After his British Association address in August 1856, Bessemer had received applications from several ironmasters for licenses, which were issued in return for a down payment and a nominal royalty of 25 pence per ton. Among those who started negotiations was Mr. Thomas Brown of Ebbw Vale Iron Works, one of the largest of the South Wales plants. He proposed, however, instead of a license, an outright purchase of Bessemer's patents for L50,000. Bessemer refused to sell, and according to his[34] account-- intense disappointment and anger quite got the better of [Brown] and for the moment he could not realize the fact of my refusal.... [He then] left me very abruptly, saying in an irritated tone ... "I'll make you see the matter differently yet" and slammed the door after him. [34] Bessemer, _op. cit._ (footnote 7), p. 169. David Mushet's advocacy of Martien's claim to priority over Bessemer has already been noticed (p. 33). From him we learn[35] that Martien's experiments leading to his patent of September 15, 1855, had been carried out at the Ebbw Vale Works in South Wales, where he engaged in "perfecting the Renton process."[36] Martien's own process consisted in passing air through metal as it was run in a trough from the furnace and before it passed into the puddling furnace. [35] _Mining Journal_, 1856, vol. 26, p. 631. [36] James Renton's process (U.S. patent 8613, December 23, 1851) had been developed at Newark, New Jersey, in 1854. It was a modification of the puddling furnace, in which the ore and carbon were heated in tubs, utilizing the waste heat of the reverberatory furnace (see the _Mechanics' Magazine_, vol. 62, p. 246, 1855). Renton died at Newark in September 1856 (_Mechanics' Magazine_, 1856, vol. 65, p. 422). It is known that Martien's patent was in the hands of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works by March 1857.[37] This fact must be added to our knowledge that Mushet's patent of September 22, 1856 was drawn up with a specific reference to the application of his "triple compound" to "iron ... purified by the action of air, in the manner invented by Joseph Gilbert Martien,"[38] and that this and his other manganese patents were under the effective control of Ebbw Vale. It seems a reasonable deduction from these circumstances that Brown's offer to buy out Bessemer and his subsequent threat were the consequences of a determination by Ebbw Vale to attack Bessemer by means of patent infringement suits. [37] _Mining Journal_, 1857, vol. 27, p. 193. [38] British patent 2219, September 22, 1856.