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Age of Invention: How Coal Won

The Coal Conquest, Part II

But just two years later, the holzersparungs kunst pops up again in a petition to Elizabeth I by a Protestant from Trento in northern Italy, Jacopo Aconcio, who had fled religious persecution first to Swizerland and then Strasbourg — exactly the same places and social circles as his co-religionists Zwick and Funcklin — before being hired by the English government in 1559 as an expert on fortifications. I’ve been able to find next to nothing about him except that his name also pops up, simply as a merchant taylor of London, in a draft patent among Cecil’s papers for a 21-year monopoly on the “instruction, art and knowledge of some expert men (having skill)” to reduce the consumption of fuel in furnaces — the holzersparungs kunst again — but this time with his partner not being de Vos, but one Steven van Herwijck of Utrecht. But what is clear is that between Herdegen, Aconcio, Gilpin, Stowghberghen, von Bocholt, Bräutigam, de Vos, Pratt, van Herwijck, Cobham, and Jordayne, there was a huge amount of effort in trying to bring the invention to England, which in terms of saving wood fuel had an obvious value to the country’s major industries like brewing.

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