* * * * * THE POSITION OF MANGANESE IN MODERN INDUSTRY. BY M.V. DESHAYES. No body among the metals and the metalloids (silicium, titanium, tungsten, chromium, phosphorus, etc.) has occupied a more prominent position in modern metallurgy than _manganese_, and it is chiefly due to its great affinity for oxygen. When this substance was discovered, more than a century ago (1774), by the celebrated Swedish chemist and mineralogist, Gahn, by treating the black oxide of manganese in the crucible, no one would have thought that the new element, so delicate by itself, without any direct industrial use, would become, in the middle of the nineteenth century, one of the most powerful and necessary instruments for the success of the Bessemer process, as well for its deoxidizing properties as for the qualities which it imparts to steel, increasing its resistance, its durability, and its elasticity, as has been shown elsewhere. Without entering into a complete history (for it is beyond the task which we have here assumed),[1] it will not be without interest to recall how, when manganese was first obtained in a pure state, that it was supposed that it would remain simply an object of curiosity in the laboratory; but when its presence was proved in spiegeleisen and when it came to be considered an essential ingredient in the best German and English works for cutlery steel (where it is thrown into the crucible as the peroxide), then we find that its qualities become better and better appreciated; and it is surprising that no technologist ever devoted his attention to the production of manganese alloys. [Footnote 1: See _Engineering_, May 27, 1881] It was not till after the investigations of Dr. Percy, Tamm, Prieger, and Bessemer, who employed crucibles for the production of these alloys, that Hendersen received the idea of utilizing it in the Siemens furnace. So important a compound could not remain unemployed. The works at Terre Noire produced, by the Martin furnace, for a number of years, ferro-manganese of 70 to 80 per cent. Shortly afterward, when competition in the market was established, the works at Carniola and at Carinthia, some English factories, and more especially the works at Saint-Louis, near Marseilles, of Terre Noire, of Montlucon, etc., successfully adopted the manufacture of _ferro-manganese with the blast furnace_, which is without doubt the method best adapted for the reduction of metallic oxides, as well in consideration of the reactions as from an economical point of view. Before very long it was possible to produce, by the blast furnace, alloys of 40, 60, 80, and even 86 per cent., in using the hot air apparatus of Siemens, Cowper, and Witwell, with the employment of good coke, and principally by calculating the charges for the fusion in such a manner as to obtain an extra basic and refractory slag.