This event was a great disappointment to all those who had filled the air with predictions of failure, and they immediately turned their attention to a general depreciation of the results attained, and the persecution, with renewed vigor, of all who were responsible for them. The first steel rails produced in America were rolled at the works of the Chicago Rolling-Mill Company (now a part of the Illinois Steel Company's plant, but then under the superintendency of O. W. Potter, Esq., late President of the Illinois Steel Company), at Chicago, on the 24th day of May, 1865. These rails were successfully rolled in a "twenty-one-inch three-high train," whose rolls were intended for rolling iron rails, and this fact is indubitable evidence of the excellent quality of the steel. There were three rails rolled on the 24th, and on the 25th three others.* Various experiments were tried to test the ductility and working qualities of the steel produced at Wyandotte; some of the early product was sent to Bridgewater, Mass., and there rolled into tack plate and cut into tacks, which were pronounced to be very much superior to any previously made of iron. In order to test the welding qualities of the steel, John Bishop, the blacksmith of the works, made a tobacco-pipe, the size of an ordinary clay pipe, the bowl and stem of which were welded up of Wyandotte steel, and when perfectly polished there was no visible evidence of a weld. I have now two jackknives and a razor made from this steel; the knives are rather soft, but the razor was used regularly by my father for fifteen years, to his entire satisfaction. When it had been shown that the pneumatic process was a qualitative success, instead of carrying out the original understanding and erecting new works arranged with especial reference to rapid and economical working, the parties in interest insisted that I should put a second converter into the experimental works, and attempt to make it a commercial success. Knowing that such an attempt could only result in utter failure, I resigned my position (June 1, 1865). Nevertheless, the proposed plan was carried out, and the works were permanently closed after about a year's unprofitable experience. While the experimental works were being constructed at Wyandotte, the firm of Winslow, Griswold & Holley was formed for the purpose of purchasing Bessemer's American patents, and manufacturing steel under them. Negotiations with Bessemer were concluded in the spring of 1864, and an experimental plant at Troy, N. Y., was started on February 16, 1865. * These rails were laid in the track of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, and it is known that they carried the traffic over ten years, but unfortunately there is no record of the time when they were taken out and discarded. It is believed that these were the first tacks made of steel. The purchase of the American patents of Bessemer by this firm at once challenged the right of the Kelly Process Company to employ the process invented by Kelly, and to the use of the apparatus invented by Bessemer; but, at the same time, the Kelly Process Company having purchased the Mushet patent for the use of spiegeleisen, was in a position to challenge the possibility of Messrs. Winslow, Griswold & Holley's making steel by the "Bessemer process" at all. The validity of the Bessemer patents for apparatus was, from the first, conceded by the Kelly Process Company, and arrangements were made, as soon as it was ascertained that they could not purchase the American patents of Bessemer, to dispense with the use of the machinery protected thereby; for they could avail themselves of that used by Kelly, which, although not nearly as convenient, was still, with some obvious improvements, capable of doing good work; or, rather, what the practice of the time called such.* In view of these facts the Kelly Process Company was clearly the master of both the legal and commercial situation; and had it been governed by an enlightened business selfishness it would have profited by the advantageous position in which (thanks to the indefatigable labors of the late Z. S. Durfee, its secretary) it was placed; but in order to do this the law had to be invoked, and to the majority of the members of the Kelly Process Company the law was a terror! Lawyers must be paid! Experts would not testify gratuitously! Costs of court would accumulate! Judges were doubtful! Jurors were uncertain! And then, if victorious, what would they gain? And if defeated, utter ruin would overwhelm them! Never before or since has a party of reputable business men been so needlessly alarmed and so utterly oblivious of the first principles of a sound business policy. The various bugaboos and hobgoblins which their terrified imagination conjured up of the horrors of the life to come among courts, judges, lawyers, experts, witnesses, and obstinate jurors, in case they ventured to assert in a court their manifest right, at last drove them into making a proposition to Messrs. Winslow, Griswold & Holley looking to a combination of the interests of the two companies, and to their final acceptance of an agreement under which they surrendered rights which were of great value to Messrs. Winslow, Griswold & Holley, and obtained practically no rights in return save that of receiving but thirty per cent of the royalties earned by the combination, and that of leaving to Messrs. Winslow, Griswold & Holley the remaining seventy per cent. *In the early days of the Bessemer process, three "blows" in ten hours was thought to be a very creditable performance, but at the present time a works that could not make that number in an hour would be regarded as a fit subject for an inquest. In the whole history of business affairs it would indeed be hard to find a more perfect illustration of "the tail waggling the dog" than this. It is only justice to the late Z. S. Durfee to say that he opposed this compromise and its unjust disposition of the rights of himself and associates with all the energy of which he was capable; and the fact that all the royalties the combination ever earned were received under the operation of an extension of the patent of William Kelly is quite sufficient to justify his business sagacity and foresight. 66 The experimental works erected by Messrs. Winslow, Griswold & Holley at Troy were used for nearly two years for the purpose for which they were designed, and their proprietors extended every facility to blast-furnace owners in all parts of the country to have their irons tried for steel;. . . many were tried and most were found wanting."* It does not appear that any effort was made to compare the chemical composition of the irons that made good steel with that of the irons that would only make bad steel; and what was "good metal" seems to have been decided by actual treatment in the converter. Notwithstanding the numerous failures in the Troy works to make good steel out of poor iron (all tending to discredit the process), there were a sufficient number of successes and enough "good metal" discovered to encourage the firm in the erection of new works (called the fiveton plant) on a manufacturing scale. January 1, 1867, the late A. L. Holley left the Troy works to take charge of works at Harrisburg, for which he had furnished the plans. For a short time after the departure of Mr. Holley the Troy works were under the charge of Mr. John C. Thompson. He was succeeded by Z. S. Durfee, who "built the forge and made some alterations both in plant and details of manufacture. Among other things, he adopted for the small or experimental plant the practice of melting the recarburizing metal in crucibles, and obtained most excellent results. . . . Mr. Durfee resigned his connection with the works in 1868, and Mr. Holley once more became the manager." Up to January, 1871, the ingots produced in these works were * Paper by R. W. Hunt, Trans. American Institute of Mining Engineers, vol. v, pp. 201-216. The phenomenal development of the "Bessemer process in America during the fifteen years preceding the death of Mr. Holley in 1882 was largely due to his efforts. For a full account of the life and labors of the late Alexander L. Holley, C. E., LL. D., the reader is referred to a memorial volume published in 1884 by the American Institute of Mining Engineers, and to an able address delivered by James Dredge, Esq., Honorary Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, in Chickering Hall, October 2, 1890, on the occasion of the unveiling of the Holley Memorial Statue, in Washington Park, New York. These works are still running, the company owning them now being known as the Troy Steel and Iron Company. either hammered in the forge, or "bloomed " from nine-inch ingots, at the Rensselaer Rolling Mill in Troy, N. Y., or the Spuyten Duyvil Rail Mill at Spuyten Duyvil, N. Y., and then rolled into rails at these establishments, but on the above date Mr. Holley had a thirty-inch blooming mill ready to run. This mill was the joint invention of James Moore, William George, and A. L. Holley, and was built by James Moore, at his Bush Hill Iron Works, Philadelphia. The mill was provided with front and back lifting tables raised by hydraulic power. The tables carried loose rolls, on which the twelve-inch ingot (heavy enough to make two rail blooms) was placed and pushed into the rolls by men. Eight men were required to attend the mill. This mill proved to be a great advance over previous practice, but in the fall of 1872 improvements were added (invented by George Fritz, of Johnstown, Pa.) which reduced the force required at the mill to three men and a boy. It is manifestly impossible in these pages to give in detail the history of the several Bessemer steel-works now in operation, and I have been thus particular in sketching at length the inception and development of the plants at Wyandotte, Mich., and Troy, N. Y., because they were the genesis of the Bessemer steel industry in America, and their history admirably illustrates the manifold obstacles which the promoters of all ultra-novel and radically revolutionary inventions have always had to encounter. well remember the sneers which greeted my statement that the time would come "when a steel rail could be made cheaper than an iron one"; and now that time having arrived, it is no small compensating satisfaction to know that the faith delivered thirty years ago to the workers at Wyandotte and Troy has expanded with the years and by "works" has been made perfect: mountains have been removed,* and the metal of their ores now in our railways binds the nation together with bars of steel, along which glide shuttle-like, to and fro, the steam-propelled carriers of the commerce of a continent; interweaving it with the warp threads of agriculture and all arts, and producing a fabric of national prosperity and happiness that shall wear through the ages and continue to clothe this people while time endures. A modern establishment for the manufacture of steel rails is vastly different from those ancient "plants" in which bar iron and iron rails were made forty years ago. Works that would turn out seventy tons per day then were thought to be remarkable both in size and in administration, but at the present time there *The "Iron Mountain" of Missouri, which at one time was supposed to be inexhaustible, has had all its ore passed through the "furnace" and converted into iron and steel; and it is only a question of a few years when other great deposits now regarded as "mountains of ore" will share the same fate. |