By heating it in an enclosed high temperature steam boiler the siliceous particles were bound together and could be moulded or worked.
With properties equivalent to natural stone, it found applications as filtering slabs, vases, tombstones, decorative architectural work, emery wheels and grindstones.
Ransome moved the manufacture of the artificial stone from Ipswich to Blackwall Lane, Greenwich, in 1866.
[1] The company's decorative "stonework" was used at the Brighton Aquarium, London Docks, the Indian Court, Whitehall, St. Thomas's Hospital, and at the University of Calcutta and other buildings in India.
His son, Ernest L. Ransome, born in 1844, moved to the United States and became a significant innovator in his own right, in the development of reinforced concrete.