an embossed stamp for a penny. Having
ascertained later that in this way the raised stamps on all official
papers in England could easily be forged, he set to work and invented a
perforated stamp which could not be forged nor removed from a document.
At the public stamp office he was told by the chief that the government
was losing 100,000 pounds a year through the custom of removing stamps
from old parchments and using them again.

The chief also fully appreciated the new danger of easy counterfeiting.
So he offered Bessemer a definite sum for his process of perforation,
or an office for life at eight hundred pounds a year. Bessemer chose
the office, and hastened to tell the good news to a young woman with
whom he had agreed to share his fortune. In explaining his invention,
he told how it would prevent any one from taking a valuable stamp from
a document a hundred years old and using it a second time.

"Yes," said his betrothed, "I understand that; but, surely, if all
stamps had a date put upon them they could not at a future time be used
without detection."

This was a very short speech, and of no special importance if we omit a
single word of four letters; but, like the schoolboy's pins which saved
the lives of thousands of people annually by not getting swallowed,
that little word, by keeping out of the ponderous minds of the British
revenue officers, had for a long period saved the government the burden
of caring for an additional income of 100,000 pounds a year. And the
same little word, if published in its connection, would render
Bessemer's perforation device of far less value than a last year's
bird's nest. He felt proud of the young woman's ingenuity, and
promptly suggested the improvement at the stamp office.

As a result his system of perforation was abandoned and he was deprived
of his promised office, the government coolly making use from that day
to this, without compensation, of the idea conveyed by that little
insignificant word.

So Bessemer's financial prospects were not very encouraging; but,
realizing that the best capital a young man can have is a capital wife,
he at once entered into a partnership which placed at his command the
combined ideas of two very level heads. The result, after years of
thought and experiment, was the Bessemer process of making steel
cheaply, which has revolutionized the iron industry throughout the
world. His method consists simply in forcing hot air from be