22
After a few remarks from Mr. Erasmus Gower, who stated that he is at present engaged in putting up some furnaces for the Japanese in the province of Hitachi (Jôshiu) where there is a considerable bed of ironstone, varying in thickness from 18 ft. to 8 ft., and needing only to be quarried.
Mr. Brunton said that in reference to the process described in the paper as being common in Japan, of keeping pig iron in a molten state for a lengthened time which sometimes extended to seven days, and by this means producing a malleable or wrought iron, he thought he saw in this some resemblance to the principle of the Bessemer process as carried out in England. The Bessemer process consisted of a rapid combustion of the earthy matters and other substances in the iron, and this combustion was obtained by the insertion of large quantities of oxygen into a vessel containing molten metal. Although the paper did not mention the means by which the Japanese maintain the iron in a melted state, it might be supposed that it was done by blowing air through it with bellows, but whether this was the case or not, it seemed to him that this practice of the Japanese was similar in principle to the Bessemer process, as it maintained the iron for varied periods at very high temperatures, and so consumed the impurities contained in it.
Professor Ayrton remarked that in the Paper a description had been given of the method of making steel employed by the Japanese. Could the reader inform him whether any of this steel was used to make steel wire of? He (Prof. Ayrton) had lately required steel wire of different thickness, but the Kogakuriyo had stated that they had been quite unable to obtain any for him, even of foreign manufacture. Now if Japanese steel wire could be procured anywhere this difficulty might be overcome.
In reply to this, Mr. Wilkin said that he was not the author of the Paper, but he was not aware that any steel wire was manufactured by the Japanese though he believed copper wire was to some considerable extent.
Professor Ayrton then continued, and said that mention had been made of the badness of Japanese copper wire. Some of it had at any rate one good quality about which he would say a few words. It would probably be known to many of those present that copper wire was largely employed in the manufacture of telegraph instruments and sub-marine cables. Now the wire, like all other conductors, offered a certain obstruction (or resistance as it is called) to the passage of the electric current, but this resistance might, for the same length and thickness of the wire, be immensely diminished by increasing the purity of the copper employed. Up to the laying of the first Atlantic cable it was imagined that any extra resistance in the conductor of a cable, produced by impurities in the copper, could be compensated for by increasing the battery power employed. Before, however, the construction of the second Atlantic cable of 1865, Sir William Thomson (whose name had lately been prominently brought before the Society in Captain Belknap’s paper on Deep Sea Soundings in the Pacific) was led from purely