Chambers attended the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876, which proved unsuccessful; America had plentiful iron-ore resources that were cheap to smelt and so no interest was shown. Before leaving the US, Chambers heard about a smelting process invented by Joel Wilson of Dover, New Jersey, which proved promising. 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 New Zealand to demonstrate the process and help manage the smelting once the furnace was built. This resulted in a furnace being built in the Onehunga suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. Work was completed in February 1883 at a cost of £500, with its first steel produced on 27 February of that year using sand from North Head of Manukau Heads under a sixty-year contract from the New Zealand government.