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Updated: June 5, 2025
Joseph Gilbert Martien, of Newark, New Jersey, who at the time of Bessemer's address was working at the plant of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works, in South Wales, secured a provisional patent a few days before Bessemer obtained one of his series of patents for making cast steel, a circumstance which provided ammunition for those who wished to dispute Bessemer's somewhat spectacular claims.
Ebbw Vale, thereupon, issued their prospectus 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.
The study of Mushet's letters to the technical press and of the attitude of the editors of those papers to Mushet suggests the possibility that he, too, was used by Ebbw Vale for the purposes of their attacks on Bessemer.
So far as is known only one direct attempt was made, presumably instigated by Ebbw Vale, to enforce their patents against Bessemer, who records 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.
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. Mining Journal, 1857, vol. 27, p. 193. British patent 2219, September 22, 1856. Some aspects of the Ebbw Vale situation are not yet explained.
He alone "from the first consistently advocated the merits and pointed out the defects of the Bessemer process," and within a few days of the British Association address he had shown Ebbw Vale "where the defect would be found and what would remedy" it.
Mushet's description of the preparation of this ingot shows that it was derived from "Bessemer scrap" made by Ebbw Vale in the first unsuccessful attempts of that firm to simulate the Bessemer process. This scrap Mushet had remelted in pots with spiegel in the proportions of 44 pounds of scrap to 3 of melted spiegel.
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 account Bessemer, op. cit. From him we learn 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."
A third man, this one a Scot resident in England, intervened to claim that he had devised the means whereby Martien's and Bessemer's ideas could be made practical. He was Robert Mushet of Coleford, Gloucestershire, a metallurgist and self-appointed "sage" of the British iron and steel industry who also was associated with the Ebbw Vale Iron Works as a consultant.
Mushet, by this time, had apparently decided to generalize the application of his compound instead of citing its use in conjunction with Martien's process, or, as he put it, he had been obliged to do for his English specification by the Ebbw Vale Iron Works. Scientific American, 1856, vol. 12, p. 6. U.S. patent 17389, dated May 26, 1857.
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