Nasmyth, James, 15 September 1856, 11 June 1889

1. Autograph letter signed from James Nasmyth to one Mrs. Wills, Penshurst (Kent), 11 June 1889: “We were delighted to receive your most welcome note of yesterday and to know that you are quite well again as in your cosey house at No 13. -- We shall be very happy to receive your friends any afternoon and hope the sun will shine not so as to unable them to enjoy so long a drive. -- I well remember Leonard Horner and his venerable Father in my early days in Edinburgh in connection with the School of arts which was, I may say, founded by him and where I received as one of it’s Earliest-pupils much truly valuable instruction. – I hope we shall be favoured with some real summer like weather after the ordeal of such repulsive states of sunless dripping days as we have had, of Late Especialy [!]. one advantage of the ultra wet days we have had is the display of the Bright Green of the Foliage of the trees and shrubs of all sorts. I never saw them look so Bright and Thriving -- and has Dear old Sol! will put all to rights and give us a real good Harvest to make up for the long course of depressing clowdy days we have passed through and cause us to say ‘alls well that Ends well’ [...]”. The unidentified recipient of this charming letter was probably a common friend of the mentioned Horner family.

2. Autograph letter signed from James Nasmyth, sent from Patricroft (Greater Manchester) on the 15 September 1856 to Leonard Horner, detailing his plans to retire from business and critically explaining the “Bessemer process” for steel production in comparision to Nasmyth’s own “steam puddling system”: “having been out on an extensive business journey from which I have only just returned I did not receive your very kind and valued letter in time to reply to it to you in Berlin from whence I hope you have returned ere this in exellent health and after as no doubt it would be a most pleasant visit – It is very kind of you to bear in mind my long cherished plan of retirement from commerce which D[eo] V[olente] I hope to carry into most complete effect at the end of this current year and with the ample means (in my view of such matters) which many years of steady industry self denial and the Blessing of good health of mind and body have enabled me to acquire. I hope to spend the rest of the days, that Kind Providence may allot me in Otium cum Activitate and indulge my pet hobby at a most pleasent pace freed from all £.S.D. cares! for having put all my savings into 3 per cent consols which my Dear wife calls ‘the true anti Billions pills’ I hope to have no thought of torment on that score and proove my self to be a practical admirer of ‘the Glorious simplicity of 3 per cent consols’ – My Successor in the Practical part of the Business is now with me at the foundry and by the End of the year he will be able to walk along by himself. I retire from the concerns totaly [!] and he goes on along with my present and only partner Mr. H. Garrett who has been my partner these last 18 years and who altho’ a very rich man yet – as having 11 children 8 of them Boys ! – desires to keep hold of what I have given him good cause to consider ‘a good concern’ – I have already taken the first great step towards retirement by the Purchace of a nice little ‘cottage in Kent’ in that most beautiful part of England. Penshurst, Kent, near Tunbridge Wells, a district which for fertility and geniality of climate [...] – Pray pardon so prolix a detail but as ‘a cottage in Kent’ has been our Day dream for the last 17 years and been toiled for with hearty zeal and pleasant hope and is now ‘a great fact’ visible to the naked Eye you must pardon me for a little garrulity on the subject. – What a splatter this mode of Decarburizing Pig Iron which Bessemer has brought out has been making -- It is a healthy child (a sort of Grand child of my own) but it has to pass the ordeal of measles, Wooping [!] cough and counting House ere it can be said to be practically successfull. It is simply my steam puddling system with the substitution of Air in place of steam passed out through the molten crude iron from the orifice of a pipe ‘placed Beneath the surface of the molten Iron’. The underlined words are the identical ones which he has borrowed from my specifications and transported or transplanted by him into his. The chief merit and originiality of this system is his Burning Position of the Iron on his fuel – it is all quackery or worse to say ‘iron made without fuel’, as he describes it. He sets fire to the incandescent molten iron by the [!] up through jets of air and the heat so generated is so intense as to maintain in a fluid state the malleable and Decarburized Iron as it is produced and so allows him to run it out into ingot molds at the End of the Process in place of being removed in Spongy Balls as in the ending Puddling process. But as to casting articles of malleable Iron by running the molten malleable Iron into molds thus is all nonsense as every practical man knows right well. [...] I wish him all success and will be the first as indeed I was to cheer him on. But he is surrounded with a parcel of foolish if not worse satellites who by absurd newspaper paragraphes are discouting all the harms of the Invention and will cause it to encounter difficulties that a more quiet pursuit and application of its intrinsic high mertis would have secured from it. I fear it will be a 9 days wonder [...]”.