May 11, 1899] 
my privilege to indicate in this Address ; for your last President 
of the century, in bidding it a respectful farewell, must offer the 
best retrospective tribute he can to the grandest industry in the 
world’s history. 
This address will, therefore, be mainly devoted to the con- 
sideration of British efforts in connection with iron and steel. 
I shall hope on another occasion to pay homage to the services 
rendered in other countries to our branch of metallurgy, but in 
view of our autumn meeting last year at Stockholm, I cannot 
proceed further without making a brief reference to Sweden. 
To her scientific men our debt is great and of long standing, for 
we have profited by their labours from the eighteenth century 
until now. We appreciated the interest in our proceedings 
which was shown by the presence of His Majesty the King and | 
the Royal Princes at our meetings in the Riddarhus. The 
gracious kindness of His Majesty during the magnificent recep- 
tion at his palace of Drottningholm will never be forgotten by 
those of us who were present. The spontaneous warmth of our 
reception by the Swedish people also touched us deeply, and 
the memories of our visit will be handed down as traditions to 
future members of our Institute, who, in the days to come, 
will, we trust, again seek the aid of Sweden by supplementing 
the ores of our own possessions with those from within the 
Arctic circle. 
From the technical point of view, as the eighteenth century 
closed, a new era in the metallurgy of iron had already begun. 
Abraham Darby had successfully introduced the use of coke in 
the blast-furnace ; James Watt had, by his powerful engines, 
much facilitated the production of blast, and had greatly stimu- 
lated the out-turn of pig iron. Nevertheless, the total annual 
production of pig iron in the year 1799 did not exceed some 
£50,000 tons. From the scientific point of view the situation 
was one of singular interest. The early writers held that good 
and bad qualities might be inherent in the iron itself. Pliny 
points out how greatly the properties of iron depend upon its 
treatment, but he thought that as for the kinds of iron, they were 
many and all were distinct, and the first difference arises from 
the diversity of the soil and climate where the mines are found. 
But Pliny’s view survived far into the present century, and evi- 
dence of it lingered in the effectiveand graceful speech in which 
the Member for Merthyr proposed a vote of thanks to our first 
President on the delivery of his inaugural address. Mr, Fother- 
gill said then that ‘‘ thirty years ago the idea prevailed univers- 
ally . . . that good iren was to be found in certain localities, 
and could be procured from no other place ; it was found good 
in one place and bad in another.” He adds: ‘‘ Enlightened 
progress of the last thirty years has shown that the quality of 
tron depends upon the alloy with which it is mixed.” 
Enduring as the old view as to the influence of locality was, 
an experimental basis for a more accurate one had been estab- 
lished very shortly before the present century began, and some, 
at least, knew that the properties of iron depended on the 
presence or absence of certain other elements. This position 
was clearly established by the great Swedish chemist, Bergman 
of Upsala, who had shown that carbon is the element to which 
steel and cast iron owe their distinctive properties. He had 
initiated the employment of calorimetric methods in determining 
the properties of iron and steel. He insisted that the real diff- 
culty is to explain how it is that the presence of 0'5 per cent. of 
carbon in iron enables the metal to be hardened by quenching 
from a red heat, or, in his own expressive words, Celerum quo- 
modo dimidia centestma, plumbaginem effictens, tantant provo- 
care possit differentiam, nodus est gordius haud facile solven- 
dus. Bergman, moreover, anticipated the later phases of 
modern research by claiming that iron isa polymorphic element, 
and plays the part ef many metals. In this early view as to the 
allotropy of iron it should be remembered that in 1790 our 
countryman, James Keir, followed him closely by urging, before 
the Royal Society, that what we now call passive iron ‘‘is really 
a distinct form of iron, the alteration being produced without 
the least diminution of its metallic splendour or change of 
colour.” 
Clouet’s celebrated experiment on the carburisation of iron 
by the diamond followed. Doubts, however, were not finally 
set at rest until 1815, when Pepys, a working cutler in London, 
excluded the possibility of the intervention of furnace gas. But, 
as soon as the present century had well turned, the industrial 
world was in possession of the fundamental fact that carbon is 
the element of dominant importance in relation to the metal- 
lurgy of iron. Well might Bergman express astonishment 
NO. 1541, VOL. 60] 
NATURE 
39 
at the action of carbon on iron. Startling as the statement 
may seem, the destinies of England throughout the century, 
and especially during the latter half of it, have been mainly 
influenced by the use of steel. Her steel rails seldom contain 
more than Bergman’s half per cent. of carbon. Her ship- 
plates, on which her strength as a maritime power depends, 
contain less than half that amount. It is essential that the 
significance of this fact should be clearly understood. Our 
national existence has long depended on iron and steel. They 
have been the source of our wealth, one of the main elements 
of our strength, one cause of our maritime supremacy. Hardly 
a step of our progress or an incident of our civilisation has not, 
in one way or another, been influenced by the properties of iron 
or steel. It is remarkable that these properties have been deter- 
mined by the relations subsisting between a mass of iron, itself 
protean in its nature, and the few tenths per cent. of carbon it 
contains. These properties are, it is true, modified either by the 
simultaneous presence of elements other than carbon, or by the 
thermal or mechanical treatment of the mass. The growth of 
our knowledge of the facts constitutes a large section of our 
scientific and industrial history. The question arises—Was our 
national progress delayed by the unreadiness of the technical 
world in England to take advantage of the facts that science had 
established ? 
If we consider the position from the point of view of two re- 
markable men who were looking for the dawn of the nineteenth 
century as we are for that of the twentieth, we shall, I think, 
be satisfied that our progress received no check from failure of 
industrial workers to assimilate the teaching of science. These 
men were Black and Cort. Of the scientific men then living, 
the greatest chemist was Black, Professor at the University of 
Edinburgh, whom Lavoisier had generously acknowledged as his 
master. Black fully recognised the importance of Bergman's work, 
and on his own part insisted on the importance of what would 
now be called the change in molecular energy as the physical 
basis on which the properties of iron and steel depend. Black, 
moreover, in his public lectures gave a singularly accurate de- 
scription of the process of decarburising iron called ‘* puddling,” 
and devised by ‘‘a Mr. Cort,” with the results of whose work 
lack was soon to become familiar. Considering how recent the 
knowledge of the meaning of oxidation really was at the time, 
Black’s statements with regard to the theory of puddling are 
truly remarkable. Later on he furnished the Government with 
an elaborate report on the quality of the material obtained by 
puddling. He showed, by such mechanical tests as the experience 
of the time suggested, the superiority of puddled iron, and pointed 
out that it was more suitable than foreign iron for the appliances 
“‘on which,” as he says, ‘‘ the lives of our seamen and the safety 
of our ships have hitherto mainly depended.” 
At the end of the century we are justly proud of our colonial 
possessions, and are satisfied that the varied applications of iron 
and steel will enable us to knit together all parts of the empire. 
At the beginning of the century, Lord Sheffield, in his ‘‘ Observ- 
ations on the commerce of the American States,” writing in the 
early days of Cort’s process, shows that it would help to make 
British iron as cheap as the foreign, an event which he con- 
sidered would be more advantageous to England than the pos- 
session of her American colonies. Black died in 1799, Cort 
survived till 1800, so that as the eighteenth century closed, the 
most eminent scientific man and the foremost practical metal- 
lurgist of the generation stood side by side. To Cort we owe 
the greatest technical advance the modern world had seen ; to 
Black the recognition of the importance of molecular energy in 
relation to metallurgical problems. 
The production of pig iron in this country also received a 
great stimulus from the discovery by Mushet about the year 
1800, that the large deposits of blackband ironstone could be 
utilised. The century opened with, in round numbers, an 
annual production of pig iron not exceeding 200,000 tons, of 
which less than one-third was converted into bars and other 
descriptions of wrought iron. The capital invested was under 
five millions, and employment was furnished for nearly 200,000 
people. 
Returning to the scientific aspect disclosed at the dawn of 
the century, the year 1803 was an eventful one for science. 
Nevertheless, the impulse given to research was not in the 
most favourable direction for the advancement of metallurgic 
art. The influence of a small proportion of carbon on iron 
had been recognised, but the quantitative relation between 
the iron and the carbon was only considered as bearing on the 
