In the early days of the Bessemer steel manufacture, many persons who had no love for steel, and saw in it a most formidable rival to iron, had with much perverted ingenuity raised a bogey to scare and alarm the uninitiated. They asserted that although many splendid specimens of steel were produced, the metal was very uncertain in its quality, and reliance could not be placed on it, as it had the fault of failing unexpectedly. Like all other trade prejudices, or mere creations of the imagination, this only required looking at steadily in open day, and in the light of well-ascertained commercial facts, to show how hollow and without foundation it really was. In fact, this crusade against steel was entirely unsuccessful in influencing engineers who took the trouble to inquire into the real facts. It did not prevent the use of thousands of steel railway tyres, which, by their great superiority, rapidly displaced the Lowmoor welded tyres previously almost exclusively relied on. It did not prevent hundreds of steam boilers being made of Bessemer steel for private establishments, nor did it stand in the way of our locomotive engine-boilers being made of this material, in place of the high-class Yorkshire iron previously used for that purpose. Those clever people who set up this bogey of "uncertainty" in the quality of steel, simply for self-protection, dared not assert that occasional bars of bad iron were unknown in commerce. The same persons who so strenuously advocated the building up of heavy masses of wrought-iron could not pretend that the welding of many parts to form a whole was exempt from uncertainty and failure. It was even then a well-known fact that the welding of large masses of wrought iron involved more risk and uncertainty in its results than any other of the processes used in the manufacture of iron.

The question of the uncertainty in quality of the Bessemer mild cast steel simply resolved itself into a question of cost, because the quality was easily ascertainable in the earliest stages of its manufacture, and thus the loss of working up bad material into a costly finished article could be most easily avoided. To show this fact, I will take as an example the production of a Bessemer steel gun-tube, suitable for a 40-pounder gun of 4.75 in. calibre. Such a forging would simply be a plain solid steel cylinder, 8 in. in diameter and 10 ft. long, weighing 15 cwt. and 20 lb., and, with a flat test piece formed on each end, it would weigh 15 1/2 cwt. A 10-ton converter would cast eleven ingots of 1 ft. square, weighing l8 1/2 cwt. each, and if 3 cwt were cut off the top end of each of these ingots to ensure absolute soundness of the part used, we should then have the requisite weight in each ingot to make the gun-tube, and 3 cwt. of scrap metal worth something, but which may be discarded in this case. Now, if this forging, when tested by bending the flat bars formed at each end for analysis, should turn out not to be of the precise standard quality for use as a gun-tube, let us see what would be the loss. The highest quality of Swedish charcoal pig-iron would be used, costing from £6 l0s. to £7 per ton (say £7), and with a small quantity of ferro-manganese, the 10 tons of steel ingots would not cost £10 per ton, and could be utilised for engine or tender axles, steam engine shafts, piston rods, plates or other articles. As the ingots were made of this pure Swedish iron, they could be sold for more than than their prime cost, at a time when steel axles and engine shafts, made from British iron smelted with coke, were sold at £16 to £20 per ton. But suppose, for the sake of argument, and to give no excuse for rejecting these figures, that 20 per cent. reduction was necessary to ensure the ready sale of the ingots, there would then be a loss of £20 on the 10 tons. Now, all experience showed that not one out of every ten charges converted was made of the wrong quality, and it is almost inconceivable that a converting-house could be so grossly mismanaged as to make one charge out of every five of the wrong quality. But if it had been so mismanaged, it would simply have diminished the output of the converting house 20 per cent.; and at a period when railway bars made from British coke-iron were selling at £l2 per ton, such Swedish steel ingots would surely have realised £8 per ton, entailing a loss of £2 on one-fifth of the steel made, thus bringing the cost per ton of ingots up from £10 to £10 l0s. per ton.

It must be borne in mind that this particular manufacture of Bessemer steel had one most important element of certainty as to its composition or quality not possessed by any other iron or steel known in commerce at that period, viz., the contents of the converter when poured into the casting ladle, and well stirred by the revolving agitator, would cast ten separate ingots of a ton weight each that were absolutely identical in quality, so that after testing one of them, the other nine could be used with certainty. This absolute identity in quality was unattainable by any other system: a fact which none of those persons who watched with dismay the daily encroachment of steel on the domain of iron were able to deny.