Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/760

740 masses as were required for cannon, armor-plate, the shafts of ocean steamers, and parts of steam-engines of the largest class, was the making of steel by a modification of the puddling process, whence the new product was called "puddled steel." The operation consisted in using a superior quality of charcoal pig iron, and in so manipulating it that the carbon was only partly removed; and the resulting product was a weldable and forgeable metal, possessing many of the qualities of the softer varieties of steel. The art of puddling steel is of German origin. The first efforts to practice it are said to have been made at Frantschach, by Schlegel and Müller, in 1835. This and several other attempts failed, and "it was not until 1850 that good puddled steel was produced in the iron-works of Messrs. Lehrkind, Fakenroth & Co., at Haspe, by following the suggestions of the chemist Lahaye."

The process was introduced into England in 1850 by Ewald



Reipe, and hence became known there as the "Reipe process"; it was patented in 1859 in the United States by Anton Lohage, and was operated for a time by Messrs. Corning & Winslow, of Troy, K Y., and by Messrs. James, Horner & Co., at Pompton, N. J. In 1870 there were eleven hundred and eighty-five tons of "puddled steel" made in this country, valued at $218,500; but before the year 1880 the process appears to have become obsolete in America. By their neglect of tins process the owners of American iron and steel works threw away what would have been to many of them a source of great profit during the twenty years preceding the introduction of the "Bessemer" and "open-hearth" processes of manufacturing steel. In Europe, however, during the past forty years, a very large amount of stool has been made in this way,