I announced the fact of my complete success to the world, and held in my hands the most undeniable proofs of the truth of my assertion, but no one would now believe it. They remembered, but too well, the great expectations that were excited two years previously by the first announcement of my invention at Cheltenham, and were not again to be disturbed by the cry of "Wolf!" Thus it happened that, after the hard battle I had fought for so many years, I found myself as far as ever from the fruits of my labour, for not a single ironmaster or steel manufacturer in Great Britain could be induced to adopt the process.

Anxious to possess still further practical proofs of the value of my invention, I made, at my experimental works at St. Pancras, a few hundredweights of steel ingots of all the special qualities required in an engineer's workshop. This steel we took to Sheffield, where it was tilted, by an experienced steel-maker, into bars of precisely the same external appearance as the ordinary steel of commerce. Either I, or my partner, Mr. Longsdon, was present the whole time occupied in the operation, and as each bar was finished we stamped it, while still hot, with a special punch which we kept in our pockets for the purpose, thus rendering the accidental or intentional change of a bar impossible. These bars we took to the works of my friends, Messrs. Galloway, the well-known engineers, of Manchester, where they were given out to the workmen and employed by them for all the purposes for which steel had previously been used in their extensive business. So identical in all essential qualities was this steel with that usually employed that, during two months' trial of it, the workmen had not the slightest idea or suspicion that they were using steel made by a new process. They were accustomed to use steel of the best quality, costing £60 per ton, and they had no doubt whatever that they were still doing so.

None of the large steel manufacturers at Sheffield would adopt my process, even under the very favourable conditions which I offered as regards licenses, viz., £2 per ton. Each one required an absolute monopoly of my invention if he touched it at all. This I fully made up my mind to resist, by adopting the only means open to me -- namely, the establishment of a steel works of my own in the midst of the great steel industry of Sheffield. My purpose was not to work my process as a monopoly, but simply to force the trade to adopt it by underselling them in their own market, which the extremely low cost of production would enable me to do, while still retaining a very high rate of profit on all that was produced. My partner, Mr. Longsdon, and my brother-in-law, Mr. William Allen, to whom I mentioned this project, were quite willing to join me in it as a purely manufacturing speculation, apart from any interest in my patents, which, however, the firm were allowed to use free of royalty, in consideration of their permitting the works to be inspected and the process fully explained to all intending licensees.

It will be remembered that Messrs. Galloway, of Manchester, were the first persons who took a license to manufacture malleable iron by my converting process, having purchased the sole right to manufacture it in Manchester and ten miles round, prior to the reading of my paper at Cheltenham. One of the original upright fixed converters had been erected at their engineering works, and having, like all the rest, failed to produce satisfactory results with ordinary phosphoric pig-iron, it had been at once abandoned. But when the proofs of our success in steel making, two years later, were afforded to Messrs. Galloway by the actual use in their own workshop of steel tools of all sorts made by us in London, it was mutually agreed that they should rescind their original license for Manchester and join us as equal partners in the Sheffield works, which I and Mr. Longsdon had determined to erect, with Mr. William Allen as the resident managing partner.

Mr. Longsdon, with his intimate knowledge of architecture, soon designed our model works -- a neat white brick range of buildings with sandstone dressings, and a tall chimney as the usual landmark. Thus were established the first Bessemer Steel Works, and in less than twelve months from its commencement, we had built a dozen melting furnaces and erected the steam and tilt hammers, blast furnaces, and converting apparatus, suitable for carrying on the new manufacture. This we commenced by bringing steel into the market at £10 to £15 per ton below the quotations of other manufacturers. In thus opposing the old-established steel trade in its very midst, we ran the risk of "rattening," or a bottle of gunpowder in the furnace flues, by which the workmen of Sheffield had earned for themselves an unenviable notoriety, and we had reason to consider ourselves fortunate that we escaped. We were doubtless indebted for this immunity to the entire and absolute disbelief, both of masters and men, in our power to compete