United States or Dominican Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Mr. Bessemer's greatest invention, announced to the British Association at Cheltenham, in 1856, is his method of the manufacture of iron and steel without fuel, which started a new era in the iron trade. His name will be forever associated with the rapid conversion of pig iron into malleable iron and steel.
Bessemer's patented factors, of which, up to the close of Mr. Kelly's experiments above noted, he seemed to have no knowledge or conception.
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.
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.
William Kelly, an ironmaster of Eddyville, Kentucky, brought into action by an American report of Bessemer's British Association paper, opposed the granting of a United States patent to Bessemer and substantiated, to the satisfaction of the Commissioner of Patents, his claim to priority in the "air boiling" process.
In view of his propensity to intervene pontifically in every discussion concerning the manufacture of iron and steel, it is somewhat surprising that he refrained from comment on Bessemer's British Association address of August 1856 for more than fourteen months. The debate was opened over the signature of his brother David who shared the family facility with the pen.
Mushet and at least five other men patented the use of manganese in steel making in 1856; his own provisional specification was filed within a month of the publication of Bessemer's British Association address in August 1856. So it is strange that Robert Mushet did not until more than a year later join in the controversy which followed that address.
Had it not been for you and Martin I should probably never have proposed the use of steam in my process, but the use of air came by degrees, just in the way I have described." It was thoroughly consistent with Mr. Bessemer's kindly feelings towards me, that, after our meeting at Cheltenham, he made me an offer of one-third share of the value of his patent.
By the time the Transactions of the British Association were prepared for publication, the controversy aroused by Bessemer's claim to manufacture "malleable iron and steel without fuel" had broken out and it was decided not to report the paper. Bessemer, op. cit. The Times, London, August 14, 1856.
Mushet's American patent had been bought by an American group interested in the Kelly process at about this time, and Bessemer's American rights had also been sold to an American group that included Alexander Lyman Holley, who had long been associated with Zerah Colburn, another American engineer.
Word Of The Day