the inscription of the gorge, the Darby furnace and the Iron Bridge as a landscape of early industrial ironmaking. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted — whc.unesco.org is blocked from this session. The reference number and criteria are omitted rather than reconstructed.