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Until the early twentieth century, firing a tile kiln in France required considerable intakes of wood, even as the country was marked by significant deforestation. Preservation measures were pursued as early as the sixteenth century. In some regions, tilers had to adapt accordingly in order to avoid bankruptcy, primarily by switching fuel to coal. This wood crisis also created opportunities for those who owned forest cover, some of whom sought not so much to protect wood resources as to take advantage of the crisis in order to establish taxes connected to their use. Another possibility was innovation, with kilns consuming less fuel. A large number of patents were filed for this purpose in the nineteenth century, leading to the development of the continuous furnaces still in use today.