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This talk proposes a fundamentally new interpretation of Britain's fossil energy economy between the first and second industrial revolutions 1750-1914. Rather than a single breakthrough in steam powered factory production, this model stresses a multi-sectoral ratchet of interlocking forces including urban demand, deep mining, infrastructure, iron production, and global food production. Each turn in the ratchet intensified fossil fuel use and made backward movement more difficult. The fossil ratchet also produced new ways of knowing and experiencing the world. Long before the rise of national accounts and GDP, the ratchet made it possible to imagine sustained economic growth through a cornucopian understanding of the mineral endowment.