The inventor of the thermometer, René Antoine de Réaumur (1683-1757), thought he had found the secret to making crucible steel. He added sulfur to the inferior French iron.
His failure was two fold. To begin with, if he had looked, he would have seen the English buying their iron ore from Sweden and asked why. Secondly, he would have honestly compared his steel to that of the British and Germans.
Even after Jars’s espionage and Alcock’s warning that making steel was easy, but making good steel was hard, the French continued their patriotic efforts to make good steel from inferior French iron.
Sixty years after Réaumur, the French steel industry was still primitive and unproductive. Finally, in 1820, a British expatriate named James Jackson, showed the French how to make crucible steel ten years after the Germans learned how to do it on their own and fifteen years after the Swiss.
Patriotism seemed to prevent the French from asking, what are the successful producers doing that we are not doing?
The French didn’t ask the big question.
sources ?
JeFF:
One good source for this is Federic Le Play in Annuales des Mines, 9 (1846). Also Harris, “Attempts to Transfer English Steel Techniques” in Essays in Industry, I believe it was n.18.
Federic Le Play was very critical of Reaumur.