That Ebbw Vale exerted every effort to find an alternative to Bessemer's process is suggested, also, by their purchase in 1856 of the British rights to the Uchatius process, invented by an Austrian Army officer. The provisional patent specifications, dated October 1, 1855, showed that Uchatius proposed to make cast steel directly from pig-iron by melting granulated pig-iron in a crucible with pulverized "sparry iron" (siderite) and fine clay or with gray oxide of manganese, which would determine the amount of carbon combining with the iron. This process, which was to prove commercially successful in Great Britain and in Sweden but was not used in America,[42] appeared to Ebbw Vale to be something from which, "we can have steel produced at the price proposed by Mr. Bessemer, notwithstanding the failure of his process to fulfil the promise."[43] [42] J. S. Jeans, _op. cit._ (footnote 5), p. 108. The process is not mentioned by James M. Swank, _History of the manufacture of iron in all ages_, Philadelphia, American Iron and Steel Association, 1892. [43] _Mining Journal_, 1856, vol. 26, p. 707. So far as is known only one direct attempt was made, presumably instigated by Ebbw Vale, to enforce their patents against Bessemer, who records[44] a visit by Mushet's agent some two or three months before a renewal fee on Mushet's basic manganese patents became payable in 1859. Bessemer "entirely repudiated" Mushet's patents and offered to perform his operations in the presence of Mushet's lawyers and witnesses at the Sheffield Works so that a prosecution for infringement "would be a very simple matter." That, he says, was the last heard from the agent or from Mushet on the subject.[45] The renewal fee was not paid and the patents were therefore abandoned by Ebbw Vale and their associates, a fact which did not come to Mushet's knowledge until 1861, when he himself declared that the patent "was never in my hands at all [so] that I could not enforce it."[46] [44] Bessemer, _op. cit._ (footnote 7), p. 290. [45] The American Iron and Steel Institute's "Steel centennial (1957) press information" (see footnote 2), includes a pamphlet, "Kelly lighted the fireworks ..." by Vaughn Shelton (New York, 1956), which asserts (p. 12) that Bessemer paid the renewal fee and became the owner of Mushet's "vital" patent. [46] Robert Mushet, _The Bessemer-Mushet process_, Cheltenham, 1883, p. 24; _The Engineer_, 1861, vol. 12, pp. 177 and 189.