"Did you after that build, or undertake to build, an oil refinery to test your continuous process?" "Yes, sir; in connection with a German. He was going to build a small refinery. He said he would build it my way, if I would let him use it in the new way. He constructed it on that principle; but he was slow--he was a very slow man to deal with. We ran ... twenty days without stopping" (to clean out the stills). "And it actually ran that length of time?" "Yes, sir." "What became of these works?" "Hauled off to the junk-yard"--by one of the companies in the combination. It "bought them out after we just got them under way, and then tore them down and hauled them off." "You then brought them up to Buffalo, and tried to put them into the Solar Works?" "Yes, sir." "What became of those?" "They eventually went the same way." In court the combination claimed that Van Syckel's was an inferior process, but it had not left it to die the natural death of the inferior process. "And how about the expense of the two ways?" he was asked. "The same help that would make 1000 barrels the old way, to take three or four days, I would make in the new process in one day; the old way takes about a ton of coal more and gets less oil, and the oil is not near so good." No contradiction was offered by the defendants of any of these statements. Uncontradicted evidence showed that the new process was cheaper and produced better oil than the old processes. Stillmen from the Herman and Solar refineries, in which Van Syckel tried his new process after the combination refused to build for him, testified to the practical success of his method. "We must have run these continuous works for two months while I was there" (at the Solar).[351] "We kept Van Syckel's process running right along continuously for sixteen days" (at the Herman refinery).[352] "We did not have to clean out the patent stills, while by the old process they would have to be cleaned out about every day or thirty-six hours."[353] A number of residents of Titusville, dealers in oil and consumers, testified to the superiority of the illuminant Van Syckel produced. It burned much better than that made by the monopoly, several said. "The burning qualities was extraordinarily good." "It gave better satisfaction to my customers." "It did not gum the lamp-wicks, and did not smell."[354] This was done in spite of rusty and choked-up pipes, defective stills and apparatus. One of the owners of the Solar, who was a practical refiner and the overseer of the works, testified that he had seen Van Syckel's continuous process run successfully both in Titusville and Buffalo: "The result was much beyond my expectation." "How long did you run the works?" "I think about two weeks." "What was the cause of it stopping?"