I had not failed to notice the growth of the Bessemer process.  If this proved successful I knew that iron was destined to give place to steel; that the Iron Age would pass away and the Steel Age take its place.  My friend, John A. Wright, president of the Freedom Iron Works at Lewiston, Pennsylvania, had visited England purposely to investigate the new process.  He was one of our best and most experienced manufacturers, and his decision was so strongly in its favor that he induced his company to erect Bessemer works.  He was quite right, but just a little in advance of his time.  The capital required was greater than he estimated.  More than this, it was not to be expected that a process which was even then in somewhat of an experimental stage in Britain could be transplanted to the new country and operated successfully from the start.  The experiment was certain to be long and costly, and for this my friend had not made sufficient allowance.

At a later date, when the process had become established in England, capitalists began to erect the present Pennsylvania Steel Works at Harrisburg.  These also had to pass through an experimental stage and at a critical moment would probably have been wrecked but for the timely assistance of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.  It required a broad and able man like President Thomson, of the Pennsylvania Railroad, to recommend to his board of directors that so large a sum as six hundred thousand dollars should be advanced to a manufacturing concern on his road, that steel rails might be secured for the line.  The result fully justified his action.

The question of a substitute for iron rails upon the Pennsylvania Railroad and other leading lines had become a very serious one.  Upon certain curves at Pittsburgh, on the road connecting the Pennsylvania with the Fort Wayne, I had seen new iron rails placed every six weeks or two months.  Before the Bessemer process was known I had called President Thomson’s attention to the efforts of Mr. Dodds in England, who had carbonized the heads of iron rails with good results.  I went to England and obtained control of the Dodds patents and recommended President Thomson to appropriate twenty thousand dollars for experiments at Pittsburgh, which he did.  We built a furnace on our grounds at the upper mill and treated several hundred tons of rails for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and with remarkably good results as compared with iron rails.  These were the first hard-headed rails used in America.  We placed them on some of the sharpest curves and their superior service far more than compensated for the advance made by Mr. Thomson.  Had the Bessemer process not been successfully developed, I verily believe that we should ultimately have been able to improve the Dodds process sufficiently to make its adoption general.  But there was nothing to be compared with the solid steel article which the Bessemer process produced.