“The old men,” as they are frequently called in the works, appear to have had an inkling of the real nature of the process: The rising impurities and combination of opposite gases indicated by bubbles were called the “Soldier’s coming.” At any rate the Bessemer invention is an adaptation of a principle acted upon during the past century in the Shropshire ironworks. Mr. Reynolds’s patent was obtained December 6, 1799, and was stated to be for “preparing iron for the conversion thereof into steel.” In his specification he described his invention to consist in the employment of oxide of manganese in the conversion of pig-iron into malleable iron or steel, but did not enter into details as to the method he employed for carrying his invention into effect.
John Wilkinson obtained a patent January 23, 1801, for making “Pig or cast metal from ore, which when manufactured into bar-iron will be found equal in quality to any that is imported from Russia or Sweden.” The patentee states his invention to consist “in making use of manganese, or ores containing manganese, in addition to ironstone and other materials used in making iron, and in certain proportions, to be varied by the nature of such ironstone and other materials.”
Mr. Reynolds was not only a chemist, but a geologist. He succeeded in forming a collection of carboniferous fossils to which modern professors acknowledge their obligations, and which, with the additions made by Mr. William Anstice, Dean Buckland pronounced one of the finest in Europe. Other manufacturers, every day dealing with subterranean treasures that give iron in abundance, were as dwellers amid the ruins of some ancient city, taking down structures of the builders of which and of the history of which they were ignorant. With him minerals had an interest beyond their market value. Coal and ore from the dusky mine, raised at so much per ton, were not minerals merely, but materials prepared to his hand by Nature. He detected traces of that venerable dame’s cast-off garments in one; the others were fabrics, the result of processes as varied as his own, the produce of machinery more wonderful and powerful than that he was about to employ in converting them to the general uses and purposes of mankind. His pit-shafts to him were mere inlets to the deep storehouse of the globe where Providence had treasured means whereby to enrich future inhabitants of the surface. Geology as a science, ’tis true, was but beginning to shed its light on the cosmogony of the world; endeavours to make out a connected history of the earth from examinations of the structure itself were deemed strange; and the more intelligent of his contemporaries, who without hesitation adopted speculations daring and beyond the province of human intellect, looked coldly upon his labours. The old workmen to whom he offered premiums for the best specimens could not for the life of them make out the meaning of his morning visits to the mines, his constant inquiries respecting fossils, his frequent hammering at ironstone nodules, his looking inside them and loading his pockets with them—seeing that he did not confine attention to those that seemed likely to make good iron. Some considered it to be one of the good old Quaker’s eccentricities, and did not forget when he turned his back to point to their heads, intimating that “all was not right in his upper garrets.” Others, knowing that he sometimes used the blow-pipe and tried experiments in his laboratory, believed his aim to be to extract “goold,” as they said, from the stone—a supposition to which the presence of iron pyrites gave some degree of colouring. One fine morning, in particular, as flitting gleams of sunshine came down to brighten young green patches of copse and meadow, telling of returning spring, a group of his men were seated with bottle and tot, drinking the cuckoo’s foot-ale, when, “Here comes Measter William, here comes Old Broadbrim,” it was said, “with his pecker in his pocket, fatch the curiosities from the crit.” Mr. Reynolds was not very well pleased, for large orders were in the books unexecuted, and coal and ore could not be got fast enough. Every engine had its steam up; but not a beam-head or pulley creaked or stirred. One or two bands of workmen had gone down, but had come up again. The cuckoo’s voice that morning for the first time had been heard, and it was more potent than the master’s; for it was the custom, and had been from time immemorial, to drink his foot-ale, and to drink it out of doors; and the man was fined, who proposed to deviate from custom by drinking it in-doors. On May Day too it was the custom, as it now is, to gather boughs or sprigs of the birch, with its young and graceful fronds, and mount them on the engines, the pit heads, and cabins, and on the heads of horses, to proclaim the fact that we had entered upon the merry, merry month of May.
Mr. Reynolds was generally pleased with meeting his men, and would readily enter into their whims, and turn such interviews to account. By such means he often obtained from them a knowledge of their wants, and received hints and suggestions that aided him in carrying out improvements in the works. The same disruption of social ties did not then exist as now; that mutual relation that beautified the olden time, and gave men and master an interest in each others welfare existed. A master, then, was more like the chief of a tribe, the father of a family; he had generally sprung from the ranks, he felt himself to be of the same flesh and blood, removed only a little by circumstances, and bound by a community of interest. Money-making had not then been reduced to a science, nor men to machines. With some degree of pride the men laid their stony treasures at the master’s feet. There were amongst them what the colliers call millers’ thumbs, horses’ hoofs, snails’ houses, “shining scales,” “crucked screws,” “things-like-leaves, and rotten wood.” “You should have heard,” said an old sage, “Mr. Reynolds give a description of them, and have seen the effect upon his audience. If I remember rightly, millers’ thumbs were orthoceratites, shells—as the name implies—like horns, but not pointed, and having several air-chambers. Horses’ hoofs, were portions of others, coiled, and spiral—that could float on the water, sink to the bottom, or rise to the surface, by a peculiar mechanical apparatus—like the forcing pump of a steam engine. The shining scales, were scales of fish coated with armour, hard as flint, and furnished with carvers to cut up the smaller fry on which they fed.” He showed that the nodules of ironstone contained exact impressions of leaves and fruits that grew beneath the golden beams of a tropical sun; that the bits called rotten wood were really wood, showing the beautiful anatomy of the tree, that it had been water-worn by being carried down the dancing stream into the soft and yielding mud in which it ultimately sank and was preserved. Coal, he explained, was nothing more than the vegetation of former periods, which accumulated where it grew, or was swept down by rains or streams into beds where it was hermetically sealed, fermented, and converted into mineral fuel for future use. “Lord, sir,” said our informant, “you should have seen how they all stared. Flukey F’lyd, one of the butties of Whimsey pit, said he little thought they were working in the gutters, or grubbing in the mud-banks of slimy lakes of a former world; he had seen stems of trees and trunks in the roof, but he thought they had got there at the Flood, and turned to stone. Gambler Baugh, of the Sulphur pit, said he thought the coal had been put there at the creation, and was intended to be used to burn up the world at the last day; and that he sometimes considered it a wrong thing to get it, believing they ought to use wood, and concluded by inviting the Governor to ‘wet,’ as he said, ‘the other eye, by taking another tot.’ The company drank his health, his long life and happiness, and exclaimed—’who’d have thought it.’” “Aye, who would have thought it,” continued Mr. Reynolds, warming with his subject, “when the first iron mine was tapped that in the slime and mud of those early times, now hardened into stone lay coiled up a thousand conveniences of mankind; that in that ore lay concealed the steam-engines, the tramways, the popular and universal metal that in peace and war should keep pace with and contribute to the highest triumphs of the world.” Upon such occasions questions of improvement, invention, adaptation, &c., &c., would often be freely discussed, and we have it upon the authority of some of the old workmen that many of the achievements in engineering we applaud in the present day, were the result of such suggestions in part.
Nothing, in fact, was known about iron ore, iron making and machinery, but what he knew or else took steps to acquaint himself with, if he had the opportunity. We have a number of large foolscap MS. volumes of experiments and extracts neatly copied, with pen and ink drawings of machines, parts of machines, &c.; shewing that whilst Smeaton and Watt were engaged in perfecting the construction of the steam engine, Mr. Reynolds was endeavouring to apply it to purposes similar to those to which it is now applied as a locomotive. Thus he constructed a locomotive with a waggon attached, the cylinder and boiler of which are still preserved. An accident, we believe a fatal one, which happened to one of the men upon starting the engine led Mr. Reynolds to abandon the machine; but he by no means lost faith in the invention. On the contrary, he was wont to say to his nephew, the late William Anstice, father of the present Mr. Reynolds Anstice, “I may never live to see the time, but thee may, William, when towns will be lighted by gas instead of oil and candles, when vessels will be driven without sails, and when carriages will travel without horses.”
This was before Trevithic invented a machine which travelled at a slow rate with heavy loads on a railway at Merthyr. It was prior to 1787, when Symington exhibited his model steam carriage in Edinburgh, and to the time when Darwin, (1793), with equal poetry and prophecy, wrote—
“Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car.”
Mr. Reynolds indeed contemplated, it is believed, a subterranean tram road from the banks of the Severn right up into the heart of the iron districts of Ketley and Donnington Wood, upon which his engine was to travel, but the prejudice against the scheme was so great, and the jury empanelled to inquire into the nature of the accident inflicted such an enormous fine to be enforced every time the engine was used, that it was abandoned. There are also a pair of partially rotatory brass cylinders in existence which Mr. Reynolds intended as models for a boat on the Severn. This was before Shropshire generally, and the iron districts more particularly, had begun to participate in the advantages of still-water communication. With the superior advantages of railways, it is difficult to appreciate the full benefit of such communication for manufacturing and agricultural purposes at that time in inland counties like our own. Mr. Reynolds however, with full faith in the future development of the powers of steam by means of improved machinery, took great pains to extend and perfect canal navigation, and his name is associated with every important work of improvement in the district during the latter end of the last and the beginning of the present centuries, and especially with a very ingenious contrivance by means of which the inequalities of surface were overcome, and the old-fashioned locks were dispensed with.
Mr. Reynolds commenced his canal for the conveyance of minerals from Oakengates and Ketley in 1788; and shortly after its completion an Act of Parliament was obtained for one from Donnington Wood which, forming a junction therewith, was to proceed along the high ground above Coalbrookdale, on one hand, and Madeley and Coalport on the other. The difference of level was 73 feet in one case and 207 feet in the other. Telford, speaking of the difficulties to be encountered from the nature of the country, says:
“The inequality of the ground and the want of sufficient water seemed insuperable, and might probably have been so for ages to come had not Mr. William Reynolds, of Ketley, whose character is too well known to need any eulogium, discovered the means of overcoming them. Having occasion to improve the method of conveying ironstone and coals from the neighbourhood of Oakengates to the ironworks at Ketley, these materials lying generally about the distance of a mile and a half from the ironworks, and 73 feet above their level, he made a navigable canal, and instead of descending in the usual way by locks, contrived to bring the canal forward to an abrupt part of the bank, the skirts of which terminated on a level with the ironworks. At the top of this bank he built a small lock, and from the bottom of the lock, and down the face of the bank, he constructed an inclined plane, with a double iron railway. He then erected an upright frame of timber, in which was fixed a large wooden barrel. Round the latter a rope was passed that led to a moveable frame, the frame being of a sufficient size to receive a canal boat, resting and preserved in nearly a horizontal position, by having two large wheels before and two small ones behind—varying as much in the diameters as the inclined plane varied from a horizontal plane. This frame being placed in the lock, the loaded boat was brought to rest upon it. The lock gates were shut, the water was drawn from the lock into a side-pond, the boat settled upon a horizontal wooden frame, and—as the bottom of the lock was formed with nearly the same declivity as the inclined plane—upon the lower gates being opened, the frame with the boat passed down the iron railway into the lower canal, which had been formed on a level with the Ketley ironworks, being a fall of 73 feet. A double railway having been laid upon the inclined plane, the loaded boat in passing down brought up another boat containing a load nearly equal to one-third part of that which passed down. The velocity of the boats was regulated by a break acting upon a large wheel, placed upon the axis on which the ropes connected with the carriages were coiled.”