president's address — SECTION B. 77 



and a half to two hours, which could be brought to blister in the air- 

 blown Spleissofen in the same tiine as the black copper in the common 

 furnace. Incidentally, the tedious work of calcination, the circum- 

 stantial transportation of the matte to and from the roast piles, &c., 

 would be wholly avoided. 



2. A saving in fuel : this would reach 40 per cent, of the firewood 

 used in the various operations involved before. 



3. A saving in labor and wages, which would amount to about 50 

 per cent, with the new method. 



The question of the converter linings is fully gone into, and their 

 composition taken as five parts of fine crushed quartz and one part of 

 refractory clay. 



In fact, except the investigation of the gases and the thermal 

 processes implicated, the two engineers left very little unattended to. 

 Their final verdict, while unfavorable to the current production of 

 blister by the pneumatic method of Bessemerising, still must be ad- 

 mitted to be scientifically fair, and candidly favorable to the general 

 notion. To the initiated it will be apparent that there is nothing in 

 their observations which clashes with the knowledge of to-day, the 

 chemical explanations alone excepted. On the contrar}^, there is 

 scarcely a point of our moden^ ])ractice which they have not anticipated, 

 the gravest error being their condemnatory conclusion that metallic 

 copper cannot be conveniently produced. As intimated, this is solely 

 attributable to the small quantity of matte experimented upon. In 

 this connection it is interesting that precisely the same lack of apprecia- 

 tion of so simple a fact also embarrassed the more successful experi- 

 menters of a later day — not for the duration of single blows or days 

 only, but for years. These Russian pioneers, therefore, are far from 

 deserving of any imputation of superficiality in comparison. It is to be 

 regretted that the expedient of " double-banking," that is, the blow- 

 ing up of successive charges of matte for the afterblow, did not occur 

 to them, for this would have led to final success, i.e., the pouring of an 

 ample liquid bulk of black copper, instead of its adhering to the sides 

 of the vessels in a chilled condition. For this operative expedient 

 they had, of course, no precedent in steel-blowing. Their manner of 

 skimming, or, rather, of hfting the slag in chilled layers, also discloses 

 that they thought too conservatively in lines of the current practice 

 in matte-smelting. 



Aside from this point, viz.. the prejudice against blowing white 

 metal for copper, which the limited scale of experimentation is account- 

 able for, and which is, unfortunately, serious enough to deprive Semen- 

 nikow and his assistants, von Jossa and Laletin, of the priority of 

 true invention, there is, as remarked, little that present-day knowledge 

 can cavil at in their delineation of the fundamental features of the 

 process. On the contrary, certain facts are already recognised which 

 even the modern professional man is frequently none too familiar 

 with. Thus, judging from recent writers, it would almost seem as if 

 the circumstance that, during the slag-forming period, the heat is kept 

 up to a large extent by only the oxidation of the iron had been estab- 



