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This variation in Renton's design was held not patentable, and in any case Renton's firm was able to show that they had successfully installed the furnace at Newark in 1852-1853, while Martien could not satisfy the Commissioner that his installation had been made before September 1854. Priority was therefore awarded to Quimby, Brown, Renton, and Creswell. U.S. patent 16690, February 22, 1857.
Perhaps the early records of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works, if they exist, will show whether this episode was in some way linked to the firm's optimistic combination of the British patents of Martien and Mushet.
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.
In the patent interference proceedings referred to below, it was stated that the furnace was in successful operation in 1854. Martien secured an American patent for his process in 1857 and to file his application appears to have gone to the United States, where he remained at least until October 1858.
According to Mushet, Martien had in fact "actually and publicly proved" his process in a receptacle and not in a gutter, so that his claim to priority could be maintained on the basis of the provisional specification. See footnote 22. Mining Journal, 1856, vol. 26, pp. 583, 631. This, like other Mushet allegations, was ignored by Bessemer, and probably with good reason.
J. G. Martien left off and is proceeding on the Bessemer plan of patenting each idea as it occurs to his imaginative brain.
Martien came to South Wales from Newark, New Jersey, where he had been manager of Renton's Patent Semi-Bituminous Coal Furnace, owned by James Quimby, and where he had something to do with the installation of Renton's first furnace in 1854. The first furnace was unsuccessful. Martien next appears in Britain, at the Ebbw Vale Iron Works.
Writing as "Sideros" he gave credit to Martien for "the great discovery that pig-iron can, whilst in the fluid state, be purified ... by forcing currents of air under it ...," though Martien had failed to observe the use of temperature by the "deflation of the iron itself"; and for discovering that
And it is absolutely necessary, in order to apply any useful alloy of iron, carbon and manganese, in the manufacture of malleable iron and very soft steel that the manganese should be largely in excess of the carbon present. Ibid., p. 208. There is an intriguing reference in this editorial to an interference on behalf of Martien against a Bessemer application for a U.S. patent.
Ibid., p. 25. Mining Journal, 1857, vol. 27, p. 755. Mushet, op. cit. The story was that for the drafting of his final specification, Martien, presumably with the advice of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works, consulted the same Carpmael, as "the leading man" in the field.
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