“I had no fixed ideas... and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right."
Sir Henry Bessemer
English engineer Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) was an inventor for all of his adult life. At seventeen he devised a counterfeit-proof embossed stamp for title deeds. He held more than 100 patents, including making lead for pencils, brass powder for use as "gold" paint, a hydraulic machine for extracting juice from sugar cane, and, most famously, the Bessemer process.
The Bessemer process was basically a considerably cheaper, faster, and more efficient way of making steel than the method then in use. Before Bessemer devised his process, steel was made by adding carbon to wrought iron. This process could take up to a week of continuous heat to produce and reguired immense amounts of fuel. The cost of steel for structural use in bridges or buildings, or on any mass-production scale, was therefore prohibitive.
Bessemer experimented with pig iron—a product of smelting iron ore that has a carbon content higher than that of steel—to see if he could remove the impurities and make steel. He finally realized that by blowing air through molten pig iron many of the impurities were removed by oxidation, leaving behind steel. He patented his idea in 1855 and it became known as the Bessemer process. Performed in large containers called Bessemer converters, the process made it possible to produce 30 tons of steel in about twenty minutes instead of a week.
The Bessemer process had a dramatic effect on the price and amount of steel, which had many applications in the buildings, weaponry, and machines of the Industrial Revolution. A similar process was discovered independently by U.S. metallurgist William Kelly.
