Selling, carrying, bringing, or taking coal(s) to Newcastle is an idiom of British origin describing a pointless action. 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 of the first known recording of the phrase in 1538, 15,000 tonnes of coal were being exported annually from the area—and therefore any attempt to sell coal to Newcastle would be doomed to fail because of the economic principle of supply.
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History
The phrase "To carry Coals to Newcastle" is first documented in North America in 1679 in William Fitzhugh's letters ("But relating farther to you would be carrying Coals to new Castle") and first appears in a printed title in Labour in vain: or Coals to Newcastle: A sermon to the people of Queen-Hith, 1709.
Timothy Dexter, an American entrepreneur, 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 got a large profit after his cargo arrived during a miners' strike which had crippled local production.
More prosaically, the American National Coal Association asserted that the United States profitably sold coal to Newcastle in the early 1990s, and 70,000 tonnes of low-sulphur coal was imported by Alcan from Russia in 2004 for their local aluminium smelting plant. However, this was over 20 years after the Thatcher government had gutted the vast majority of heavy industry across the North East of England, so much so that the last exports from the area were six years before Alcan's venture.
Although the coal industry of Newcastle upon Tyne is now practically non-existent, the expression can still be used today with a degree of literal accuracy, since the harbour of Newcastle in Australia (named for Newcastle in the UK after abundant coal deposits were discovered there and exploited by early European settlers) has succeeded its UK namesake by becoming the largest exporter of coal in the modern world.
Contemporary use
With the increasing onset of globalization, parallels in other industries are being found, and the idiom is now frequently used by the media when reporting business ventures whose success may initially appear just as unlikely. It has been referred to in coverage of the export to India of Saudi Arabian saffron and chicken tikka masala from the United Kingdom, the sale of Scottish pizzas to Italy, the flowing of champagne and cheese from Britain to the French, and the production of manga versions of William Shakespeare from Cambridge for Japan.
Even though its original geographic origin may have been displaced, this cliché continues to be used.