Part 7

These proceedings invited Robert Mushet's intervention. Still under the impression that his patent was still alive and, with Martien's, in the "able hands" of the Ebbw Vale Iron Company, he condemned Bessemer for his "lack of grace" to do him justice, and took the occasion to indict the patent system which denied him and Martien the fruits of their labors.

Ibid., pp. 78 and 177.

The Engineer found Mushet's position untenable on the very grounds he was pleading--that patents should not be issued to different men at different times for the same thing; and showed that Bessemer in his patents of January 4, 1856, and later, had clearly anticipated Mushet. In a subsequent article, The Engineer disposed of Martien's and Mushet's claims with a certain finality. The Ebbw Vale Iron Works had spent £7,000 trying to carry out the Martien process and it was unlikely that they would have allowed Bessemer to infringe upon that patent if they had any grounds for a case. Bessemer was not imitating Mushet. The latter's "triple compound" required manganese pig-iron (with a content of 2 to 5 percent of manganese) at £13 per ton while Bessemer used an oxide of manganese (at a 50 percent concentration): at £7 per ton.

The alloy of manganese and other materials now used in the atmospheric process contains 50 percent of manganese a proportion which could never be obtained from the blast furnace, owing to the highly oxidisable nature of that metal. And it is absolutely necessary, in order to apply any useful alloy of iron, carbon and manganese, in the manufacture of malleable iron and very soft steel that the manganese should be largely in excess of the carbon present.

Ibid., p. 208. There is an intriguing reference in this editorial to an interference on behalf of Martien against a Bessemer application for a U.S. patent. No dates are given and the case has not been located in the record of U.S. Patent Commissioner's decision.

Sufficient answer to Mushet was at any rate available in the fact that many hundreds of tons of excellent "Bessemer metal" made without any mixture of manganese or spiegeleisen in any form were in successful use. And, moreover, spiegeleisen was not a discovery of Robert Mushet or an exclusive product of Germany since it had been made for twenty years at least from Tow Law (Durham) ores. If Bessemer had refused Mushet a license (and this was an admitted fact), Bessemer's refusal must have been made in self-defense:

Mr. Mushet having set up a number of claims for "improvements" upon which claims, we have a right to suppose, he was preparing to take toll from Mr. Bessemer, but which claims, the latter gentleman discovered, in time, were worthless and accordingly declined any negotiations with the individual making them.

Ibid., p. 254.

Mushet's claims were by this time rarely supported in the periodicals. One interesting article in his favor came in 1864 from a source of special interest to the American situation. Mushet's American patent had been bought by an American group interested in the Kelly process at about this time, and Bessemer's American rights had also been sold to an American group that included Alexander Lyman Holley, who had long been associated with Zerah Colburn, another American engineer. Colburn, who subsequently (1866) established the London periodical Engineering and is regarded as one of the founders of engineering journalism, was from 1862 onward a frequent contributor to other trade papers in London. Colburn's article of 1864 seems to have been of some importance to Mushet, who, in the prospectus of the Titanic Steel and Iron Company, Ltd., issued soon after, brazenly asserted that, "by the process of Mr. Mushet especially when in combination with the Bessemer process, steel as good as Swedish steel" would be produced at £6 per ton. Mushet may have intended to invite a patent action, but evidently Bessemer could now more than ever afford to ignore the "sage of Coleford."

U.S. patent 17389, dated May 26, 1857. The patent was not renewed when application was made in 1870, on the grounds that the original patent had been made co-terminal with the British patent. The latter had been abandoned "by Mushet's own fault" so that no right existed to an American renewal (U.S. Patent Office, Decision of Commissioner of Patents, dated September 19, 1870).

See below, p. 45. The exact date of the purchase of Mushet's patent is not known.

Engineering, 1882, vol. 33, p. 114. The deal was completed in 1863.

The Engineer, 1864, vol. 18, pp. 405, 406.

Mining Journal, 1864, vol. 34, pp. 77 and 94 (italics supplied). It has not yet been possible to ascertain if this company was successful. Mushet writes from this time on from Cheltenham, where the company had its offices. Research continues in this interesting aspect of his career.

The year 1865 saw Mushet less provocative and more appealing; as for instance: "It was no fault of Mr. Bessemer's that my patent was lost, but he ought to acknowledge his obligations to me in a manly, straightforward manner and this would stamp him as a great man as well as a great inventor."

Mining Engineer, 1865, vol. 35, p. 86.

But Bessemer evidently remained convinced of the security of his own patent position. In an address before the British Association at Birmingham in September 1865 he made his first public reply to Mushet. In his long series of patents Mushet had attempted to secure--

almost every conceivable mode of introducing manganese into the metal.... Manganese and its compounds were so claimed under all imaginable conditions that if this series of patents could have been sustained in law, it would have been utterly impossible for to have employed manganese with steel made by his process, although it was considered by the trade to be impossible to make steel from coke-made iron without it.

The Engineer, 1865, vol. 20, p. 174.

The failure of those who controlled Mushet's batch of patents to renew them at the end of three years, Bessemer ascribed to the low public estimation to which Mushet's process had sunk in 1859, and he had therefore, "used without scruple any of these numerous patents for manganese without feeling an overwhelming sense of obligation to the patentee." He was now using ferromanganese made in Glasgow. Another alloy, consisting of 60 to 80 percent of metallic manganese was also available to him from Germany.

This renewed publicity brought forth no immediate reply from Mushet, but a year later he was invited to read a paper before the British Association. A report on the meeting stated that in his paper he repeated his oft-told story, and that "he still thought that the accident (of the non-payment of the patent stamp duties) ought not to debar him from receiving the reward to which he was justly entitled." Bessemer, who was present, reiterated his constant willingness to submit the matter to the courts of law, but pointed out that Mushet had not accepted the challenge.

Mechanics' Magazine, 1866, vol. 16, p. 147.

Three months later, in December 1866, Mushet's daughter called on Bessemer and asked his help to prevent the loss of their home: "They tell me you use my father's inventions and are indebted to him for your success." Bessemer replied characteristically:

I use what your father has no right to claim; and if he had the legal position you seem to suppose, he could stop my business by an injunction tomorrow and get many thousands of pounds compensation for my infringement of his rights. The only result which followed from your father taking out his patents was that they pointed out to me some rights which I already possessed, but of which I was not availing myself. Thus he did me some service and even for this unintentional service, I cannot live in a state of indebtedness....

With that he gave Miss Mushet money to cover a debt for which distraint was threatened. Soon after this action, Bessemer made Mushet a "small allowance" of £300 a year. Bessemer's reasons for making this payment, he describes as follows: "There was a strong desire on my part to make him (Mushet) my debtor rather than the reverse, and the payment had other advantages: the press at that time was violently attacking my patent and there was the chance that if any of my licensees were thus induced to resist my claims, all the rest might follow the example."

Bessemer, op. cit. (footnote 7), p. 294.

Ibid.

Mushet's Titanic Steel and Iron Company was liquidated in 1871 and its principal asset, "R. Mushet's special steel," that is, his tungsten alloy tool metal, was taken over by the Sheffield firm of Samuel Osborn and Company. The royalties from this, with Bessemer's pension seem to have left Mushet in a reasonably comfortable condition until his death in 1891; but even the award of the Bessemer medal by the Iron and Steel Institute in 1876 failed to remove the conviction that he had been badly treated. One would like to know more about the politics which preceded the award of the trade's highest honor. Bessemer at any rate was persuaded to approve of the presentation and attended the meeting. Mushet himself did not accept the invitation, "as I may probably not be then alive." The President of the Institute emphasized the present good relations between Mushet and Bessemer and the latter recorded that the hatchet had "long since" been buried. Yet Mushet continued to brood over the injustice done to him and eventually recorded his story of the rise and progress of the "Bessemer-Mushet" process in a pamphlet written apparently without reference to his earlier statements and so committing himself to many inconsistencies.