Chapter 2

[22] See _Mining Journal_, 1857, vol. 27, pp. 839 and 855. David Mushet withdrew from the discussion after 1858 and his relapse into obscurity is only broken by an appeal for funds for the family of Henry Cort. A biographer of the Mushets is of the opinion that Robert Mushet wrote these letters and obtained David's signature to them (Fred M. Osborn, _The story of the Mushets_, London, 1952, p. 44, footnote). The similarity in the style of the two brothers is extraordinary enough to support this idea. If this is so, Robert Mushet who disagreed with himself as "Sideros" was also in controversy with himself writing as "David."

[23] _Mining Journal_, 1856, vol. 26, p. 567.

[24] _Ibid._, pp. 631 and 647. The case of Martien will be discussed below (p. 36). David Mushet had overlooked Bessemer's patent of January 10, 1855.

Robert Mushet's campaign on behalf of his own claims to have made the Bessemer process effective was introduced in October 1857, two years after the beginning of Bessemer's experiment and after one year of silence on Bessemer's part. Writing as "Sideros"[25] he gave credit to Martien for "the great discovery that pig-iron can, whilst in the fluid state, be purified ... by forcing currents of air under it ...," though Martien had failed to observe the use of temperature by the "deflation of the iron itself"; and for discovering that--

when the carbon has been all, or nearly all, dissipated, the temperature increases to an almost inconceivable extent, so that the mass, when containing only as much carbon as is requisite to constitute with it cast steel ... still retains a perfect degree of fluidity.

[25] _Mining Journal_, 1857, vol. 27, p. 723. Robert Mushet was a constant correspondent of the _Mining Journal_ from 1848. The adoption of a pseudonym, peculiar apparently to 1857-1858 (see _Dictionary of national biography_, vol. 39, p. 429), enabled him to carry on two debates at a time and also to sing his own praises.

This, says "Sideros," was no new observation; "it had been before the metallurgical world, both practical and scientific, for centuries," but Bessemer was the first to show that this generation of heat could be attained by blowing cold air through the melted iron. Mushet goes on to show, however, that the steel thus produced by Bessemer was not commercially valuable because the sulphur and phosphorous remained, and the dispersion of oxide of iron through the mass "imported to it the inveterate hot-short quality which no subsequent operation could expel." "Sideros" concludes that Bessemer's discovery was "at least for a time" now shelved and arrested in its progress; and it had been left "to an individual of the name of Mushet" to show that if "fluid metallic manganese" were combined with the fluid Bessemer iron, the portion of manganese thus alloyed would unite with the oxygen of the oxide and pass off as slag, removing the hot-short quality of the iron. Robert Mushet had demonstrated his product to "Sideros" and had patented his discovery, though "not one print, literary or scientific, had condescended to notice it."

"Sideros" viewed Mushet's discovery as a "spark amongst dry faggots that will one day light up a blaze which will astonish the world when the unfortunate inventor can no longer reap the fruits of his life-long toil and unflinching perseverance." In an ensuing letter he[26] summed up the situation as he saw it:

Nothing that Mr. Mushet can hereafter invent can entitle him to the merit of Mr. Bessemer's great discovery ... and ... nothing that Mr. Bessemer may hereafter patent can deprive Mr. Robert Mushet of having been the first to remove the obstacles to the success of Mr. Bessemer's process.

[26] _Ibid._, p. 823. Mushet's distinction between an inventor and a patentee is indicative of the disdain of a son of David Mushet for an amateur (see also p. 886).

Bessemer still did not intervene in the newspaper discussion; nor had he had any serious supporters, at least in the early stage.[27]

[27] One William Green had commented extensively on David Mushet's early praise of the Bessemer process and on his sudden reversal in favor of Martien soon after Bessemer's British Association address (_Mechanics' Magazine_, 1856, vol. 65, p. 373 ff.). Green wrote from Caledonian Road, and the proximity to Baxter House, Bessemer's London headquarters, suggests the possibility that Green was writing for Bessemer.

Publication in the _Mining Journal_ of a list of Mushet's patents,[28] evidently in response to Sideros' complaint, now presented Bessemer with notice of Robert Mushet's activity, even if he had not already observed his claims as they were presented to the Patent Office. Mushet, said the _Mining Journal_--

appears to intend to carry on his researches from the point where Mr. J. G. Martien left off and is proceeding on the Bessemer plan of patenting each idea as it occurs to his imaginative brain. He proposes to make both iron and steel but does not appear to have quite decided as to the course of action ... to accomplish his object, and therefore claims various processes, some of which are never likely to realize the inventor's expectations, although decidedly novel, whilst others are but slight modification of inventions which have already been tried and failed.

[28] _Mining Journal_, 1857, vol. 27, p. 764.

The contemporary attitude is reflected in another comment by the _Mining Journal_:[29]

Although the application of chemical knowledge to the manufacture of malleable iron cannot fail to produce beneficial results, the quality of the metal depends more upon the mechanical than the chemical processes.... Without wishing in any way to discourage the iron chemists, we have no hesitation in giving this as our opinion which we shall maintain until the contrary be actually proved. With regard to steel, there may be a large field for chemical research ... however, we believe that unless the iron be of a nature adapted for the manufacture of steel by ordinary processes, the purely chemical inventions will only give a metal of a very uniform quality.

[29] _Ibid._, p. 764.

Another correspondent, William Green, was of the opinion that Mushet's "new compounds and alloys," promised well as an auxiliary to the Bessemer process but that "the evil which it was intended to remove was more visionary than real." Bessemer's chief difficulty was the phosphorus, not the oxide of iron "as Mr. Mushet assumes." This, Bessemer no doubt would deal with in due course, but meanwhile he did well "to concentrate his energies upon the steel operations," after which he would have time to tackle "the difficulties which have so far retarded the iron operations."[30]

[30] _Ibid._, p. 791.

Mushet[31] claims to have taken out his patent of September 22, 1856, covering the famous "triple compound," after he--

had fully ascertained, upon the ordinary scale of manufacture that air-purified cast-iron, when treated as set forth in my specifications, would afford tough malleable iron ... I found, however, that the remelting of the coke pig-iron, in contact with coke fuel, hardened the iron too much, and it became evident that an air-furnace was more proper for my purpose ... [the difficulties] arose, not from any defect in my process, but were owing to the small quantity of the metal operated upon and the imperfect arrangement of the purifying vessel, which ought to be so constituted that it may be turned upon an axis, the blast taken off, the alloy added and the steel poured out through a spout ... _Such a purifying vessel Mr. Bessemer has delineated in one of his patents._

[31] _Ibid._, p. 770 (italics supplied).

Mushet also claimed to have designed his own "purifying and mixing" furnace, of 20-ton capacity, which he had submitted to the Ebbw Vale Iron Works "many months ago," without comment from them. There is an intriguing reference to the painful subject of two patents not proceeded with, and not discussed "in the avaricious hope that the parties connected with the patents will make me honorable amends ... these patents were suppressed without my knowledge or consent." Lest his qualifications should be questioned, Mushet concludes:

I do not profess to be an iron chemist, but I have undoubtedly made more experiments upon the subject of iron and steel than any man now living and I am thereby enabled to say that all I know is but little in comparison with what has yet to be discovered.

So began Mushet's claim to have solved Bessemer's problem, a claim which was to fill the correspondence columns of the engineering journals for the next ten years. Interpretation of this correspondence is made difficult by our ignorance of the facts concerning the control of Mushet's patents. These have to be pieced together from his scattered references to the subject.

His experiments were conducted, at least nearly up to the close of the year 1856, with the cooperation of Thomas Brown of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works.[32] The price of this assistance was apparently half interest in Mushet's patents, though for reasons which Mushet does not explain the deed prepared to effect the transfer was never executed.[33] Mushet continued, however, to regard the patents as "wholly my own, though at the same time, I am bound in honor to take no unfair advantage of the non-execution of that deed." A possible explanation of this situation may be found in Ebbw Vale's activities in connection with Martien and Bessemer, as well as with an Austrian inventor, Uchatius.

[32] _Ibid._, p. 770.

[33] _Ibid._, p. 823.

Ebbw Vale and the Bessemer Process

After his British Association address in August 1856, Bessemer had received applications from several ironmasters for licenses, which were issued in return for a down payment and a nominal royalty of 25 pence per ton. Among those who started negotiations was Mr. Thomas Brown of Ebbw Vale Iron Works, one of the largest of the South Wales plants. He proposed, however, instead of a license, an outright purchase of Bessemer's patents for £50,000. Bessemer refused to sell, and according to his[34] account--

intense disappointment and anger quite got the better of [Brown] and for the moment he could not realize the fact of my refusal.... [He then] left me very abruptly, saying in an irritated tone ... "I'll make you see the matter differently yet" and slammed the door after him.

[34] Bessemer, _op. cit._ (footnote 7), p. 169.

David Mushet's advocacy of Martien's claim to priority over Bessemer has already been noticed (p. 33). From him we learn[35] that Martien's experiments leading to his patent of September 15, 1855, had been carried out at the Ebbw Vale Works in South Wales, where he engaged in "perfecting the Renton process."[36] Martien's own process consisted in passing air through metal as it was run in a trough from the furnace and before it passed into the puddling furnace.

[35] _Mining Journal_, 1856, vol. 26, p. 631.

[36] James Renton's process (U.S. patent 8613, December 23, 1851) had been developed at Newark, New Jersey, in 1854. It was a modification of the puddling furnace, in which the ore and carbon were heated in tubs, utilizing the waste heat of the reverberatory furnace (see the _Mechanics' Magazine_, vol. 62, p. 246, 1855). Renton died at Newark in September 1856 (_Mechanics' Magazine_, 1856, vol. 65, p. 422).

It is known that Martien's patent was in the hands of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works by March 1857.[37] This fact must be added to our knowledge that Mushet's patent of September 22, 1856 was drawn up with a specific reference to the application of his "triple compound" to "iron ... purified by the action of air, in the manner invented by Joseph Gilbert Martien,"[38] and that this and his other manganese patents were under the effective control of Ebbw Vale. It seems a reasonable deduction from these circumstances that Brown's offer to buy out Bessemer and his subsequent threat were the consequences of a determination by Ebbw Vale to attack Bessemer by means of patent infringement suits.

[37] _Mining Journal_, 1857, vol. 27, p. 193.

[38] British patent 2219, September 22, 1856.

Some aspects of the Ebbw Vale situation are not yet explained. Martien came to South Wales from Newark, New Jersey, where he had been manager of Renton's Patent Semi-Bituminous Coal Furnace, owned by James Quimby, and where he had something to do with the installation of Renton's first furnace in 1854. The first furnace was unsuccessful.[39] Martien next appears in Britain, at the Ebbw Vale Iron Works. No information is available as to whether Martien's own furnace was actually installed at Ebbw Vale, although as noted above, David Mushet claims to have been invited to see it there.

[39] Joseph P. Lesley, _The iron manufacturer's guide_, New York, 1859, p. 34. Martien's name is spelled Marteen. A description of the furnace is given in _Scientific American_ of February 11, 1854, (vol. 9, p. 169). In the patent interference proceedings referred to below, it was stated that the furnace was in successful operation in 1854.

Martien secured an American patent for his process in 1857 and to file his application appears to have gone to the United States, where he remained at least until October 1858.[40] He seems to have taken the opportunity to apply for another patent for a furnace similar to that of James Renton. This led to interferences proceedings in which Martien showed that he had worked on this furnace at Bridgend, Glamorganshire (one of the Ebbw Vale plants), improving Renton's design by increasing the number of "deoxydizing tubes." This variation in Renton's design was held not patentable, and in any case Renton's firm was able to show that they had successfully installed the furnace at Newark in 1852-1853, while Martien could not satisfy the Commissioner that his installation had been made before September 1854. Priority was therefore awarded to Quimby, Brown, Renton, and Creswell.[41]

[40] U.S. patent 16690, February 22, 1857. A correspondent of the _Mining Journal_ (1858, vol. 28, p. 713) states that Martien had not returned to England by October 1858.

[41] U.S. Patent Office, Decision of Commissioner of Patents, dated May 26, 1859 in the matter of interference between the application of James M. Quimby and others ... and of Joseph Martien.

Since Renton had not patented his furnace in Great Britain, Martien's use of his earlier knowledge of Renton's work and of his experience at Bridgend in an attempt to upset Renton's priority is a curious and at present unexplainable episode. Perhaps the early records of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works, if they exist, will show whether this episode was in some way linked to the firm's optimistic combination of the British patents of Martien and Mushet.

That Ebbw Vale exerted every effort to find an alternative to Bessemer's process is suggested, also, by their purchase in 1856 of the British rights to the Uchatius process, invented by an Austrian Army officer. The provisional patent specifications, dated October 1, 1855, showed that Uchatius proposed to make cast steel directly from pig-iron by melting granulated pig-iron in a crucible with pulverized "sparry iron" (siderite) and fine clay or with gray oxide of manganese, which would determine the amount of carbon combining with the iron. This process, which was to prove commercially successful in Great Britain and in Sweden but was not used in America,[42] appeared to Ebbw Vale to be something from which, "we can have steel produced at the price proposed by Mr. Bessemer, notwithstanding the failure of his process to fulfil the promise."[43]

[42] J. S. Jeans, _op. cit._ (footnote 5), p. 108. The process is not mentioned by James M. Swank, _History of the manufacture of iron in all ages_, Philadelphia, American Iron and Steel Association, 1892.

[43] _Mining Journal_, 1856, vol. 26, p. 707.

So far as is known only one direct attempt was made, presumably instigated by Ebbw Vale, to enforce their patents against Bessemer, who records[44] a visit by Mushet's agent some two or three months before a renewal fee on Mushet's basic manganese patents became payable in 1859. Bessemer "entirely repudiated" Mushet's patents and offered to perform his operations in the presence of Mushet's lawyers and witnesses at the Sheffield Works so that a prosecution for infringement "would be a very simple matter." That, he says, was the last heard from the agent or from Mushet on the subject.[45] The renewal fee was not paid and the patents were therefore abandoned by Ebbw Vale and their associates, a fact which did not come to Mushet's knowledge until 1861, when he himself declared that the patent "was never in my hands at all [so] that I could not enforce it."[46]

[44] Bessemer, _op. cit._ (footnote 7), p. 290.

[45] The American Iron and Steel Institute's "Steel centennial (1957) press information" (see footnote 2), includes a pamphlet, "Kelly lighted the fireworks ..." by Vaughn Shelton (New York, 1956), which asserts (p. 12) that Bessemer paid the renewal fee and became the owner of Mushet's "vital" patent.

[46] Robert Mushet, _The Bessemer-Mushet process_, Cheltenham, 1883, p. 24; _The Engineer_, 1861, vol. 12, pp. 177 and 189.

Further support for the thesis that Ebbw Vale's policy was in part dictated by a desire to make Bessemer "see the matter differently" is to be found in the climatic episode. Work on Martien's patents had not been abandoned and in 1861 certain patents were taken out by George Parry, Ebbw Vale's furnace manager. These, represented as improvements of Martien's designs, were regarded by Bessemer as clear infringements of his own patents.[47] When it came to Bessemer's knowledge that Ebbw Vale was proposing to "go to the public" for additional capital with which to finance, in part, a large scale working of Parry's process, he threatened the financial promoter with injunctions and succeeded in opening negotiations for a settlement. All the patents "which had been for years suspended" over Bessemer were turned over to him for £30,000. Ebbw Vale, thereupon, issued their prospectus[48] with the significant statement that the directors "have agreed for a license for the manufacture of steel by the Bessemer process which, from the peculiar resources they possess, they will be enabled to produce in very large quantities...." So Bessemer became the owner of the Martien and Parry patents. Mushet's basic patents no longer existed.

[47] _The Engineer_, 1862, vol. 14, p. 3. Bessemer, _op. cit._ (footnote 7), p. 296.

[48] _Mining Journal_, 1864, vol. 34, p. 478.

Mushet and Bessemer

That Mushet was "used" by Ebbw Vale against Bessemer is, perhaps, only an assumption; but that he was badly treated by Ebbw Vale is subject to no doubt. Mushet's business capacity was small but it is difficult to believe that he could have been so foolish as to assign an interest in his patents to Ebbw Vale without in some way insuring his right of consultation about their disposition. He claims that even in the drafting of his specifications he was obliged to follow die demands of Ebbw Vale, which firm, believing, "on the advice of Mr. Hindmarsh, the most eminent patent counsel of the day,"[49] that Martien's patent outranked Bessemer's, insisted that Mushet link his process to Martien's. This, as late as 1861, Mushet believed to be in effective operation.[50] His later repudiation of the process as an absurd and impracticable patent process "possessing neither value nor utility"[51] may more truly represent his opinion, especially as, when he wrote his 1861 comment, he still did not know of the disappearance of his patents.

[49] _The Engineer_, 1861, vol. 12, p. 189.

[50] _Ibid._, p. 78.

[51] Mushet, _op. cit._ (footnote 46), p. 9.

Mushet's boast[52] that he had never been into an ironworks other than his own in Coleford is a clue to the interpretation of his behavior in general and also of his frequent presumptuous claims. When, for instance, the development of the Uchatius process was publicized, he gave his opinion[53] that the process was a useless one and had been patented before Uchatius "understood its nature"; yet later[54] he could claim that the process was "in fact, my own invention and I had made and sold the steel thus produced for some years previously to the date of Captain Uchatius' patent". Moreover, he claims to have instructed Uchatius' agents in its operation! He may, at this later date, have recalled his challenge (the first of many such) in which he offered Uchatius' agent in England to pay a monetary penalty if he could not show a superior method of producing "sound serviceable cast steel from British coke pig-iron, _on the stomic plan_ and without any mixture of clay, oxide of manganese or any of these pot destroying ingredients."[55]

[52] _Ibid._, p. 25.

[53] _Mining Journal_, 1857, vol. 27, p. 755.

[54] Mushet, _op. cit._ (footnote 46), p. 28. The Uchatius process became the "You-cheat-us" process to Mushet (_Mining Journal_, 1858, vol. 28, p. 34).

[55] _Mining Journal_, 1857, vol. 27, p. 755 (italics supplied).

It was David Mushet (or Robert, using his brother's name)[56] who accused Bessemer, or rather his patent agent, Carpmael, of sharp practice in connection with Martien's specification, an allegation later supported by Martien's first patent agent, Avery.[57] The story was that for the drafting of his final specification, Martien, presumably with the advice of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works, consulted the same Carpmael, as "the leading man" in the field. The latter advised that the provisional specification restricted Martien to the application of his method to iron flowing in a channel or gutter from the blast furnace, and so prevented him from applying his aeration principle in any kind of receptacle. In effect, Carpmael was acting unprofessionally by giving Bessemer the prior claim to the use of a receptacle. According to Mushet, Martien had in fact "actually and publicly proved" his process in a receptacle and not in a gutter, so that his claim to priority could be maintained on the basis of the provisional specification.

[56] See footnote 22.

[57] _Mining Journal_, 1856, vol. 26, pp. 583, 631.

This, like other Mushet allegations, was ignored by Bessemer, and probably with good reason. At any rate, Martien's American patent is in terms similar to those of the British specification; he or his advisers seem to have attached no significance to the distinction between a gutter and a receptacle.

Mushet's claim to have afforded Bessemer the means of making his own process useful is still subject to debate. Unfortunately, documentation of the case is almost wholly one sided, since his biggest publicizer was Mushet himself. An occasional editorial in the technical press and a few replies to Mushet's "lucubrations" are all the material which exists, apart from Bessemer's own story.