Selling or carrying coal(s) to Newcastle is an idiom of British origin describing a foolhardy or pointless action.1 It refers to the fact that historically, the economy of Newcastle upon Tyne in north-eastern England was heavily dependent on the distribution and sale of coal—by the time the phrase was first recorded in 1538,23 15,000 tonnes of coal were being exported annually from the area4—and therefore any attempt to sell coal to Newcastle would be doomed to failure because of the economic principle of supply and demand.1
Timothy Dexter, an Americanentrepreneur, succeeded in defying the idiom in the eighteenth century. Renowned for his eccentricity and widely regarded as a buffoon, he was persuaded to sail a shipment of coal to Newcastle by rival merchants plotting to ruin him. However, he instead yielded a large profit after his cargo arrived during a miners' strike which had crippled local production.56 More prosaically, the American National Coal Association asserted that the United States was able to profitably sell coal to Newcastle in the early 1990s,7 and 70,000 tonnes of low-sulphur coal was imported by Alcan from Russia in 2004 for their local aluminiumsmelting plant. However, this was in the context of Newcastle's traditional coal industry having stagnated so much by the end of the twentieth century that the last exports from the area were six years prior to Alcan's venture.8
