The narrative continues with details of further masterly experiments until the new process was turning out steels of excellent quality, containing any desired fraction of carbon, at a cost of but six to seven pounds sterling per ton as against fifty to sixty pounds by the methods which Bessemer laid upon the shelf. His predecessors had made forty to fifty pounds of steel at a time in small crucibles, he made five tons in twenty minutes. In his magnificent simplification Bessemer at a stroke dismissed a long series of troublesome processes long believed to be as unavoidable as winter’s cold. He did away with the smelting of pig iron, the rolling, shearing and piling of bars, and the heating furnace. From the beginning of the Bessemer manufacture to the present hour, its main output has been rails for railroads. In this single service the debt due to Bessemer surpasses computation, for his steel has as least six-fold the durability of the iron it has replaced. A rail laid at Crewe Station in 1863, weighing twenty pounds to the yard, was turned in 1866 and taken up in 1875; it was estimated that 72,000,000 tons had passed over it, while the greatest wear of its tables was but .85 inch. Bessemer did not at once enter upon success in the practical application of his process. British pig iron, with which he dealt, abounded in phosphorus, an element which he could not drive out, and which made his steels faulty. It was only when, at length, he obtained pure pig iron from Sweden that he was able to supply the market with pure, soft malleable iron, and with steels of various degrees of hardness. In a sequel, full of interest, he sketches the shrewd means by which he secured a handsome fortune from his great invention, for Bessemer had remarkable business ability as well as inventive genius. His labors in steel-making obliged him to neglect his devices in the plate-glass manufacture which, despite their merit, were also neglected by the producers of plate-glass. He remarks: “The simple fact is that an invention must be nursed and tended as a mother nurses her baby, or it inevitably perishes.” Bessemer’s Versatility.