The Beginnings of Cheap Steel Part 4

The failure of those who controlled Mushet's batch of patents to renew them at the end of three years, Bessemer ascribed to the low public estimation to which Mushet's process had sunk in 1859, and he had therefore, "used without scruple any of these numerous patents for manganese without feeling an overwhelming sense of obligation to the patentee." He was now using ferromanganese made in Glasgow. Another alloy, consisting of 60 to 80 percent of metallic manganese was also available to him from Germany.

This renewed publicity brought forth no immediate reply from Mushet, but a year later he was invited to read a paper before the British a.s.sociation. A report on the meeting stated that in his paper he repeated his oft-told story, and that "he still thought that the accident (of the non-payment of the patent stamp duties) ought not to debar him from receiving the reward to which he was justly ent.i.tled."

Bessemer, who was present, reiterated his constant willingness to submit the matter to the courts of law, but pointed out that Mushet had not accepted the challenge.[89]

[89] _Mechanics' Magazine_, 1866, vol. 16, p. 147.

Three months later, in December 1866, Mushet's daughter called on Bessemer and asked his help to prevent the loss of their home: "They tell me you use my father's inventions and are indebted to him for your success." Bessemer replied characteristically:

I use what your father has no right to claim; and if he had the legal position you seem to suppose, he could stop my business by an injunction tomorrow and get many thousands of pounds compensation for my infringement of his rights. The only result which followed from your father taking out his patents was that they pointed out to me some rights which I already possessed, but of which I was not availing myself. Thus he did me some service and even for this unintentional service, I cannot live in a state of indebtedness....

With that he gave Miss Mushet money to cover a debt for which distraint was threatened.[90] Soon after this action, Bessemer made Mushet a "small allowance" of 300 a year. Bessemer's reasons for making this payment, he describes as follows: "There was a strong desire on my part to make him (Mushet) my debtor rather than the reverse, and the payment had other advantages: the press at that time was violently attacking my patent and there was the chance that if any of my licensees were thus induced to resist my claims, all the rest might follow the example."[91]

[90] Bessemer, _op. cit._ (footnote 7), p. 294.

[91] _Ibid._

Mushet's t.i.tanic Steel and Iron Company was liquidated in 1871 and its princ.i.p.al a.s.set, "R. Mushet's special steel," that is, his tungsten alloy tool metal, was taken over by the Sheffield firm of Samuel Osborn and Company. The royalties from this, with Bessemer's pension seem to have left Mushet in a reasonably comfortable condition until his death in 1891;[92] but even the award of the Bessemer medal by the Iron and Steel Inst.i.tute in 1876 failed to remove the conviction that he had been badly treated. One would like to know more about the politics which preceded the award of the trade's highest honor. Bessemer at any rate was persuaded to approve of the presentation and attended the meeting. Mushet himself did not accept the invitation, "as I may probably not be then alive."[93] The President of the Inst.i.tute emphasized the present good relations between Mushet and Bessemer and the latter recorded that the hatchet had "long since" been buried. Yet Mushet continued to brood over the injustice done to him and eventually recorded his story of the rise and progress of the "Bessemer-Mushet"

process in a pamphlet[94] written apparently without reference to his earlier statements and so committing himself to many inconsistencies.

[92] See Fred M. Osborn, _The story of the Mushets_, London, 1852.

[93] _Journal of the Iron and Steel Inst.i.tute_, 1876, p. 3.

[94] Robert Mushet, _The Bessemer-Mushet process_, Cheltenham, 1883.

William Kelly's "Air-boiling" Process

An account of Bessemer's address to the British a.s.sociation was published in the _Scientific American_ on September 13, 1856.[95] On September 16, 1856, Martien filed application for a U.S. patent on his furnace and Mushet for one on the application of his triple compound to cast iron "purified or decarbonized by the action of air blown or forced into ... its particles while it is in a molten ... state."[96]

Mushet, by this time, had apparently decided to generalize the application of his compound instead of citing its use in conjunction with Martien's process, or, as he put it, he had been obliged to do for his English specification by the Ebbw Vale Iron Works.

[95] _Scientific American_, 1856, vol. 12, p. 6.

[96] U.S. patent 17389, dated May 26, 1857. Martien's U.S. patent was granted as 16690, dated February 24, 1857.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 2.--ONLY KNOWN DESIGN FOR KELLY'S AIR-BOILING FURNACE, FROM U.S. PATENT 17628. _A_ is "the flue to carry off the carbonic gas formed in decarbonizing the iron," _B_ is the port through which the charge of fluid iron is received, _C_ and _C'_ are the tuyeres, and _D_ is the tap hole for letting out the refined metal.]

The discussion in the _Scientific American_, which was mostly concerned with Martien's claim to priority, soon evoked a letter from William Kelly. Writing under date of September 30, 1856, from the Suwanee Iron Works, Eddyville, Kentucky, he claimed to have started "a series of experiments" in November 1851 which had been witnessed by hundreds of persons and "discussed amongst the ironmasters, etc., of this section, all of whom are perfectly familiar with the whole principle ... as discovered by me nearly five years ago." A number of English puddlers had visited him to see his new process. "Several of them have since returned to England and may have spoken of my invention there." Kelly expected "shortly to have the invention perfected and bring it before the public."[97]

[97] _Scientific American_, 1856, vol. 12, p. 43, Kelly's suggestion of piracy of his ideas was later enlarged upon by his biographer John Newton Boucher, _William Kelly: A true history of the so-called Bessemer process_, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, 1924.

Bessemer's application for an American patent was granted during the week ending November 18, 1856, and Kelly began his interference proceedings sometime before January 1857.[98]

[98] _Ibid._, p. 82. Kelly's notice of his intention to take testimony was addressed to Bessemer on January 12, 1857. See papers on "Interference, William Kelly vs. Henry Bessemer Decision April 13, 1857." U.S. Patent Office Records. Quotations below are from this file, which is now permanently preserved in the library of the U.S. Patent Office.

Kelly's witnesses were almost wholly from the ranks of employees or former employees. The only exception was Dr. Alfred H. Champion, a physician of Eddyville. Dr. Champion describes a meeting in the fall of 1851 with "two or three practical Ironmasters and others" at which Kelly described his process and invited all present to see it in operation. He stated:

The company present all differed in opinion from Mr. Kelly and appealed to me as a chemist in confirmation of their doubts. I at once decided that Mr. Kelly was correct in his Theory and then went on to explain the received opinion of chemists a century ago on this subject, and the present received opinion which was in direct confirmation of the novel theory of Mr. Kelly. I also mentioned the a.n.a.logy of said Kelly's process in decarbonising iron to the process of decarbonising blood in the human lungs.

The Doctor does not say, specifically, if he or any of the "company"

went to see the process in operation.

Kelly obtained affidavits from another seventeen witnesses. Ten of these recorded their recollections of experiments conducted in 1847.

Five described the 1851 work. Two knew of or had seen both. One of the last group was John B. Evans who became forge manager of Kelly's Union Forge, a few miles from Suwanee. This evidence is of interest since a man in his position should have been in a position to tell something about the results of Kelly's operations in terms of usable metal.

Unfortunately, he limits himself to a comment on the metal which had chilled around a tuyere which had been sent back to the Forge ("it was partly malleable and partly refined pig-iron") and to an account of a conversation with others who had worked some of Kelly's "good wrought iron" made by the new process.

Only one of the witnesses (William Soden) makes a reference to the phenomenon which is an accompaniment of the blowing of a converter: the prolonged and violent emission of sparks and flames which startled Bessemer in his first use of the process[99] and which still provides an exciting, if not awe-inspiring, interlude in a visit to a steel mill. Soden refers, without much excitement, to a boiling commotion, but the results of Kelly's "air-boiling" were, evidently, not such as to impress the rest of those who claimed to have seen his furnace in operation. Only five of the total of eighteen of the witnesses say that they witnessed the operations. Soden, incidentally, knew of seven different "air-boiling" furnaces, some with four and some with eight tuyeres, but he also neglected to report on the use of the metal.

[99] Bessemer, _op. cit._ (footnote 7), p. 144.

As is well known, Kelly satisfied the Acting Commissioner that he had "made this invention and showed it by drawings and experiment as early as 1847," and he was awarded priority by the Acting Commissioner's decision of April 13, 1857, and U.S. Patent 17628 was granted him as of June 23, 1857. The _Scientific American_ sympathized with Bessemer's realization that his American patent was "of no more value to him than so much waste paper" but took the opportunity of chastising Kelly for his negligence in not securing a patent at a much earlier date and complained of a patent system which did not require an inventor to make known his discovery promptly. The journal advocated a "certain fixed time" after which such an inventor "should not be allowed to subvert a patent granted to another who has taken proper measures to put the public in possession of the invention."[100]

[100] _Scientific American_, 1857, vol. 12, p. 341.

Little authentic is known about Kelly's activities following the grant of his patent. His biographer[101] does not doc.u.ment his statements, many of which appear to be based on the recollections of members of Kelly's family, and it is difficult to reconcile some of them with what few facts are available. Kelly's own account of his invention,[102]

itself undated, a.s.serts that he could "refine fifteen hundredweight of metal in from five to ten minutes," his furnace "supplying a cheap method of making run-out metal" so that "after trying it a few days we entirely dispensed with the old and troublesome run-out fires."[103]

This statement suggests that Kelly's method was intended to do just this; and it is not without interest to note that several of his witnesses in the Interference proceedings, refer to bringing the metal "to nature," a term often used in connection with the finery furnace.

If this is so, his a.s.sumption that he had antic.i.p.ated Bessemer was based on a misapprehension of what the latter was intending to do, that is, to make steel.

[101] Boucher, _op. cit._ (footnote 97).

[102] U.S. Bureau of the Census, _Report on the manufacturers of the United States at the tenth census (June 1, 1880) ..., Manufacture of iron and steel_, report prepared by James M.

Sw.a.n.k, special agent, Was.h.i.+ngton, 1883, p. 124. Mr. Sw.a.n.k was secretary of the American Iron and Steel a.s.sociation. This material was included in his _History of the manufacture of iron in all ages_, Philadelphia, 1892, p. 397.

[103] _Ibid._, p. 125. The run-out fire (or "finery" fire) was a charcoal fire "into which pig-iron, having been melted and partially refined in one fire, was run and further refined to convert it to wrought iron by the Lancas.h.i.+re hearth process,"

according to A. K. Osborn, _An encyclopaedia of the iron and steel industry_, New York, 1956.

This statement leaves the reader under the impression that the process was in successful use. It is to be contrasted with the statement quoted above (page 43), dated September 1856, when the process had, clearly, not been perfected. In this connection, it should be noted that in the report on the Suwanee Iron Works, included in _The iron manufacturer's guide_,[104] it is stated that "It is at this furnace that Mr. Kelly's process for refining iron in the hearth has been most fully experimented upon."

[104] J. P. Lesley, _op. cit._ (footnote 39), p. 129. The preface is dated April 6, 1859. The data was largely collected by Joseph Lesley of Philadelphia, brother of the author, during a tour of several months. Since Suwanee production is given for 44 weeks only of 1857 (_i.e._, through November 4 or 5, 1857) it is concluded that Lesley's visit was in the last few weeks of 1857.

A major financial crisis affected United States business in the fall of 1857. It began in the first week of October and by October 31 the _Economist_ (London) reported that the banks of the United States had "almost universally suspended specie payment."[105] Kelly was involved in this crisis and his plant was closed down. According to Sw.a.n.k,[106]

some experiments were made to adapt Kelly's process to need of rolling mills at the Cambria Iron Works in 1857 and 1858, Kelly himself being at Johnstown, at least in June 1858. That the experiments were not particularly successful is suggested by the lack of any American contributions to the correspondence in the English technical journals.

Kelly was not mentioned as having done more than interfere with Bessemer's first patent application. The success of the latter in obtaining patents[107] in the United States in November 1856, covering "the conversion of molten crude iron ... into steel or malleable iron, without the use of fuel ..." also escaped the attention of both English and American writers.

[105] _Economist_ (London), 1857, vol. 15, pp. 1129, 1209.

[106] Sw.a.n.k, _op. cit._ (footnote 42), p. 125. John Fritz, in his _Autobiography_ (New York, 1912, p. 162), refers to experiments during his time at Johnstown, _i.e._, between June 1854 and July 1860. _The iron manufacturer's guide_ (see footnote 104) also refers to Kelly's process as having "just been tried with great success" at Cambria.

[107] U.S. patents 16082, dated November 11, 1856, and 16083, dated November 18, 1856. Bessemer's unsuccessful application corresponded with his British patent 2321, of 1855 (see footnote 98).

It was not until 1861 that the question arose as to what happened to Kelly's process. The occasion was the publication of an account of Bessemer's paper at the Sheffield meeting of the (British) Society of Mechanical Engineers on August 1, 1861. Accepting the evidence of "the complete industrial success" of Bessemer's process, the _Scientific American_[108] asked: "Would not some of our enterprising manufacturers make a good operation by getting hold of the [Kelly] patent and starting the manufacture of steel in this country?"

[108] _Scientific American_, 1861, new ser., vol. 5, pp. 148-153.

There was no response to this rhetorical question, but a further inquiry as to whether the Kelly patent "could be bought"[109] elicited a response from Kelly. Writing from Hammondsville, Ohio, Kelly[110]

said, in part: