THE WEALTH OF KNOWLEDGE^287
product. No go. The biggest push came after Gabriel Jars's English
trip of 1765. Jars himself set out to produce cementation steel but
got mediocre results, largely because he worked with French iron à
la Reaumur; death in 1769 interrupted his efforts. Another
technician named Duhamel, traveling companion of Jars and protégé
of the minister Turgot, was hired by the comte de Broglie, owner of
a forge and recipient of a government subsidy of some 15,000 livres,
to undertake similar experiments. Fifteen years later the government
was obliged to recognize that Duhamel was getting nowhere. Lesser
metallurgists tried on their own initiative. No question about it:
France needed steel and wanted to know how to make it.
Enter the Englishman, Michael Alcock of Birmingham, whom we
came to know above. He told the French that there was nothing to
it: making steel was easy; the hard part was making good steel. So
with the help of Director of Commerce Trudaine de Montigny (son
of the man who had sent Jars and Duhamel to visit England), he set
up a plant of his own and produced samples of cementation and
crucible steel. He never got beyond the stage of samples.
Meanwhile two of Alcock's partners went off on their own and
bought a small filemaking forge at Amboise on the Loire (better
known for its royal château). The forge caught the interest of the
duc de Choiseul and got the French government (again with the
support of Trudaine de Montigny) to sponsor a "royal manufactory"
of fine steels and subsidize it in the amount of 20,000 livres a year.
The subsidy, however, came with a curse: the obligation to use
French-made wrought iron. The enterprise invested heavily in
equipment—six large furnaces, forty power hammers, eighty steel
forges—and undertook experiment after experiment. To no avail. It
never made crucible steel, and its cementation steel did not inspire
confidence.
Other enterprises, more or less well connected but equally
determined, also entered the race, aiming particularly at the
manufacture of good files, which were becoming ever more
important as mechanization advanced and metals replaced wood.
One of them, in the Dauphiné, had the support of the intendant and
of the financial group of the duc d'Orléans. To begin with, it set its
sights low: the manufacture of blades for scythes and sundry
hardware. But then it ran into trouble because of embezzlement. It
was easier to take money than to make it.
Denis Woronoff, historian of the French iron industry, sums up:
sixty years after Reaumur, the French steel industry was still