Manchester Memoirs, Vol. Ivii. (191 3), No. ll. 7 



" fellow come down from London to read a paper on the 

 "manufacture of malleable iron without fuel." 



" Oh," said Mr. Clay, " that's just where this gentleman and 

 I are going." 



The paper created the sensation that might have been 

 expected. The first speaker in the discussion was James 

 Nasmyth, who referred in glowing terms to the novelty of 

 the process, whilst he was followed by Mr. Budd, above 

 referred to, who made the amende honorable by generously 

 offering Bessemer an opportunity of testing the process 

 commercially at his ironworks free of cost. 



On August 27th, fourteen days after the publication 

 of the paper in TJie Times newspaper, the proprietors 

 of the Dowlais Iron Works, on the recommendation of 

 their chemist, Edward Riley, took out the first licence for 

 the process, and, in less than one month, sales of royalties to 

 the amount of ^27,000 had been made. Surely no other 

 invention ever so quickly revealed such visions of riches, 

 and yet, in the very hour of triumph, the elements of 

 disaster were gathering. This was due to the fact that the 

 material used by Bessemer for his first experiments, and 

 ordered by him merely as pig-iron, was supplied by some 

 London founders from a stock of good-quality grey Blaen- 

 avon iron, and, all unknowingly, suitable for the require- 

 ments of the Bessemer process, as regards the generation 

 of heat in the blowing operation. It was, therefore, 

 imagined by Bessemer and his first licensees that any 

 kind of pig-iron was suitable for the pneumatic process, 

 and the ironmakers took their own brands to experiment 

 with, not knowing that what was right for the refinery or 

 puddling furnace was wrong for converters lined with 

 silicious materials. The result was that the first licensees 

 found that all they obtained was a decarburized, rotten, 

 red- and cold-short, and, therefore, worthless material. 

 In this connection I cannot do better than quote here a 



