Sept. 1, 1870] 
NATURE 
368 
PAPERS ON IRON AND STEEL 
1.—A VERY COSTLY AND VEXATIOUS FALLACY 
IL. 
FE HE greatest enemy to steel is phosphorus; one-tenth 
per cent. is sufficient to produce serious deterioration, 
and even to render the harder varieties of steel utterly 
worthless. As our common English pig-iron is made from 
clay iron-stones, many of the nodules of which contain, as 
nuclei or otherwise, the remains of fishes and other animal 
matter, they are exceptionally rich in phosphorus ; and 
thus all the difficulties of steel-making are greatly in- 
creased in this country. There are few results in con- 
nection with the progress of British industry of which we 
have better reason to be proud than our pre-eminence as 
steel-makers, in spite of the greatest natural disadvantages ; 
and thisis the more remarkable from the fact that so great 
a triumph has been gained by illiterate men who have 
achieved it by following out with a remarkably. sound 
though unaided sagacity the strict method of true 
Baconian inductive investigation. Whenever I meet a 
formulating book-stuffed pedant, I love to tell him of the 
great unconsidered fact, that while the learned men of the 
middle ages were muddling their intellects with worthless 
‘disputations, the artizans of that period were true induc- 
tive philosophers, and that the revival of science only 
commenced when the men of the universities adopted the 
method which had always been followed by the men of 
the workshop. 
If the men of the universities have outstripped the men 
of the workshop in recent times, itis simply due to the 
fact that science has kept systematic record of its achieve- 
ments, by means of which each worker has the full benefit 
of the labours of his precedessors and fellow-workers, and 
‘is able to start from the point where these left off ; where- 
as the workshop observers and experimentalists have 
worked with little or no systematic co-operation, If such 
co-operation only among one set of investigators has done 
so much, what may we not expect when it shall not only 
be extended to the other, but when both sections shall 
co-operate with each other, This technical and scientific 
co-operation is the great want of the present age. The 
artizan needs scientific education, and the professors of 
science have much to learn from the great mass of facts 
included in the practical experience of the workshop. 
But I must not at present be carried further away into 
this tempting digression, but return to my main subject 
‘by anticipating an objection which will probably be made. 
The manufacture of puddled steel may be supposed to 
refute all I have said respecting the impracticability of 
producing steel directly from English pig-iron. If steel 
fit for the manufacture of files, chisels, &c., could be made 
from ordinary English pig-iron by this process, all my 
statements certainly would be refuted, for puddled steel is 
simply made by checking the oxidation and arresting it 
at such a point that some of the carbon in the pig-iron 
shall remain unburnt. 
The facts connected with the manufacture of puddled 
steel which bear upon the present subject, are as follows : 
First, puddled steel of merchantable quality cannot be 
made at all from common English pig-iron. Second, the 
manufacture of puddled steel has been much more suc- 
cessful on the Continent than in England. Third, only 
mild steel and that of an inferior quality is made by this 
process from English iron. 
Referring to the first fact, 1 may mention that there is 
a great deal of mystery, and there have been a great 
many failures and much waste of labour, fuel, and iron in 
carrying out this process in England. In many forges 
where it has been tried it is now altogether abandoned, 
and where it is carried on with any degree of success 
‘there is usually much secresy maintained. Now the 
mystery is not in the puddling, as the necessary modifica- 
tions in the supply of cinder and the working of the 
damper are well understood, and have been sufficiently 
explained in the specifications of abandoned patents and 
otherwise. The secret part of this process is in the selec- 
tion of the pig-iron, or rather of the “ blend” of pig-irons, 
for it is found that a mixture of certain brands of pig-iron 
is better than any single brand used alone, : 
My own experience in connection with this subject has 
been very interesting, and is, I think, worthy of record. 
When engaged as chemist in the works of Sir John 
Brown and Co. of Sheffield, I made careful analyses of 
all the numerous brands of pig-iron that are used for 
various purposes in these works, These I tabulated and 
kept continually before me, in order to compare their com- 
position with the special uses to which they were applied, 
and the properties which they, or the material made from 
them, exhibited, The manager of the iron department 
was arcmarkable example of one of those self-taught, un- 
conscious Baconian philosophers I have above alluded to, 
He has, during many years, been observing, experiment- 
ing, and generalising his inductions consisting of a code of 
original rules for the manufacture of iron suitable for 
various purposes. Like the man who had talked prose 
all his life without knowing it, he has been following 
strictly the injunctions of the ‘‘ Novum Organon ” in dis- 
covering the best “blends” of pig-iron for manufacturing 
respectively armour-plates, rails, boiler-plates, angle 
irons, &c,, &c.; and among his other mysteries were 
certain blends for making puddled steel. These he calls 
his “steel-irons.” He selected these, like all the others, 
without having, or pretending to haye, any knowledge of 
their chemical composition, ~ P 
Ty quite a different path, z.e. upon purely theoretical 
chemical grounds, I had determined that certain brands 
among those I had analysed were the best fitted for making 
puddled steel, and was anxious to yerify my theory, To 
have asked directly for a revelation of the iron manager’s 
secrets would have been unreasonable, and therefore I 
simply gave him a statement of the analyses of these par- 
ticular brands all arranged together, and called them 
“steel-irons,” adding that for the best work I supposed 
that he mixed with them a proportion of a certain foreign 
brand; ‘Hush, don’t talk so loud; I don’t want these 
fellows to hear you, Who told you that I use these?” 
was the substance of Mr. Jevons’s reply. My theoretical 
and his practical selection proved to be exactly the same 
in result. He had selected just those particular pigs which 
contained the smallest per-centage of phosphorus, and 
which relatively to their carbon contained the smallest 
proportion of silicon, 
But this was not all, I had just concluded a number of 
experiments made for the express purpose of determining 
the function of manganese in the manufacture of iron and 
steel, and had come to the conclusion that its usefulness de- 
pends upon its readily oxidising, even before all the car- 
bon is oxidised, and thereby affording a base with which 
the silica could unite and form a liquid and readily fusible 
silicate. Now this is just what is wanted in making 
puddled steel, and hence I suggested the addition of the 
highly manganiferous foreign ore, He had recently dis- 
covered that it did just what I expected, and supposed 
that his discovery was quite new, Such, however, was 
not the case, for this, like so many other trade mysteries, 
had been independently discovered by a number of other 
practical investigators, 
The foreign manganiferous metal referred to is Spie- 
geleisen, Dr. Percy says “Spiegeleisen has been found 
admirably suited for the production of puddled steel of the 
best quality, and accordingly it is largely used for this 
purpose,” Now spiegeleisen is remarkably free from 
those impurities which, as I have stated, cannot be removed 
from common English pig-iron without also taking out 
the carbon. I find that the average proportion of silicon 
to carbon in English pigs is about three-fourths ; in spie- 
