orms us that "at the present
time the bridge is undergoing repair; and, special examination having
been made, there is no appearance either that the abutments have moved,
or that the ribs have been broken in the centre or are out of their
proper right line. There has, it is true, been a strain on the land
arches, and on the roadway plates, which, however, the main arch has
been able effectually to resist."

The bridge has now been in profitable daily use for upwards of eighty
years, and has during that time proved of the greatest convenience to
the population of the district. So judicious was the selection of its
site, and so great its utility, that a thriving town of the name of
Ironbridge has grown up around it upon what, at the time of its
erection, was a nameless part of "the waste of the manor of Madeley."
And it is probable that the bridge will last for centuries to come.
Thus, also, was the use of iron as an important material in
bridge-building fairly initiated at Coalbrookdale by Abraham Darby, as
the use of iron rails was by Richard Reynolds. We need scarcely add
that since the invention and extensive adoption of railway locomotion,
the employment of iron in various forms in railway and bridge
structures has rapidly increased, until iron has come to be regarded as
the very sheet-anchor of the railway engineer.

In the mean time the works at Coalbrookdale had become largely
extended. In 1784, when the government of the day proposed to levy a
tax on pit-coal, Richard Reynolds strongly urged upon Mr. Pitt, then
Chancellor of the Exchequer, as well as on Lord Gower, afterwards
Marquis of Stafford, the impolicy of such a tax. To the latter he
represented that large capitals had been invested in the iron trade,
which was with difficulty carried on in the face of the competition
with Swedish and Russian iron. At Coalbrookdale, sixteen "fire
engines," as steam engines were first called, were then at work, eight
blast-furnaces and nine forges, besides the air furnaces and mills at
the foundry, which, with the levels, roads, and more than twenty miles
of iron railways, gave employment to a very large number of people.
"The advancement of the iron trade within these few years," said he,
"has been prodigious. It was thought, and justly, that the making of
pig-iron with pit coal was a great acquisition to the country by saving
the wood and supplying a material to manufactures, the production of
which, by the consu