 "Heylyn and Frye do not appear to have had a factory of their own, but probably carried on their experiments at a factory already existing at Bow, having first secured the services of a well-skilled workman whose name has not been preserved, and who may have been the real inventor of English porcelain," a writer noted in 1911.But although the scale of production hardly amounts to a successful commercial enterprise, in recent years scientific analysis of various pieces, some excavated, that do not fit the traditional narrative of the earliest days of English porcelain, have suggested to some researchers that not only was there earlier production of porcelain, but that one formula produced the earliest hard-paste porcelain made in England, some two decades before Plymouth porcelain.The earliest Bow porcelains are of soft-paste incorporating bone ash, forming a phosphatic body that was a precursor of bone china.