Josiah Marshall Heath

Josiah Marshall Heath (8 November 1790 – 28 January 1851)[1] was an English metallurgist, businessman and naturalist, who invented the use of manganese to deoxidise steel.

[2] In India he learned the local steel-making processes, including wootz, but having failed to found a profitable steel mill there he returned to England and settled in Sheffield.

[4] Around 1825, Heath (who wanted to continue the important progress of European methods), obtained from the British East India Company the monopoly of iron production over a large area centred on Madras.

He studied iron and steel making in England and returned to India in 1830 where he built a factory at Porto Novo, in the south of the Arcot district, with a government loan.

But the business ran at a loss, because of management failings, technical inexperience, lack of funding and the sole use of charcoal as a combustion agent.

I propose to produce a superior quality of cast steel, by taking ordinary bars of steel, ground as usual, or mixtures of iron or malleable iron and carbonaceous materials, with 1 to 3 parts per hundred by weight of carbide of manganese, and then placing them in a crucible and subjecting them to a heat suitable to melt these materials; when they have become liquid, they can be cast in a mould, in the usual manner.

[8] After nine years of legal proceedings, the British House of Lords (then the highest court in the land) recognised the patent in its aspect of the first use of manganese oxide.

Thomas Webster, one of Heath's lawyers, wrote:[9][10][11][12] Unfortunately, a very great uncertainty is cast over the procedure used to maintain and defend property relating to inventions.