Crossword-Solution: EBBW 4 letters, 5 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 11

The extraordinary durability of the forty-five pound rails made for the Reading Railway Company by the Ebbw Vale Company in 1837 is well known to railway men.

One of the best specimens is the Crumlin viaduct, 200 feet high at one point, which spans the river and valley of the Ebbw near the village of Crumlin in South Wales.

Joseph Gilbert Martien, of Newark, New Jersey, who at the time of Bessemer's address was working at the plant of the Ebbw Vale Iron Works, in South Wales, secured a provisional patent a few days before Bessemer obtained one of his series of patents for making cast steel, a circumstance which provided ammunition for those who wished to dispute Bessemer's somewhat spectacular claims.

Within a month of his address, Bessemer had sold licenses to several ironmasters (outside Sheffield) and so provided himself with capital with which to continue his development work; but he refused to sell his patents outright to the Ebbw Vale Iron Works and by this action, as will be seen, he created an enemy for himself.

Mushet also claimed to have designed his own "purifying and mixing" furnace, of 20-ton capacity, which he had submitted to the Ebbw Vale Iron Works "many months ago," without comment from them.