John Chambers bet £500 and a government sand contract on turning New Zealand’s black beach sand into steel. For a few months in 1883 it worked. By the late 1880s the shareholders were sitting on £20,000 of debt.
Chasing a process
Chambers was born around 1839 in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, and reached New Zealand in 1866. He saw that the iron sands on the Taranaki beaches had production potential. Interest was hard to find. In 1876 he approached smelters in Britain and the United States, but the response was thin and produced only a few laboratory test smelts.
That same year he went to the Philadelphia Exhibition. It went nowhere for him, since America had plenty of cheap, easily smelted iron ore. Before leaving, though, he heard about a smelting process invented by Joel Wilson of Dover, New Jersey. Chambers formed a company with Guy H. Gardner and bought the New Zealand rights to the patent. Wilson sent one of his men, W. H. Jones, to demonstrate the method and help run the smelting.
The Onehunga furnace
The furnace went up in Onehunga, a suburb of Auckland, and was finished in February 1883 at a cost of £500. Its first steel came off on 27 February, made from sand taken at North Head of Manukau Heads under a sixty-year contract with the government.
Then it fell apart. In December 1883 Jones got drunk, argued with a bricklayer and shot him dead. He was sentenced to 14 years of hard labour. His successor, Edmund Otway, fell ill and died in June 1884. Next came James McAndrew, an ironmaster from the Clyde region of Scotland, who struggled with the de-oxidation stage of the process. Nobody could match the quality Jones had achieved, and sand-based production was dropped.
The company switched to making wrought iron from scrap. Margins were far lower. In the end the works were broken up and shipped to China.
After the furnace
Chambers stayed in business around Auckland, working in other iron-related companies and in goldmining, and eventually became manager of T. and S. Morrin & Son. In 1892 he started John Chambers and Son with his son, importing mining equipment and other goods. It became a limited company in 1898.
Others kept at the sands. In 1886 John Parry persuaded Sir Henry Bessemer to experiment with them, and the results were promising, but Bessemer was in his twilight years and could not carry the work forward. Chambers died on 27 September 1903.
