30 Lange, Bessemer, Goran sson and MusJict. 



down by the Metropolitan Railway Co. in 1865, ^t which 

 time the price was £1^ ^ ton. The industry was now 

 making great strides. In 1864 an American syndicate 

 bought the United States patents of Bessemer, the 

 celebrated Holley acting first as negotiator and later as 

 engineering and metallurgical expert. By 1865 the pro- 

 cess was well established on the Continent. 



The discovery of a suitable basic lining for the 

 Bessemer converter gave a great impetus to the process on 

 the Continent, as the enormous deposits of phosphoric ore 

 in Western Germany, Luxemburg, and Eastern France 

 could now be used. I have already referred to the fact 

 that dephosphorization is possible in the puddling process 

 whilst the silica lining of the Bessemer converter made 

 this impossible. Tunner, of Leoben, was the first to re- 

 commend a non-siliceous lining, but at that time none 

 could be made. Daelen, in 1873, proposed lining the con- 

 verter wath iron oxide, but the practical difficulties were 

 too great. In 1877 both Bell and Krupp took out patents 

 for purifying pig-iron by oxide of iron. Snelus had already, 

 in 1 872, pointed the way to the true solution of the problem 

 for the Bessemer process by patenting a basic lining, using 

 a mixture of lime and magnesia with a little clay and 

 oxide of iron, keeping the silica at a minimum, but it was 

 not to the interest of the Company he was then working for 

 to pursue the process. All difficulties in the way of pro- 

 ducing a stable basic lining were, however, solved by 

 Messrs. Thomas and Gilchrist in 1878, who discovered a 

 method of making basic bricks from magnesian limestone, 

 burnt at a very high temperature with aluminium silicate 

 as a sintering material. The basic Bessemer — or Thomas — 

 process, as it was called, had a swift development, and in 

 1889 the output was no less than 2,000,000 tons. 



In his letter to me of December 8th, 1894, Sir Henry 



