ty-five years ago, was similar to this in principle. Our
machinery was better, and pure charcoal was placed in the crucible
instead of wood; but the process was long and costly, and only small
pieces of steel were produced at a time.

Henry Bessemer enters upon the scene. In 1831, being then eighteen years
of age, he came up to London from a country village in Hertfordshire to
seek his fortune, not knowing one person in the metropolis. He was, as
he has since said, "a mere cipher in that vast sea of human enterprise."
He was a natural inventor, of studious and observant habits. As soon as
he had obtained a footing in London he began to invent. He first devised
a process for copying bas-reliefs on cardboard, by which he could
produce embossed copies of such works in thousands at a small expense.
The process was so simple that in ten minutes a person without skill
could produce a die from an embossed stamp at a cost of one penny.

When his invention was complete he thought with dismay and alarm that,
as almost all the expensive stamps affixed to documents in England are
raised from the paper, any of them could be forged by an office-boy of
average intelligence. The English government has long obtained an
important part of its revenue by the sale of these stamps, many of which
are high priced, costing as much as twenty-five dollars. If the stamp on
a will, a deed, or other document is not genuine, the document has no
validity. As soon as he found what mischief had been done, he set to
work to devise a remedy. After several months' experiment and reflection
he invented a stamp which could neither be forged nor removed from the
document and used a second time. A large business, it seems, had been
done in removing stamps from old parchments of no further use, and
selling them to be used again.

The inventor called at the stamp office and had an interview with the
chief, who frankly owned that the government was losing half a million
dollars a year by the use of old stamps; and he was then considering
methods of avoiding the loss. Bessemer exhibited his invention, the
chief feature of which was the perforation of the stamp in such a way
that forgery and removal were equally impossible. The commissioner
finally agreed to adopt it. The next question was as to the compensation
of the young inventor, and he was given his choice either to accept a
sum of money or an office for life in the stamp office of four thousand
dollars a y