PEESIDENT's address — SECTION B. 69 



furnace, for the purpose of getting rid of the sulphur in the roasting 

 process." This is imperfect chemistry, for a desulphurisation could 

 not, under the circumstances, be effected without a simultaneous 

 oxidation of the iron. But the remark goes to demonstrate that this 

 fact was not taken into account, and that the Keats patent is not a 

 valid precursor of either the HoUway process for treating pyritic ores, 

 nor of the so-called Mnnhes process for treating mattes. 



A few days later, on October 18th, 1856, Isham Baggs patented 

 a method in which he proposed to smelt the ore raw, or after calcina- 

 tion, draw off the slag, and then inject a current of air, oxygen, or 

 other gas into the metal bath. Next in order are patents by Glass, 

 in 1862, pertaining to the similar pneumatic treatment of antimony 

 ores. In France Leclerc, about the same time, patented the treatment 

 of arsenical and antimonial copper ores by the injection of air, and then 

 of steam, to refine the metal, and remove arsenic and antimony. 



The above appei^r to be the earliest attempts to apply the Besse- 

 mer method to copper materials. To follow this particular line of 

 mere ideas further would serve no purpose. But little success can have 

 attended these patents in practice, as none of the proposals have sur- 

 vived. There was no prominent practical suggestion, embodying the 

 true pneumatic principle, submitted to the copper industry for some 

 time after 1856, a state of suspense which the prejudice created by . 

 Bessemer's own tribulations with his steel process no doubt was largely 

 resjionsible for. 



A decade after Bessemer's original patent, however, we finally 

 find the pneumatic principle begin to take root in a manner which led 

 to more permanent things, of which the first expression is contained 

 in an American patent taken out in 1865, by A. Raht, in Tennessee, 

 for the treatment of copper mattes in a Bessemer converter. Un- 

 fortunately this idea was not put into effect on an efficient scale, for 

 want of capital, and it remains merely a nominal precursor of the 

 present practice. The year after, in 1866, the celebrated Austrian 

 Rittinger experimented on a working scale with the enrichment of 

 mattes by rapid oxidation. He again only used a curved hollow 

 rabble, sunk into molten matte in a reverberatory furnace, but — a 

 new point — -with the simultaneous addition of quartz sand for the 

 scorification of the iron. This is the first positive appearance of the 

 important feature of an intentional slagging of the ferruginous base. 

 After this preUminary enrichment was completed the regulus was to 

 be roasted to blister in the usual way, and the refining finished in the 

 same furnace. The experiments, then interrupted by war. were re- 

 peated by Rittinger at SclimoUnitz, Hungary, in 1871, but remained 

 inconclusive, because of the insufficiency of the blast at his disposal, 

 which did not create a proper energy and intensity of reaction. How- 

 ever, several calcinations and fusions of the matte were avoided and 

 saved, and the black copper staore was sooner reached. (7) 



An interesting patent of about this time is that of Dixon, January, 

 1869. It refers to the employment of a blast furnace, similar to a pig- 



{g) Oesterr. Zeitschr. f. B.-u. H., 1872. 



