Short answers, pulled from the story.
James Beaumont Neilson was a Scottish inventor born in Shettleston on the 22nd of June 1792. He invented the hot-blast process for smelting iron, which involved blowing furnaces with heated rather than cold air, dramatically improving fuel efficiency. Patents for the process were obtained in 1828.
At a temperature of 600 degrees Fahrenheit, the hot-blast process reduced fuel consumption to a third of what cold-blast furnaces required. It also allowed raw coal to be used instead of coke, and made the exploitation of black band ironstone economically viable for the first time.
By 1840, Neilson and his partners were earning thirty thousand pounds per year in royalties from fifty-eight ironmasters. The licence was set at one shilling per ton of iron made, a rate kept deliberately low to discourage evasion.
Neilson v Baird was a patent infringement case heard in the Court of Session in 1843, after the original patent expired in 1842. The trial lasted ten days and cost forty thousand pounds. Further proceedings against Baird resulted in damages awarded to Neilson of one hundred and sixty thousand pounds.
Neilson trained as an engine wright before being appointed foreman of the Glasgow Gasworks in 1817 at age twenty-five. Five years later he became manager and engineer there, a post he held for forty years before retiring in 1847.
Neilson is buried in the family mausoleum at Tongland Kirkyard. His son Walter Montgomerie Neilson erected a monument to his memory on the hill at Queenshill, near Kirkcudbright, in 1883.