A son-in-law of Abraham Darby's, Richard Reynolds by name, made a great stride towards the modern railway by substituting iron for wood on the tramways which connected the different works at Coalbrookdale; and it was a grandson of the same Abraham who designed and erected the first iron bridge.
England, we have seen, borrowed the idea of her smelting processes and iron-castings from Germany and Holland; but the discovery of that important material, cast-steel, belongs, at least, to one of her own sons. Yet even here the relationship is a merely conventional one, for Benjamin Huntsman (1704-1776) was the child of German parents who had settled in Lincolnshire.
Huntsman's original calling was that of a clock-maker; but his remarkable mechanical skill, his shrewdness, and his practical sense, soon gave him the repute of the 'wise man' of the district, and brought neighbours to consult him not only as to the repair of every ordinary sort of machinery, but also of the human frame--the most complex of all machines! It was his daily experience of the inferior quality of the tools at his command that led him to make experiments in the manufacture of steel. What his experiments were we have no record to show; but that they must have been conducted with Teutonic patience and thoroughness there can be no doubt, from the formidable nature of the difficulties overcome.
England, however, long refused to make use of Huntsman's precious material, although produced in her very midst. The Sheffield cutlers would have nothing to do with a substance so much harder than anything they were accustomed to, and Huntsman was actually compelled to look for his market abroad! All the cast-steel he could manufacture was sent over to France, and the merit of employing this material for general purposes belongs originally to that country. The inventions of Henry Cort (1740-1800) for refining and rolling iron (1785) were the mainspring of the malleable iron trade, and made Great Britain independent of Russia and Sweden for supplies of manufactured iron. One authority has stated that since 1790, when Cort's improvements were entirely established, the value of landed property in England had doubled. But he was unfortunate in business life, and in 1811 upwards of forty iron firms subscribed towards a fund for the assistance of his widow and nine orphan children. David Mushet (1772-1847) did much for the expansion of the iron trade in Scotland by his preparation of steel from bar-iron by a direct process, combining the iron with carbon, and by his discovery of the effect of manganese on steel.