“To persons conversant with the manufacture of iron, it will be at once apparent that the ingots of the malleable metal which I have described will have no hard or steely parts, such as are found in puddled iron, requiring a great amount of rolling to blend them with the general mass, nor will such ingots require an excess of rolling to expel cinder from the interior of the mass, since none can exist in the ingot, which is pure and perfectly homogeneous throughout, and hence requires only as much rolling as is necessary for the development of fibre; it therefore follows that, instead of forming a merchant bar, or rail, by the union of a number of separate pieces welded together, it will be far more simple and less expensive to make several bars or rails from a single ingot. Doubtless this would have been done long ago had not the whole process been limited by the size of the ball which the puddler could make. “The facility which the new process affords of making large masses will enable the manufacturer to produce bars that, in the old mode of working, it was impossible to obtain; while at the same time it admits of the use of more powerful machinery, whereby a great deal of labour will be saved and the process be greatly expedited.... I wish to call the attention of the meeting to some of the peculiarities which distinguish cast steel from all other forms of iron, viz., the perfectly homogeneous character of the metal, the entire absence of sand-cracks or flaws, and its greater cohesive force and elasticity, as compared with the blister steel from which it is made,—qualities which it derives solely from its fusion and formation into ingots, all of which properties malleable iron acquires in like manner by its fusion and formation into ingots in the new process; nor must it be forgotten that no amount of rolling will give the blister steel, although formed of rolled bars, the same homogeneous character that cast steel acquires by a mere extension of the ingot to some ten or twelve times its original length....