litilf prior lo 185i>. The im-lhoils ol production wen- 

 still lari^cly those of a century earlier. Slow prepara- 

 tion of the steel by cementation or in cruciljlcs meant 

 a disproportionate consumption of fuel and a resulting 

 high cost. Production in small ciuantities prevented 

 the adoption of steel in uses wltich required large 

 initial masses of metal. Steel was. in fact, a luxury 

 product. 



The work of Reaumur and, especially, of Huntsman, 

 whose development of cast steel after 1740 secured an 

 international reputation for Sheffield, had established 

 the cementation and crucible processes as the primary 

 source of cast steel, for nearly 100 years. Josiah 

 Marshall Heath's patents of 1839, were the first devel- 

 opments in the direction of cheaper steel, his process 

 leading to a reduction of from 30 to 40 percent in the 

 price of good steel in the Sheffield market. ' Heath's 

 secret was the addition to the charge of from 1 to 3 

 percent of carburet of manganese ^ as a deoxidizer. 

 Heath's failure to word his patent .so as to cover also 

 his method of producing carburet of manganese led to 

 the efTective breakdown of that patent and to the 

 general adoption of his process without payment of 

 license or royalty. In sjiile of this reduction in the 

 cost of its production, steel remained, until after the 

 midpoint of the century, an insignificant item in the 

 output of the iron and steel industry, being used prin- 

 cipally in the manufacture of cutlery and edge tools. 



The stimulus towards new methods of making steel 

 and, indeed, of making new steels came curiously 

 enough from outside the established industry, from a 

 man who was not an ironmaster — Henry Bessemer. 

 The way in which Bes.semcr challenged the trade was 

 itself unusual. There are few cases in which a stranger 

 to an industry has taken the risk of giving a description 

 of a new process in a pul)lic forum like a meeting of the 

 British Association for the Advancement of Science. 

 He challenged the trade, not only to attack his theories 

 but to produce evidence from their own plants that 

 they could provide an alternative means of satisfying 

 an emergent demand. Whether or not Bessemer is 

 entitled to claim priority of invention, one can but 

 agree with the ironmaster who said: " "Mr. Bessemer 

 has raised such a spirit of en(|uiry throughout . . . the 



' Andrew Ure, Dictionary of arts, manujacturrs and mines. New 

 York, 1856, p. 735. 



'.Sec abridgement of British patent 8021 of 1839 quoted by 

 James S. Jeans, Steel, London, 1880, p. 28 ff. It is not clear 

 that Heath was aware of the precise chemical effect of the use of 

 manfianesc in this way. 



« Mining Journal, 1857, vol. 27, p. 465. 



land as nuist Icid lo an improved syslciii ol manu- 

 facture.'' 



Bessemc-r and his Competitors 



Henry Bessemer (1813-1898), an Englishman of 

 French extraction, was the son of a mechanical 

 engineer with a special interest in mctalhugy. I lis 

 environment and his unusual ability to synthesize his 

 ob.servation and experience enabled Bessemer to begin 

 a career of invention by registering his first patent at 

 the age of 2.S. His active experimenting continued 

 uniil his death, although the public record of his 

 results ended wiih a patent issued on the day before 

 his .seventieth birthday. A total of 117 British 

 patents " bear his name, not all of them, by any means, 

 successful in the sense of producing a substantial 

 income. Curiously, Bessemer's financial stability was 

 assured by the success of an invention he did not 

 patent. This was a process of making bronze powder 

 and gold paint, until the 1830's a secret held in 

 Germany. Bessemer's substitute for an expensive 

 imported product, in the then state of the patent laws, 

 would have failed to give him an adequate reward if 

 he had been unable to keep his process secret. To 

 assure this reward, he had to design, assemble, and 

 organize a plant capable of operation with a minimmn 

 of hired labor and with close .security control. The 

 fact that he kept the method secret for 40 years, 

 suggests that his machinery * (Bessemer describes it as 

 virtually automatic in operation) represented an 

 appreciation of coordinated design greatly in advance 

 of his time. His experience must have directly con- 

 tributed to his conception of his steel process not as a 

 metallurgical trick but as an industrial process; for 

 when the time came, Bessemer patented his discovery 

 as a process rather than as a formula. 



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.'"* The inability to 

 obtain a patent over the method of production meant 

 that the disclosure of his formula, necessary for patent 

 specification, would openly in\ile competitors, in- 



~ Sir Henry Bessemer, F. R. S., an autobiography, London. 1905, 

 p. 332. 

 ' Ibid., p. 59 fir. 

 » Ibid., p. 82. 



30 



BULLETIN 218: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THK MUSLIM OK HISTORY .XND TECHNOLOGY 



