594 REPORT— 1891. 



(3) The foregoing instances have been given to indicate the general nature of 

 metallurgical chemistry. It will be well now to show how the great advances in 

 metallurgical practice have been made in the past, with a view to ascertain 

 what principles should guide us in the future. 



It is a grave mistake to suppose that in industry, any more than in art, national 

 advance takes place always under the guidance of a master possessed of some new 

 gift of invention, yet we have been reminded that we are apt to be reverent to 

 these alone, as if the nation had been unprogressive, and suddenly awakened by the 

 genius of one man. The way for any great technical advance is prepared by the 

 patient acquisition of facts by investigators of pure science. Whether the in- 

 vestigators are few or many, and consequently whether progress is slow or rapid, 

 will depend in no small measure on the spirit of the nation as a whole. A genius 

 whose practical order of mind enables him to make some great invention suddenly 

 arises, apparently bj' chance, but his coming wUl, in most cases, be found to have 

 ' followed hard upon ' the discovery by some scientific worker of an important 

 fact, or even the accurate determination of a set of physical constants. No 

 elaborate monograph need have reached the practical man — a newspaper para- 

 graph, or a lecture at a Mechanics' Institute may have been sufficient to give 

 him the necessary impulse ; but the possessors of minds which are essentially 

 practical often forget how valuable to them have been the fragments of knowledge 

 they have so insensibly acquired that they are almost unconscious of having 

 received any external aid. 



The investigating and the industrial faculty are sometimes, though rarely, 

 united in one individual. Rapid advance is often made by those who are un- 

 trammelled by a burden of precedent, but it should be remembered that though the 

 few successes, which have been attained in the course of ignorant practice, may 

 come into prominence, none of the countless failures are seen. 



I would briefly direct attention to certain processes which have been adopted 

 since the year 1849, when Dr. Percy presided over this Section at Birmingham, 

 a great metallurgical centre. In that year the President of the Association 

 made a reference to metallurgy, a verj' brief one, for Dr. llobinson only said ' Ihe 

 manufacture of iron has been augmented si.x-fold by the use of the puddling-furnace 

 and the hot-blast, both gifts of theory ' ; and so, it may be added, are most of the 

 important processes which have since been devised. Take the greatest metallurgical 

 advance of all, the Bessemer process, which has probably done more than any 

 other to promote the material advance of all countries. It was first communicated 

 to the world at the Oheltenliam Meeting of the British Association, 1856. Its 

 nature is well known, and I need only say that it depends on the fact that when 

 air is blown through a bath of impure molten iron, sufficient heat is evolved by the 

 rapid combustion of silicon, manganese, and carbon to maintain the bath fluid 

 after these elements have been eliminated, there being no external source of heat, 

 as there is in the puddling furnace or the refinery hearth. We have recently 

 been told that at an early and perilous stage of the Bessemer process confidence in 

 the experiments was restored by the obser%'atiou that the temperature of the 

 ' blown ' metal contained in a crucible was higher than that of the furnace in which 

 it was placed. The historian of the future will not fail to record that the way for 

 the Bessemer process had been prepared by the theoretical work of Andrews, 1848, 

 and of Favre and Silbermann, 1852, whose work on the calorific power of various 

 elements showed that siUcon and phosphorus might be utilised as fuel, because 

 great heat is engendered by their combustion. 



The basic process for removing phosphorus, a process of great national import- 

 ance, the development of which we owe to Thomas and Gilchrist, is entirely the 

 outcome of purely theoretical teaching, in connection with which the names of 

 Gruner and Percy deserve special mention. In the other great group of processes 

 for the production of steel, those in which Siemens' regenerative furnace is em- 

 ployed, we have the direct influence of a highly trained theorist, who concluded 

 his address as President of this Association in 1882 by reminding us that ' in the 

 great workshop of nature there is no line of demarcation to be drawn between the 

 most exalted speculation and commonplace practice.' The recent introduction of 



