170 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
manufacture were, there could never have been a universal development 
of rail traction if it had depended upon material made in sucha way. We 
are especially interested in the manner the growing demand was met, 
for it was at the Cheltenham Meeting of the Association in 1856 that 
Bessemer made public the invention he had already been working on 
for two years, and which was to insure a cheap method of production 
of a material so essential to transport. One should mention with 
Bessemer the name of Mushet, whose work helped so materially in 
getting rid of the red shortness which in the early days gave such trouble. 
We are apt at the present day, I am afraid, to somewhat belittle the 
work of Bessemer in view of the more improved methods now employed, 
but his name must for ever stand out as the one which made cheap 
transport possible. After the use of manganese in one form or the 
other as a deoxidiser and a ‘ physic’ for sulphur, there, however, still 
remained the baneful effect, due to phosphorus, which prevented the 
use of the ores of more general occurrence. There have been few more 
epoch-making announcements made at meetings of technical subjects— 
although this was not appreciated at the time by many of the audi- 
ence—than S. G. Thomas’s announcement of the discovery of the ‘ basic ’ 
process, which he made at the meeting of the Iron and Steel Institute in 
March 1878. I say advisedly that many did not appreciate the news, 
for an old friend of mine who was present was impressed by the earnest- 
ness of the remarks of Thomas and the little notice taken of the short 
statement made. His work, associated with that of his cousin, Gilchrist, 
was the result of close scientific research. E, 
Another investigation which has given great results in transport has 
been the ever-growing use of alloy steels. For the scientific inception 
of these we owe a great debt to Sir Robert Hadfield, whose inventive 
genius and scientific mind are still active in that field he has made so 
particularly his own. His first investigations materially affect transport 
to-day. It is true that Mushet had previously worked on self-hardening 
tool-steel containing tungsten, but the work was carried out only on a 
small scale. In 1882 Hadfield had produced manganese steel.* This 
is a most remarkable product with its great toughness, and is exten- 
sively used for railway and tramway crossings, where resistance to 
abrasion is of great value. This was the first of that very remarkable 
series of alloys about which I must say a few words, for they have made 
possible the motor-car and the aeroplane as we have them to-day. 
Continuing his investigations, in 1889 Hadfield produced the compound 
of iron and silicon* known as low hysteresis steel. Indirectly this is 
of the greatest interest from a transport standpoint, as when used in 
transformers it not only reduces the hysteresis losses, but allows of a 
considerable saving in the weight of core material. 
From these early uses of alloy steels there has grown up a large 
number of various alloys, many of which are of the very greatest use 
for various transport purposes. It is not too much to say that the 
modern aeroplane is the result of the material now at the designers’ 
disposal both for the engine and for the structure itself. The strength 
2 Inst. of Civil Engineers, vol. 93, 1888. 
3 Iron and Stecl Institute, p. 222, Pt. IT, 1889. 
