Short answers, pulled from the story.
Abraham Darby I was an English ironmaster and Quaker born on the 14th of April 1677 at Wren's Nest in Woodsetton, Staffordshire. He is significant for developing the first commercially successful method of smelting iron using coke rather than charcoal, a process he achieved at Coalbrookdale in 1709, which became a foundational step in the Industrial Revolution.
Darby brought the Coalbrookdale furnace into blast on the 10th of January 1709, and the blast appears to have been successful. His first account book, covering October 1708 to January 1710, records the production of charked coal and shows he sold 81 tons of iron goods in that first year.
Darby took out a patent in 1707 for a new method of casting iron pots using sand moulds rather than traditional loam moulds. The method, which also employed a special casting box and core developed with a Welsh apprentice named John Thomas, produced pots that were thinner and lighter than existing alternatives.
Darby was apprenticed in Birmingham in the early 1690s to Jonathan Freeth, a Quaker manufacturer of brass mills for grinding malt. Working there, he observed coke being used to fuel malting ovens, learning that coke prevented sulphur from coal from spoiling beer while avoiding the scarcity of charcoal. Those two observations later underpinned his development of the coke-fuelled blast furnace.
Darby died on the 5th of May 1717 at Madeley Court in Madeley, Shropshire, after eighteen months of illness, aged 40. His shares were mortgaged to Thomas Goldney II, who converted the debt into eight of sixteen company shares; his eldest son, Abraham Darby II, was only six years old at the time and did not begin assisting in management until 1728.
Dud Dudley was Abraham Darby I's great-grandmother's full brother, making Dudley his great-granduncle. Dudley had claimed to smelt iron using coal as a fuel, but the iron he produced was rejected by charcoal ironmasters. The source suggests this family precedent may have inspired Darby to perfect the technique that Dudley could not.