OBITUARIES, FOREIGN. (BADEX-POWEL^ BESSEMER.) 



583 



States in company with Wilhelm Liebknecht, and 

 lectured in the principal cities. He left his wife 

 in England, and was accompanied by Eleanor Marx 

 (daughter of Karl), who was an effective public 

 speaker as well as an attractive woman, and was 

 very earnest in disseminating her father's ideas. 

 His wife died, and in 1898 he married again, where- 

 upon Miss Marx committed suicide. It was said 

 that Aveling procured the poison for her, and there 

 was to be a legal investigation, but his own death, 

 from natural causes, followed so soon as to pre- 

 vent it. 



Baden-Powell, Sir George S., an English econ- 

 omist, born in Langton, Kent, in 1847 ; died in 

 London, Nov. 20, 1898. He was educated at St. 

 Paul's School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he 

 was graduated with honor in 1876, became private 

 secretary to the Governor of Victoria, special com- 

 missioner to the West Indies in 1882, Sir Charles 

 Warren's assistant in Bechuanaland in 1884, a mem- 

 ber of the Malta Commission in 1887, Bering Sea 

 Commissioner in 1891, and member of the joint 

 commission at Washington in 1892. He represented 

 .a division of Liverpool in Parliament from 1885. 

 He published " New Homes for the Old Country," 

 " Absorption of Small States by Large," " Protec- 

 tion and Bad Times," " State Aid and State Inter- 

 ference," and numerous articles on colonial, finan- 

 cial, and economic subjects. 



Ball, John Thomas, an Irish jurist, born in 

 Dublin in 1815; died in Dundrum, March 17, 1898. 

 He was graduated from the University of Dublin 

 in 1836, was called to the Irish bar in 1840, attained 

 a high reputation in the equity and common law 

 courts and as a civilian in the ecclesiastical courts, 

 and was made Queen's advocate in 1865. In that 

 year he was defeated as the Liberal candidate for 

 Parliament in the representation of the University 

 of Dublin, but in 1868 he was elected by the votes 

 of Conservatives who wished to secure his services 

 in defense of the Irish Church, then threatened with 

 disestablishment. Mr. Disraeli, on becoming Prime 

 Minister, appointed Dr. Ball Solicitor-General, and 

 .afterward Attorney-General. Mr. Gladstone soon 

 returned to power and carried through his Irish 

 Church bill, which Dr. Ball from the front bench of 

 the Opposition succeeded in having modified in 

 some important particulars. Lord Beaconsfield re- 

 appointed him Attorney-General in 1874, and in 

 tne following year made him Lord Chancellor of 

 Ireland, which office he held till Mr. Gladstone re- 

 turned in 1880. 



Barrow, John, an English author, born in 1808 ; 

 died at Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, in December, 

 1898. He was a son of Sir John Barrow, the arctic 

 explorer, and was himself a noted traveler, but 

 usually in more temperate regions than those af- 

 fected by his father. His published works com- 

 prise " Excursions in the North of Europe " (1835) ; 

 ' Visit to Iceland " (1835) ; " Tour around Ireland " 

 <1836) ; " Tour in Austria, Lombardy, Bavaria, etc." 

 (1840) ; " Memoir of Sir John Barrow " ; " Life of 

 Sir Francis Drake " (1843) ; " The Naval Worthies 

 of Elizabeth's Reign " (1845) ; " Life of Admiral Sir 

 William Sydney Smith " (1848) ; " Expeditions on 

 the Glaciers" (1864); and "Mountain Ascents in 

 Westmoreland and Cumberland " (1886). 



Beardsley, Aubrey, an English artist, died in 

 Mentone, March 16, 1898. Without receiving a reg- 

 ular artistic training, he developed a genius in 

 black and white, a faculty for weaving a pattern 

 with the pen, a power in the treatment of the line 

 partaking of the qualities of Japanese art, an imag- 

 inative and grotesque symbolism and weird fantas- 

 tic idealism that were peculiarly his own and had a 

 far-reaching influence on contemporary art, not 



'one in England, but in Germany, Austria, and the 





United States. His work was first seen in the 

 "Yellow Book" and the " Savoy Magazine," after 

 which he illustrated books of poetry and gave direc- 

 tion to the development of art in the production of 

 advertising posters, analogous to the work of French 

 artists who likewise had drawn inspiration from the 

 Japanese. 



Bessemer, Sir Henry, an English inventor, born 

 in Charlton, Hertfordshire, Jan. 19, 1813 ; died in 

 London, March 15, 1898. He was the son of an 

 artist who was a member of the French Academy. 

 All his life he was a prolific and assiduous inventor. 

 One of his first successful inventions was gold paint, 

 which he compounded with his own hands in his 

 house at St. Pancras in order to keep the process 

 secret. At the time of the Crimean War, when the 

 study of guns and projectiles engaged the attention 

 of many ingenious minds, he worked on a method 

 of giving a rotary motion to the shot without rifling 

 the barrel. This attracted the attention of the Em- 

 peror Louis Napoleon, but the results that he ob- 

 tained only convinced him that it would be useless 

 to work on projectiles until guns could be made 

 stronger and better. Therefore he gave himself up 

 to the study of gun metal, erecting shops at St. 

 Pancras in which to carry on his experiments. 

 Abandoning all other business, at the end of two 

 years he struck upon the central principles of the 

 Bessemer process for converting cast iron into cast 

 steel. Before that the decarbonization of iron 

 could only be effected by the tedious, difficult, and 

 unhealthf ul process of puddling, which consisted in 

 turning and kneading great molten masses at the 

 end of long rods until every part was exposed to the 

 air. Bessemer's idea was to force a blast of air 

 through the molten metal until it was sufficiently 

 decarbonized. After he had read a paper before the 

 British Association in 1856 descriptive of his pro- 

 cess, a number of firms bought the right to use it, 

 but it was not yet perfect, and after others, who had 

 experimented on what they supposed to be his meth- 

 od, had pronounced it a failure, they took no pains 

 to apply and develop the invention. He, however, 

 set to work to remove its defects, and after two 

 more years of costly experimentation, he produced 

 steel that could not be distinguished from that made 

 by the old process. The ironmasters declined to 

 give any more attention to the subject, having made 

 up their minds that the invention was a failure. 

 Finding no one willing to take it up, he determined 

 to go into the manufacture himself. His steel 

 works were built at Sheffield, and gradually the 

 product was brought upon the market, until the 

 steelmakers of Sheffield suddenly became aware that 

 they were being undersold 20 a ton, and rushed to 

 obtain licenses at a higher price than was demanded 

 before. At the same time the manufacturing busi- 

 ness of Henry Bessemer & Co. went on, pay- 

 ing in profits six times the invested capital every 

 year of the fourteen during which the partnership 

 existed. In royalties the inventor received over 

 1,000,000. Martien's patent, which covered a pro- 

 cess similar to his, though proceeding from a false 

 theory, he bought up, and Mushet's idea of restor- 

 ing carbon with manganese to the completely decar- 

 bonized iron by mixing spiegeleisen with it he made 

 use of, and acknowledged by paying an annual al- 

 lowance to that inventor, although his suggestion 

 was not patentable. In 1865 he showed at the meet- 

 ing of the British Association samples of steel that 

 he made with recarbonization or the admixture of 

 manganese by arresting the process of decarboniza- 

 tion at exactly the right stage. Bessemer was an 

 adept in hydraulics, as he used delicate hydraulic 

 machinery "in moving the great vessels of molten 

 iron, and in his earlier experiments on projectiles he 

 had employed hydraulic power to shape the shot. 



