It will be remembered by my readers that Bessemer steel, which is now used, and its value acknowledged, over the whole civilised world, was the direct outcome of my investigations in search of a more suitable metal than was at that time employed in the construction of ordnance. It is my present purpose to show that I had succeeded in attaining the result which I sought, and thus not permit the mere assertion of one man to obliterate from the page of history the fact that I originated a process and produced a material which, at the time the experiments were made by Colonel Wilmot at Woolwich, and for twelve years after that period,¹ and consequently during the whole tenure of office of Sir William Armstrong at Woolwich, stood unrivalled as a material for the construction of ordnance. No other known process could, at that period, produce steel with such marvellous rapidity, and at such an enormous reduction in price; no other known method could produce in large masses steel of such a degree of mildness as to pass, by almost imperceptible gradations, downwards until it became soft iron; nor did there exist any other known process by which large masses of almost chemically pure iron could be produced without weld or joint.²
Many persons who are not intimately acquainted with the early history of Bessemer steel have fallen into great error, and honestly believe that the Bessemer process was in itself uncertain and incapable of perfect control, and that the excellent material commercially produced at the present time has been the result of a long succession of improvements in the process since it left my hands. Nothing could be more absolutely erroneous or more historically untrue, as I shall show further on by incontestable proofs. No doubt all popular beliefs and prejudices have some real, or supposed, good reason for their origin, and this particular popular error was, I admit, the outcome of circumstances only too well calculated to give rise to, and perpetuate, such a belief! The Bessemer process was sprung upon the iron trade suddenly, and in a moment, as it were, it excited the wildest hopes and the direst apprehensions. But it was very soon afterwards discovered that with ordinary phosphoric pig-iron it failed to produce iron or steel of any commercial value. It is almost impossible at this distant period to realise the sudden revulsion of feeling which then took place, and the utter disbelief in the whole scheme which followed, and, passing beyond all reasonable bounds, has not, even at the time I am now writing, entirely disappeared. When, after the labour of two years, I had succeeded in making "Bessemer Pig" from British hematite; when from that pig I had produced steel of excellent quality for all structural purposes; when I had manufactured a high- class tool steel from Swedish pig; and when also the tipping vessel was invented with the ladle provided with a bottom valve, the conical mould, and the hydraulic crane; when, in fact, the general system of the present day was a proved commercial reality at my own works in Sheffield; then, and not till then, did I again bring my process before the trade, when it still met with blank incredulity and distrust. But this time I was backed with proofs that could not be denied, for there, in the town of Sheffield, in the very heart of the great steel industry of the country, stood the Bessemer Steel Works, in daily commercial operation, underselling the old-established manufacturer, who still resisted its encroachment and obstinately refused to believe in it. But the temptation to the ironmaster to become a steel manufacturer at then existing prices was very great, and the adaptability of the process to the manufacturer of rails was self evident. Rail mills and steel works were established by people who had no previous knowledge or experience of steel and its peculiarities, and, what was still worse, there was not a manager or foreman, or even an ordinary workman, to be found who had any knowledge whatever of the new process. As an instance of this difficulty, I may mention a case in point. A very handy carpenter, whom I had employed to assist in the works, had acquired a certain amount of routine knowledge of the process. This made him a valuable man, and one of my licensees who had adopted my process bid a high price for this small amount of practical knowledge, and engaged this carpenter's services, under a five years' agreement, at £5 per week. It is only fair to say that he was quite worth it.

Thus it happened that those ironmasters who had adopted my process had to struggle against difficulties quite unknown in any old-established trade. Need we wonder, then, that the quality of their steel sometimes differed from day to day?

The ironmaster had been in the habit of making bar iron from every kind of pig, and he could not realise the fact that good steel by my process could only be made from a special quality of iron. This he did not like to buy from other makers; in those early days he did not fully understand how to make it himself, and hence he would use inferior hematite iron, or mix some of his own phosphoric pig with it, to eke it out and lessen the cost. The bad results so produced were all set down to the uncertainty of the Bessemer