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Updated: May 2, 2025
This is one of those damaging effects naturally produced by excessive protective duties; which, while they enable American ironmasters quickly to realize enormous fortunes, drive the American merchants to purchase English ships, or intrust their merchandise in English bottoms, as it is impossible to maintain protective duties at sea.
Webster puts it; for there was such a contingency as that of the ironmasters combining to dispute the patent right, and there is every reason to believe that they were prepared to adopt that course.
Writing under date of September 30, 1856, from the Suwanee Iron Works, Eddyville, Kentucky, he claimed to have started "a series of experiments" in November 1851 which had been witnessed by hundreds of persons and "discussed amongst the ironmasters, etc., of this section, all of whom are perfectly familiar with the whole principle ... as discovered by me nearly five years ago."
Through their want of intelligent direction the great "Trust" of American ironmasters, a gang of energetic, narrow-minded furnace owners, had smelted far more iron than the whole world had any demand for. During their period of activity they had drawn into their employment a great number of workers, and had erected a huge productive plant.
The career of Richard Crawshay, the first of the great ironmasters who had the sense to appreciate and adopt the methods of manufacturing iron invented by Henry Cort, is a not unfitting commentary on the sad history we have thus briefly described. It shows how, as respects mere money-making, shrewdness is more potent than invention, and business faculty than manufacturing skill.
In 1839, when the process had become generally adopted throughout Scotland, and, indeed, was found absolutely essential for smelting the peculiar ores of that country more especially Mushet's Black Band a powerful combination was formed amongst the ironmasters to resist the patent.
Other inventors claimed a part in the invention of the Bessemer process of making steel. Here, the contemporary discussion in the technical press is re-examined to throw light on the relations of these various claimants to the iron and steel industry of their time, as having a possible connection with the antagonism shown by the ironmasters toward Bessemer's ideas.
The Londoners only began to reconcile themselves to the use of coal when the wood within reach of the metropolis had been nearly all burnt up, and no other fuel was to be had. Archaeologia Cambrensis, 3rd Series, No. 34, April, 1863. Art. "Sussex Ironmasters in Glamorganshire." DUDLEY's Metallum Martis, 1665.
In this he was a good deal hampered even by those ironmasters who were his friends, and had promised him the requisite opportunities for making a fair trial of the new process. They strongly objected to his making the necessary alterations in the furnaces, and he seemed to be as far from a satisfactory experiment as ever.
By the erection of blast furnaces at Phillipsburg and Ringwood, N. J., and Durham, Pa., and the addition of wire mills, bridge shop, chain shop, etc., to the works at Trenton, the purchase of iron and coal lands, and the development of numerous mines, the firm of Cooper & Hewitt achieved high rank among the ironmasters of America; and the Iron and Steel Institute of Great Britain conferred upon Peter Cooper in 1879 the "Bessemer gold medal" for his services in the development of the American iron trade.
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