Before it became the planet’s number 1 enemy, coal was once mined to solve an environmental problem. When it became mainstream, it triggered an unprecedented flurry of innovations that continues to this day.
Welcome to Plain Sight by Wyzr, where we bring hidden patterns into plain sight. Every week, we explore stories and ideas that help us understand why we are the way we are.
Beautiful, Clean Coal
“I call it beautiful, clean coal. I tell my people, never use the word coal unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it.”
Donald Trump is not wrong. He’s just off with his timing.
By a few centuries.
As ironic as it may sound, here’s a fact:
Coal started to be mined for industrial purposes as a solution to an environmental menace.
By the 1500s, blast furnaces were being used for iron production across most of Europe and the UK. All these furnaces had something in common — they used charcoal as the fuel. Charcoal, as you probably know, is made by heating wood in a controlled environment. Because it generated an intensely hot and admirably clean heat, it was considered ideal for ironmaking as well as other industries that needed abundant heat in any form.
Wood, obviously, was also useful for other things — most notably building houses and ships.
As England was developing fast in this period, more and more wood was being used to fuel this growth. The consumption had reached alarming levels, and timber stocks had fallen to worrying lows. There were fears now of an impending environmental catastrophe because of deforestation. Industrialists were being pressured to look at other sources for fuel, and certain laws were passed to ensure they did.
Coal, until then, was mostly used for small-scale purposes. But it was well known that the UK had plenty of it. As fears of wood depletion grew, entrepreneurs turned to this abundant resource and began substituting charcoal for it, reluctantly.
The applications were not restricted to ironmaking. Breweries, dyers, brickmakers, potters, smelters, glassmakers — all of them turned to coal and had to figure out different ways to adapt it for their specific needs.
But the early reluctance didn’t last too long. Coal was both more energy-dense and more available than wood. With its introduction to ironmaking, Britain’s iron production skyrocketed. As more iron got produced, the world found more uses for it. To sustain the production, more coal was needed.
And the more coal and iron Britain used, the more it needed to mine, and the deeper it mined, the more work it took to pump water out of the pits. To be able to pump more water, they needed a more efficient solution.
That prompted the invention of the steam engine. It began with the primitive ones by Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, and then progressed to the more sophisticated ones by James Watt.
As the steam engines evolved and came of age, they started doing singularly what would have required hundreds of men and horses at a time. The men could now graduate to doing other work — like working on ships to explore new lands, or working in the rapidly growing manufacturing industry — and the horses, well, could simply be horses.
This chain of innovations is endless. An existing technology makes some activity or producing some good more efficient, causing an increase in demand for that good, in turn resulting in people devising even more efficient ways to produce more of that good, consequently creating demand for something else in the process, which people discover to be indispendable. The cycle continues.
In 1865, British economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that as coal-powered steam engines became more efficient, Britain’s total coal consumption actually increased, because the lower cost per unit of output encouraged greater use of coal-powered machines across more industries. This famously became known as the Jevons Paradox.
It is the idea that increases in efficiency in using a resource can lead to a higher overall consumption of that resource, rather than a decrease.
As far as coal is concerned, it continues to hold. In 2024, global coal production surpassed 9 billion metric tons for the first time in history. That’s about 1.2 metric tonnes per person for the year.
And coal is just one example. The next big technology that’s embracing Jevons Paradox is Artificial Intelligence, in all its forms. Chips are getting smaller, those that used to be expensive are now cheaper, and sizes that were once thought to be unattainable are being created. These smaller chips are powering technologies that are significantly more capable than their predecessors. But before I say anything more about AI, let’s go back a couple of centuries to see what coal really did to England as a country.
In 1800, 95 per cent of Britain’s energy came from coal. At the same point, right across the English Channel, over 90 per cent of France’s energy still came from burning wood. For most of history, Britain’s and France’s per capita incomes had been at similar levels. But in the early 1800s, Britain was 80 per cent richer than France. Coal had, almost single-handedly, made Britain and its people significantly wealthier.
There’s one more thing to note here, which is critical in today’s context. A technology as widespread as coal in Britain took over 200 years to just cross the sea to France. People had more than enough time to adapt. The transition from men on horses to men in ships took generations.
Today, technology travels in seconds. It doesn’t wait for you to adapt. You can’t afford to be reactive. If you’re not a step ahead of the curve, you’re probably at risk. But if you are, you’ll probably get richer.
So here's a question worth considering: What’s that one thing in your life which is right in front of your eyes, and yet you are not seeing? Which abundant resource are you overlooking today that could power your next breakthrough?
Subscriber Spotlight
Last week, we explored how ‘third places’ like cafes had become the OG idea incubators of the 20th century. Our subscriber, Sneha’s response perfectly captures something we often miss about breakthrough ideas - they happen in the spaces between the spaces.
“During my MBA days, it wasn’t classrooms or formal sessions that sparked the most out-of-the-box ideas but rather the corridors, canteen corners, and lunch breaks,” she wrote. Those moments became “mini melting pots where hierarchies faded away, and conversations jumped effortlessly from real estate to antibody development.”
Her key insight? “Freedom for ideas to just flow raw, unfiltered, and wonderfully diverse.” And crucially: “Some of those spontaneous sparks are now real, tangible ventures.”
Innovation, it seems, prefers the unplanned margins over the planned centers.
What we’re reading at Wyzr
Material World by Ed Conway. A compelling and deeply researched exploration of the essential materials that underpin our modern life: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. I expected it to be boring — I was wrong! What sets this book apart is its blend of economic insight, historical context, and on-the-ground reporting. It shows how geopolitics, labor, and environmental tradeoffs are intimately connected to the supply of these resources.
Did you enjoy this edition of Plain Sight? Write to us about your ideas, what you liked, what you didn’t, and any feedback that can help us improve at plainsight@wyzr.in. We’ll include some chosen responses in our subsequent editions.
Until next week.
Best,
Yashraj
