11^ — ^THE RISE OF SCIENCE IN INDUSTRY 



Bessemer, or Winslow, Griswold & Holley, party taking 70 per cent., 

 and the Kelly Process Company 30 per cent, of all royalties collected. 

 To this wise compromise may we attribute the subsequent establishment 

 of many works. . . . 



But great difficulty was even vet experienced in inducing capitalists 

 and manufacturers to attempt the introduction of the new manufacture. 

 While the metal produced was wonderful in its qualities, still the neces- 

 sary first outlay was so large, and the details of the process were so un- 

 certain, and the time-honored prejudice against anything new, held such 

 powerful sway, that our people hesitated, doubted, and waited. Wonder- 

 ful tales came to us of what was being done abroad, and some venture- 

 some railway managers even dared to import and place in their tracks 

 trial lots of foreign Bessemer rails. 



Messrs. Winslow, Griswold & Holley had, from the very first erec- 

 tion of their works, wisely pursued the plan of extending every facilit\^ to 

 blast-furnace owners, in all parts of the country, to have their irons tried 

 for steel; and under this system many brands were tried, and most were 

 found wanting. These failures to obtain good results, of course, built up 

 still greater barriers against the spread of the process. In the light of our 

 present chemical knowledge of the manufacture, it is amusing to think 

 of firms sending a few tons of iron to Wyandotte, Troy, or even Eng- 

 land, to be tried in actual practice, when a few hours of laboratory work 

 would have settled the entire question. But still it was this very blind 

 using of unknown irons that first opened the eyes of steelmakers to the 

 possibility of making good products from metals pronounced unfit by 

 the then authorities. . . . 



After building the original experimental plant at Troy, Mr. A. L. 

 Holley seems to have appreciated that the manufacture was capable of 

 a development far beyond that which had been attained in those coun- 

 tries in which it was already considered a success. 



Even if his mind did not fully realize this conclusion, his mechanical 

 intuition was alive to the possibilities of improvement, and the result of 

 his thought gave us the present accepted type of American Bessemer 

 plant. He did away with the English deep pit and raised the vessels so 

 as to get working space under them on the ground floor; he substituted 

 top-supported hydraulic cranes for the more expensive counter-weighted 

 English ones, and put three ingot cranes around the pit instead of two, 

 and thereby obtained greater area of power. He changed the location of 

 the vessels as related to the pit and melting-house. He modified the ladle 

 crane, and worked all the cranes and the vessels from a single point; he 

 substituted cupolas for reverberatory furnaces, and last, but by no means 

 least, introduced the intermediate or accumulating ladle which is placed 

 on scales, and thus insures accuracy of operation by rendering possible 

 the weighing of each charge of melted iron, before pouring it into the 

 converter. These points cover the radical features of his innovations. 

 After building such a plant, he began to meet the difficulties of details 

 in manufacture, among the most serious of which was the short duration 

 of the vessel bottoms, and the time required to cool off the vessels to a 

 point at which it was possible for workmen to enter and make new bot- 

 toms. After many experiments, the result was the Holley Vessel Bottom, 



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