MUSHET, DAVID

(b. Dalkeith, Scotland, 2 October 1772; d. Monmouth, Wales, 7 June 1847)

metallurgy.

Mushet was the son of William Musehet, an iron founder, and Margaret Cochrane. The family name, the origins of which have been traced to the Norman period, appears in various forms, including Mushett. Educated at Dalkeith Grammar School, Mushet frequented his father’s and other foundries in the Glasgow area, although his first job (1792) was as an accountant at the Clyde ironworks at Tollcross, near Glasgow, where he began experiments with iron in 1793. Working after business hours, he used the firm’s reverberatory furnace and other facilities until he was summarily denied access to them in 1798. His first three papers, published in 1798 in Tilloch’s Philosophical Magazine, were the product of this period.

Mushet stayed with Clyde until 1800, continuing his research in his own laboratory and reporting the results in thirteen more papers. From 1801 to 1805 he was associated in partnership with William Dixon and Walter Neilson (the father of J. B. Neilson, the inventor of the hot-blast stove) at the Calder Iron- works. During this period he discovered, in the parish of Old Monkland, some ten miles east of Glasgow, the blackband ironstone formation (1801). This discovery, later to put Scotland in a favorable competitive position vis-à-vis England and Wales, brought no advantage to Mushet because its full utilization had to await the introduction of the hot blast (1828–1830), first tried out at the Clyde and Calder Ironworks. Because of the “speculative habits of one partner and the constitutional nervousness of another,” Mushet abandoned his interests in Calder and in the blackband leases and left Scotland. Another group of ten papers was published during this period.

From 1805 to 1810 Mushet was associated with the ironworks at Alfreton, Derbyshire. Not much is known of his activities there, apart from his publi- cation of six papers and, apparently, the writing of articles on the blast furnace and blowing engine for Rees’s Cyclopaedia and on iron for the 1824 supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In 1810 Mushet moved to Coleford, in the Forest of Dean. He published nothing during his first six years there, being occupied with a partnership in the Whitecliff Ironworks until he became “dissatisfied with his partners” and withdrew. Between 1816 and 1823 he published eight more papers in Philosophical Magazine; but subsequently—apart from three studies on the alloying of copper with iron (1835)—seems to have confined himself to his experiments, to consul- tation with neighboring ironmasters, and, presumably, to the training of his son Robert. He was also active during the early 1830’s in a controversy over the right of the Free Miners of the Forest of Dean to transfer their rights to “foreigners” like himself, that is, those who had not worked a year and a day in the iron mines.

Mushet was granted five patents: one (2,447 of 1800) in the Clyde period, three (3,944 of 1815; 4,248 of 1818, and 4,697 of 1822) from the middle period at Coleford, and one in 1835 (6,908). The technical value of the processes described, especially in the patent of 1800, was the subject of controversy in the trade press of the 1870’s, and Robert Forester Mushet proved an aggressive defender of his father.

The publication of Mushet’s collected papers in 1840 was initiated by his son David, and Mushet appended considerable material in the form of illustrative notes to the originals. He notes, for example, that in 1798, as is claimed in the 1800 patent, he had asserted that carbon in a gaseous state passes into iron by the mouth or through the pores of the crucible to form steel. His later note states: “This opinion I have long considered the effort of a young mind eager to account for the whole phenomena before it, without that knowledge of the subject which long experience and observation confer” (Papers, p. 33). This disclaimer was overlooked in the later arguments, particularly by J. S. Jeans.

In a field in which scientific research had to wage a long battle with the empiricism of the ironmaster, it is not surprising that Mushet’s acknowledged contributions to the development of the iron and steel industry were less spectacular than those of his son. It is, indeed, strange that eight years after the publi- cation of the Papers, the Institution of Civil Engineers, of which Mushet had been an associate, expressed the hope that his family would collate the papers of one “whose researches were carried on with such inde- fatigable industry and perseverance and yet of whose labor so little is really known” (Proceedings, Institution of Civil Engineers, 7 [1848], 12).

Samuel Smiles credits Mushet with the successful application of the hot-blast stove to anthracite in iron smelting and states that Heath developed his patent cast steel from Mushet’s experiments on the “beneficial effects of oxide of manganese on steel.” Mushet’s work on ferromanganese (1817) may have given Robert Forester Mushet the hint that led to his involvement with the Bessemer process.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Mushet’s papers were collected by his son David as Papers on Iron and Steel (London, 1840). Three other papers are “Blast” and “Blowing Machine,” in Abraham Rees, ed., The Cyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences, and Literature (London, 1819) (the Papers, p. xix, states that the volume was in the hands of a committee appointed by the iron trade in 1807 “on occasion of the proposed tax on iron”), and “Ironmaking,” in Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (London, 1824), 114–127.

II. Secondary Literature. See F. W. Baty, Forest of Dean (London, 1952), 98; Dictionary of National Biography, repr. ed., XIII, 1326–1327; Henry Hamilton, The Industrial Revolution in Scotland (London, 1932; repr. 1966), 179; C. E. Hart, The Free Miners (Gloucester, 1953), 136, 272, 290, 506; J. S. Jeans, Steel (London, 1880), 23; Fred M. Osborn, The Story of the Mushets (London, 1952); H. S. Osborn, The Metallurgy of Iron and Steel (Philadelphia, 1869), esp. 124–142, which frequently confuses the work of

Mushet and his son Robert; John Percy, Metallurgy (Iron and Steel) (London, 1875), 424–425; and Samuel Smiles, Industrial Biography (London, 1863), 141–148.

Philip W. Bishop