B.—CHEMISTRY. 61 
purposes, by specifyig the conditions of their acceptance: standards 
established by the Government, often based on inquiry and experiment, 
gave confidence to other users and resulted in the improvement of industrial 
materials. 
Although iron-making had flourished intermittently since the Roman 
occupation, and had reached considerable proportions under Elizabeth, 
no great contribution to knowledge can be attributed to Great Britain in 
the progress of metallurgy until the restriction of the cutting down of 
timber for charcoal towards the end of the sixteenth century forced into 
consideration the use of coal for smelting, the pioneer work being that of 
Dud Dudley, who in 1642 cast iron cannon at his foundries for the Royalist 
troops. It was his experience as an Admiralty official that brought ‘Cort, 
more than 100 years later, to recognise the inferiority of English wrought 
iron, and to leave the Service for the purpose of improving existing processes 
so that his successful wrought iron was accepted towards the end of the 
eighteenth century for anchors and iron work in the Royal Navy. His 
invention of the puddling process led to great prosperity in the iron trade. 
The need to meet Government requirements became similarly urgent 
in the case of steel, which in its earlier production as puddled steel so failed 
in uniformity of composition that as a material of construction it could 
not be used by the Admiralty, nor permitted by the Board of Trade. 
Bessemer’s great advance of converting molten iron cast into steel by 
blowing air through it, described in 1856 to this Association, enabled him 
to propose a material more suitable for guns and projectiles than the cast 
iron thenemployed. Bessemer steel came into use for many purposes, 
and its production increased rapidly, but boiler plates submitted to the 
Admiralty still showed great variations in carbon content. Meanwhile 
the rival open-hearth process was steadily developed and established 
by Siemens. In 1875 the Director of Naval Construction had pointed 
to the danger due to lack of uniformity of steel made by the converter 
process, but in 1879 he was able to report the success of the new open-hearth 
steel. The Government challenge had been taken up by Siemens, who 
produced a steel to meet all its specifications, so causing its acceptance 
for Admiralty work, and its admission by the Board of Trade for structural 
use. 
After Thomas and Gilchrist had in 1877 solved the problem of dephos- 
phorising iron by the basic process, the Admiralty instituted an inquiry 
as to its properties, which led to an official recognition of basic steel, thus 
greatly enlarging the source of supply through the use of native ores. 
Among the men who assisted the Government in these inquiries was 
Dr. Percy, who placed metallurgy in this country on a scientific basis, 
while lecturing on that subject at the Royal School of Mines and at the 
Ordnance College. Abel, appointed War Department Chemist in 1854, 
gave much attention to the use of iron and steel for military purposes, 
investigating the question of erosion of guns and throwing new light on 
the constitution of steel by his isolation of Fe,C. He did good service in 
convincing the great ironmasters of the importance of chemistry in their 
industry. To Roberts-Austen also, Chemist and Assayer to the Mint, 
many Government inquiries and commissions were indebted for advice 
on the subjects he had enriched by his researches, such as the physical 
constants and mechanical properties of metals, the effect of impurities, 
