Bituminous Coal coastal shipments up from Virginia might resume. These experiments established a bottom draught and closed doors (reflection or reverberatory furnace techniques) were the key. Before the war, Baltimore, New York, Newark, New Haven, Boston, and Philadelphia industrialists were importing Bituminous via shipload from Virginia and Great Britain, and these supplies became difficult to obtain or blocked politically by the war and its preceding embargoes on British goods. After the war, the sanctions continued until various boundary disputes were resolved as far away as The Oregon Country and the Columbia River basin. Historical backdrop Meanwhile, between 1814 and 1818 industries along the Eastern Seaboard were still thirsting for energy relief when inquiries to the LHCM Co. by Hazard & White indicated the operation & rights of the company were available. Frustrated by the snail-like progress of improvements that would become the Schuylkill Canal, White & Hazard applied to the Pennsylvania legislature for the rights to improve and operate navigations upon the rapids-strewn Lehigh River initiating the process that lead to the Lehigh Canal—beginning regular high volume & reliable coal deliveries in late 1820—and the great changes a flood of anthracite would create in the next century. Iron from Anthracite smelting Research into the smelting of iron using anthracite coal (without coking it first) began in the 1820s in Wales by Thomas, experiments in France, most notably by Gueymard and Robin at Vizille in 1827, and in the 1830s in Pottsville & Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania. Early attempts tried to gradually substitute anthracite for other fuels, such as coke or charcoal, but all failed due to the use of cold blast techniques, which generated insufficient heat to keep the anthracite in regenerative combustion. In the same time-frame, Thomas had also continued experimenting with mixes of Anthracite and other fuels, before he combined those experiments and the new hot blast processing. In the United States, where the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) had begun shipping anthracite to Philadelphia in 1820 because the principles could not obtain sufficient fuels for their iron works at the 'Falls of the Schuylkill' —so had built the Lehigh Canal and taken over the works of the haphazard Lehigh Coal Mine Company—by the late 1820s having established works that were running smoothly, after building America's second operating railroad in 1827, they'd great interest in exploiting the great anthracite deposits of Schuylkill County for ironmaking, which mills foundries