Kelly obtained affidavits from another seventeen witnesses. Ten of these recorded their recollections of experiments conducted in 1847. Five described the 1851 work. Two knew of or had seen both. One of the last group was John B. Evans who became forge manager of Kelly's Union Forge, a few miles from Suwanee. This evidence is of interest since a man in his position should have been in a position to tell something about the results of Kelly's operations in terms of usable metal. Unfortunately, he limits himself to a comment on the metal which had chilled around a tuyère which had been sent back to the Forge ("it was partly malleable and partly refined pig-iron") and to an account of a conversation with others who had worked some of Kelly's "good wrought iron" made by the new process.
Only one of the witnesses (William Soden) makes a reference to the phenomenon which is an accompaniment of the blowing of a converter: the prolonged and violent emission of sparks and flames which startled Bessemer in his first use of the process[99 ] and which still provides an exciting, if not awe-inspiring, interlude in a visit to a steel mill. Soden refers, without much excitement, to a boiling commotion, but the results of Kelly's "air-boiling" were, evidently, not such as to impress the rest of those who claimed to have seen his furnace in operation. Only five of the total of eighteen of the witnesses say that they witnessed the operations. Soden, incidentally, knew of seven different "air-boiling" furnaces, some with four and some with eight tuyères, but he also neglected to report on the use of the metal.
As is well known, Kelly satisfied the Acting Commissioner that he had "made this invention and showed it by drawings and experiment as early as 1847," and he was awarded priority by the Acting Commissioner's decision of April 13, 1857, and U.S. Patent 17628 was granted him as of June 23, 1857. The Scientific American sympathized with Bessemer's realization that his American patent was "of no more value to him than so much waste paper" but took the opportunity of chastising Kelly for his negligence in not securing a patent at a much earlier date and complained of a patent system which did not require an inventor to make known his discovery promptly. The journal advocated a "certain fixed time" after which such an inventor "should not be allowed to subvert a patent granted to another who has taken proper measures to put the public in possession of the invention."[100 ]
Little authentic is known about Kelly's activities following the grant of his patent. His biographer[101 ] does not document his statements, many of which appear to be based on the recollections of members of Kelly's family, and it is difficult to reconcile some of them with what few facts are available. Kelly's own account of his invention,[102 ] itself undated, asserts that he could "refine fifteen hundredweight of metal in from five to ten minutes," his furnace "supplying a cheap method of making run-out metal" so that "after trying it a few days we entirely dispensed with the old and troublesome run-out fires."[103 ] This statement suggests that Kelly's method was intended to do just this; and it is not without interest to note that several of his witnesses in the Interference proceedings, refer to bringing the metal "to nature," a term often used in connection with the finery furnace. If this is so, his assumption that he had anticipated Bessemer was based on a misapprehension of what the latter was intending to do, that is, to make steel.
This statement leaves the reader under the impression that the process was in successful use. It is to be contrasted with the statement quoted above (page 43), dated September 1856, when the process had, clearly, not been perfected. In this connection, it should be noted that in the report on the Suwanee Iron Works, included in The iron manufacturer's guide,[104 ] it is stated that "It is at this furnace that Mr. Kelly's process for refining iron in the hearth has been most fully experimented upon."
A major financial crisis affected United States business in the fall of 1857. It began in the first week of October and by October 31 the Economist (London) reported that the banks of the United States had "almost universally suspended specie payment."[105 ] Kelly was involved in this crisis and his plant was closed down. According to Swank,[106 ] some experiments were made to adapt Kelly's process to need of rolling mills at the Cambria Iron Works in 1857 and 1858, Kelly himself being at Johnstown, at least in June 1858. That the experiments were not particularly successful is suggested by the lack of any American contributions to the correspondence in the English technical journals. Kelly was not mentioned as having done more than interfere with Bessemer's first patent application. The success of the latter in obtaining patents[107 ] in the United States in November 1856, covering "the conversion of molten crude iron ... into steel or malleable iron, without the use of fuel ..." also escaped the attention of both English and American writers.
It was not until 1861 that the question arose as to what happened to Kelly's process. The occasion was the publication of an account of Bessemer's paper at the Sheffield meeting of the (British) Society of Mechanical Engineers on August 1, 1861. Accepting the evidence of "the complete industrial success" of Bessemer's process, the Scientific American[108 ] asked: "Would not some of our enterprising manufacturers make a good operation by getting hold of the [Kelly] patent and starting the manufacture of steel in this country?"
There was no response to this rhetorical question, but a further inquiry as to whether the Kelly patent "could be bought"[109 ] elicited a response from Kelly. Writing from Hammondsville, Ohio, Kelly[110 ] said, in part:
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.
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, Massachusetts, 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, assuming that he was the only "citizen of the United States" who had even seen the Bessemer apparatus.[111 ]