The Beginnings of Cheap Steel Part 5

I would say that the New England states and New York would be sold at a fair rate.... I removed from Kentucky about three years ago, and now reside at New Salisbury about three miles from Hammondsville and sixty miles from Pittsburg. Accept my thanks for your kind efforts in endeavoring to draw the attention of the community to the advantages of my process.

[109] _Ibid._, p. 310.

[110] _Ibid._, p. 343.

This letter suggests that the Kelly process had been dormant since 1858. Whether or not as a result of the publication of this letter, interest was resumed in Kelly's experiments. Captain Eber Brock Ward of Detroit and Z. S. Durfee of New Bedford, Ma.s.sachusetts, obtained control of Kelly's patent. Durfee himself went to England in the fall of 1861 in an attempt to secure a license from Bessemer. He returned to the United States in the early fall of 1862, a.s.suming that he was the only "citizen of the United States" who had even seen the Bessemer apparatus.[111]

[111] His claim is somewhat doubtful. Alexander Lyman Holley, who was later to be responsible for the design of most of the first Bessemer plants in the United States had been in England in 1859, 1860, and 1862. In view of his interest in ordnance and armor, it is unlikely that Bessemer could have escaped his alert observation. His first visit specifically in connection with the Bessemer process appears to have been in 1863, but he is said to have begun to interest financiers and ironmasters in the Bessemer process after his visit in 1862 (_Engineering_, 1882, vol. 33, p.

115).

In June, 1862, W. F. Durfee, a cousin of Z. S. Durfee, was asked by Ward to report on Kelly's process. The report[112] was unfavorable.

"The description of [the apparatus] used by Mr. Kelly at his abandoned works in Kentucky satisfied me that it was not suited for an experiment on so large a scale as was contemplated at Wyandotte [Detroit]." Since it was "confidently expected that Z. S. Durfee would be successful in his efforts to purchase [Bessemer's patents], it was thought only to be antic.i.p.ating the acquisition of property rights ... to use such of his inventions as best suited the purpose in view."

[112] W. F. Durfee: "An account of the experimental steel works at Wyandotte, Michigan," _Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers_, 1884, vol. 6, p. 40 ff.

Thus the first "Bessemer" plant in the United States came into being without benefit of a license and supported only by a patent "not suited" for a large experiment. Kelly seems to have had no part in these developments. They took some time to come to formation. Although the converter was ready by September 1862, the blowing engine was not completed until the spring of 1864 and the first "blow" successfully made in 1864. It may be no more than a coincidence that the start of production seems to have been impossible before the arrival in this country of a young man, L. M. Hart, who had been trained in Bessemer operations at the plant of the Jackson Brothers at St. Seurin (near Bordeaux) France. The Jacksons had become Bessemer's partners in respect of the French rights; and the recruitment of Hart suggests the possibility that it was from this French source that Z. S. Durfee obtained his initial technical data on the operation of the Bessemer process.[113]

[113] Research in the French sources continues. The arrival of L.

M. Hart at Boston is recorded as of April 1, 1864, his s.h.i.+p being the SS _Africa_ out of Liverpool, England (Archives of the United States, card index of pa.s.senger arrivals 1849-1891 list No. 39).

During the organization of the plant at Wyandotte, Kelly was called back to Cambria, probably by Daniel J. Morrell, who, later, became a partner with Ward and Z. S. Durfee in the formation of the Kelly Pneumatic Process Company.[114] We learn from John E. Fry,[115] the iron moulder who was a.s.signed to help Kelly, that--

in 1862 Mr. Kelly returned to Johnstown for a crucial, and as it turned out, a final series of experiments by him with a rotative [Bessemer converter] _made abroad and imported for his purpose_.

This converter embodied in its materials and construction several of Mr. Bessemer's patented factors, of which, up to the close of Mr. Kelly's experiments above noted, he seemed to have no knowledge or conception. And it was as late as on the occasion of his return in 1862, to operate the experimental Bessemer converter, that he first recognized, by its adoption, the necessity for or the importance of any after treatment of, or additions required by the blown metal to convert it into steel.

[114] Sw.a.n.k, _op. cit._ (footnote 42), p. 409.

[115] _Johnstown Daily Democrat_, souvenir edition, autumn 1894 (italics supplied). Mr. Fry was at the Cambria Iron Works from 1858 until after 1882.

Fry later a.s.serted[116] that Kelly's experiments in 1862 were simply attempts to copy Bessemer's methods. (The possibility is under investigation that the so-called "pioneer converter" now on loan to the U.S. National Museum from the Bethlehem Steel Company, is the converter referred to by Fry.)

[116] _Engineering_, 1896, vol. 61, p. 615.

William Kelly, in effect, disappeared from the record until 1871 when he applied for an extension of his patent of June 23, 1857. The application was opposed (by whom, the record does not state) on the grounds that the invention was not novel when it was originally issued, and that it would be against the public interest to extend its term.

The Commissioner ruled that,[117] on the first question, it was settled practice of the Patent Office not to reconsider former decisions on questions of fact; the novelty of Kelly's invention had been re-examined when the patent was reissued in November 1857. Testimony showed that the patent was very valuable; and that Kelly "had been untiring in his efforts to introduce it into use but the opposition of iron manufacturers and the amount of capital required prevented him from receiving anything from his patent until within very few years past." Kelly's expenditures were shown to have amounted to $11,500, whereas he had received only $2,400. Since no evidence was filed in support of the public interest aspect of the case, the Commissioner found no substantial reason for denying the extension; indeed "very few patentees are able to present so strong grounds for extension as the applicant in the case."

[117] See U.S. Patent Office, Decision of Commissioner of Patents, dated June 15, 1871.

In a similar application in the previous year, Bessemer had failed to win an extension of his U.S. patent 16082, of November 11, 1856, for the sole reason that his British patent with which it had been made co-terminal had duly expired at the end of its fourteen years of life, and it would have been inequitable to give Bessemer protection in the United States while British iron-masters were not under similar restraint. But if it had not been for this consideration, Bessemer "would be justly ent.i.tled to what he asks on this occasion." The Commissioner[118] observed: "It may be questioned whether [Bessemer]

was first to discover the principle upon which his process was founded.

But we owe its reduction to practice to his untiring industry and perseverance, his superior skill and science and his great outlay."

[118] U.S. Patent Office, Decision of Commissioner of Patents dated February 12, 1870.

Conclusions

Martien was probably never a serious contender for the honor of discovering the atmospheric process of making steel. In the present state of the record, it is not an unreasonable a.s.sumption that his patent was never seriously exploited and that the Ebbw Vale Iron Works hoped to use it, in conjunction with the Mushet patents, to upset Bessemer's patents.

The position of Mushet is not so clear, and it is hoped that further research can eventually throw a clearer light on his relations.h.i.+p with the Ebbw Vale Iron Works. It may well be that the "opinion of metallurgists in later years"[119] is sound, and that both Mushet and Bessemer had successfully worked at the same problem. The study of Mushet's letters to the technical press and of the att.i.tude of the editors of those papers to Mushet suggests the possibility that he, too, was used by Ebbw Vale for the purposes of their attacks on Bessemer. Mushet admits that he was not a free agent in respect of these patents, and the failure of Ebbw Vale to ensure their full life under English patent law indicates clearly enough that by 1859 the firm had realized that their position was not strong enough to warrant a legal suit for infringement against Bessemer. Their purchase of the Uchatius process and their final attempt to develop Martien's ideas through the Parry patents, which exposed them to a very real risk of a suit by Bessemer, are also indications of the politics in the case.

Mushet seems to have been a willing enough victim of Ebbw Vale's scheming. His letters show an almost presumptuous a.s.sumption of the mantle of his father; while his sometimes absurd claims to priority of invention (and demonstration) of practically every new idea in the manufacturing of iron and steel progressively reduced the respect for his name. Bessemer claims an impressive array of precedents for the use of manganese in steel making and, given his att.i.tude to patents and his reliance on professional advice in this respect, he should perhaps, be given the benefit of the doubt. A dispa.s.sionate judgment would be that Bessemer owed more to the development work of his Swedish licensees than to Mushet.

[119] William T. Jeans, _The creators of the age of steel_, London, 1884.

Kelly's right to be adjudged the joint inventor of what is now often called the Kelly-Bessemer process is questionable.[120] Admittedly, he experimented in the treatment of molten metal with air blasts, but it is by no means clear, on the evidence, that he got beyond the experimental stage. It is certain that he never had the objective of making steel, which was Bessemer's primary aim. Nor is there evidence that his process was taken beyond the experimental stage by the Cambria Works. The rejection of his "apparatus" by W. F. Durfee must have been based, to some extent at least, upon the Johnstown trials. There are strong grounds then, for agreeing with one historian[121] who concludes:

The fact that Kelly was an American is evidently the princ.i.p.al reason why certain popular writers have made much of an invention that, had not Bessemer developed his process, would never have attracted notice. Kelly's patent proved very useful to industrial interests in this country as a bargaining weapon in negotiations with the Bessemer group for the exchange of patent rights.

[120] Bessemer dealt with Kelly's claim to priority in a letter to _Engineering_, 1896, vol. 61, p. 367.

[121] Louis C. Hunter, "The heavy industries since 1860," in H.

F. Williamson (editor), _The growth of the American economy_, New York, 1944, p. 469.

Kelly's suggestion[122] that some British puddlers may have communicated his secret to Bessemer can, probably, never be verified.

All that can be said is that Bessemer was not an ironman; his contacts with the iron trade were, so far as can be ascertained, nonexistent until he himself invaded Sheffield. So it is unlikely that such a secret would have been taken to him, even if he were a well-known inventor.

[122] Later developed into a dramatic story by Boucher, _op.

cit._ (footnote 97).