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The Engineer found Mushet's position untenable on the very grounds he was pleading that patents should not be issued to different men at different times for the same thing; and showed that Bessemer in his patents of January 4, 1856, and later, had clearly anticipated Mushet. In a subsequent article, The Engineer disposed of Martien's and Mushet's claims with a certain finality.
Mushet having set up a number of claims for "improvements" upon which claims, we have a right to suppose, he was preparing to take toll from Mr. Bessemer, but which claims, the latter gentleman discovered, in time, were worthless and accordingly declined any negotiations with the individual making them. Ibid., p. 254. Mushet's claims were by this time rarely supported in the periodicals.
The exact date of the purchase of Mushet's patent is not known. Engineering, 1882, vol. 33, p. 114. The deal was completed in 1863. The Engineer, 1864, vol. 18, pp. 405, 406. It has not yet been possible to ascertain if this company was successful. Mushet writes from this time on from Cheltenham, where the company had its offices. Research continues in this interesting aspect of his career.
This fact must be added to our knowledge that Mushet's patent of September 22, 1856 was drawn up with a specific reference to the application of his "triple compound" to "iron ... purified by the action of air, in the manner invented by Joseph Gilbert Martien," and that this and his other manganese patents were under the effective control of Ebbw Vale.
Another Mushet patent is described as so much like Uchatius' process that it would seem to be almost unpatentable. See Jeans, op. cit. Mushet's formal pronouncement on Bessemer's paper, dated June 28, 1859, is perhaps his most intelligible communication on the subject.
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.
Mushet's failure to make the public appreciate his theories has not injured his inventive faculties." These patents include, besides variations on his "triple compound" theme, his important patent on the use of tungsten for cutting tools, later to be known as Mushet steel. Mining Journal, 1859, vol. 29, p. 539 and 640.
Three months later, in December 1866, Mushet's daughter called on Bessemer and asked his help to prevent the loss of their home: "They tell me you use my father's inventions and are indebted to him for your success."
Mushet's lifelong labours, the following may be summarily mentioned: The preparation of steel from bar-iron by a direct process, combining the iron with carbon; the discovery of the beneficial effects of oxide of manganese on iron and steel; the use of oxides of iron in the puddling-furnace in various modes of appliance; the production of pig-iron from the blast-furnace, suitable for puddling, without the intervention of the refinery; and the application of the hot blast to anthracite coal in iron-smelting.
Robert Mushet's indignant "advertisement" of January 5, 1858, reiterating his parentage of this sample, also claimed a double-headed steel rail "made by me under another of my patent processes," and sent to Derby to be laid down there to be "subjected to intense vertricular triturations."
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