The importance of the discovery, Jif confirmed, to engineers and to the public, is so great that, at the risk of being wearisome, it is desirable to emphasize certain facts in connexion with it:—(1) Ordinary Bessemer steel, because of the impurities contained in the metal, wears badly and irregularly. Hard steels have an infinitely longer life, can be made to bear the same strains with very much less content of material, and thus, in view of the increased cost of production, the material for rails, girders, motor-cars, etc., etc., can be supplied to do the ordinary work ab a greatly reduced cost.
(2) The country that is able to produce high-grade steel at, roughly, the cost of ordinary steel will benefit by an immensely increased output, and will be able, because of superior methods, to compete on favourable terms with Great Britain, America, and other countries.
At a moment when the whole world is in need of steel of every sort, the cheapening of the material itself in its highest grade and a reduction in the amount of labour required to produce it is a factor of capital importance in the general work of reconstruction.
A point that has to be borne in ind is that while the electric process for producing pure steel suitable for the preparation of high-grade steel is excellent, it requires enormous expenditure of energy and labour, and is consequently extremely costly. The Bessemer process, on the other hand, while re-natively cheap, has hitherto failed utterly to remove the inevitable impurities. As regards appliances, labour, and yield, all that is required from the standpoint of in-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.