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Robert Mushet, The Bessemer-Mushet process, Cheltenham, 1883. William Kelly's "Air-boiling" Process An account of Bessemer's address to the British Association was published in the Scientific American on September 13, 1856.
In the light of subsequent developments, it is necessary to consider Bessemer's attitude toward the patent privilege. He describes his secret gold paint as an example of "what the public has had to pay for not being able to give ... security to the inventor" in a situation where the production of the material "could not be identified as having been made by any particular form of mechanism."
Another correspondent, William Green, was of the opinion that Mushet's "new compounds and alloys," promised well as an auxiliary to the Bessemer process but that "the evil which it was intended to remove was more visionary than real." Bessemer's chief difficulty was the phosphorus, not the oxide of iron "as Mr. Mushet assumes."
It is certain that he never had the objective of making steel, which was Bessemer's primary aim. Nor is there evidence that his process was taken beyond the experimental stage by the Cambria Works. The rejection of his "apparatus" by W. F. Durfee must have been based, to some extent at least, upon the Johnstown trials.
Green wrote from Caledonian Road, and the proximity to Baxter House, Bessemer's London headquarters, suggests the possibility that Green was writing for Bessemer.
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."
Kelly was not mentioned as having done more than interfere with Bessemer's first patent application. The success of the latter in obtaining patents in the United States in November 1856, covering "the conversion of molten crude iron ... into steel or malleable iron, without the use of fuel ..." also escaped the attention of both English and American writers. Swank, op. cit.
Unfortunately, documentation of the case is almost wholly one sided, since his biggest publicizer was Mushet himself. An occasional editorial in the technical press and a few replies to Mushet's "lucubrations" are all the material which exists, apart from Bessemer's own story.
Bessemer's own story of his most important invention was very interesting. Practical iron men had said that it was an impossible feat to convert molten pig iron in a few minutes into fluid malleable iron, and then into available steel, and all this without additional fuel. But the genius and perseverance of Mr. Bessemer, aided by his practical knowledge of chemistry and mechanics, did it.
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.
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