186 
PROCEEDINGS 1841 — 1848. 
accruing from the use of railway chairs made with the hot blast iron 
proved that they were much more liable to break than those manu- 
factured in the old way. Reference w^as made to the paper prepared 
by Mr. Todd and read at a meeting held at Leeds in 1841, in which 
the iron prepared with a cold blast was shown to be relatively 
much stronger than the other. Considerable discussion occurred 
on the conclusion of the paper, and considering that the quantity 
of iron produced in Great Britain had increased from 653,000 tons 
in 1830 to 1,396,000 tons in 1840, the subject was of sufficient 
importance to be adjourned to another meeting, when the whole 
question could be more fully discussed. On the 14th December, 
Mr. W. Graham communicated a paper on the same subject in 
which he contended that the iron produced by the hot blast was 
superior to that produced from the cold blast, his experiments 
being conducted on irons which had been bent until they had broken. 
Mr. Hartop contended that the paper was no answer to the one he 
had read six months before, a.nd that the cold blast irons had been 
produced at Mr. Graham's works, whilst it was a notorious fact that 
they were not capable of producing goo si qualities by that process, 
those works being essentially hot blast system. He stated that the 
iron manufacturers in the neighbourhood of Bradford and Low Moor 
had had the courage to continue to make on the cold blast system 
during a series of years of depression, the result of which was that 
the miners in the vicinity of Bradford had been nearly fully employed 
throughout the three years, while the miners in other parts of the 
iron districts were only half employed. The matter was adjourned 
to the evening meeting, and a long discussion followed on the relative 
merits of the two methods of manufacture, one party contending that 
there were plenty of purposes to which the hot blast iron might be 
applied, and it was preferable because it was cheaper ; the other con- 
tending that there was no use to which it could be put with advan- 
tage, the cheapness of production being more than counterbalanced 
by its decrease afterwards. 
At the same meeting the Rev. Dr. Scoresby, who occu- 
pied the chair, explained a practical method of determining 
the qualities of Iron and Steel, and the degrees of hardness 
