Alexander Lyman Holley was born on July 20, 1832 in Lakeville, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of Alexander H. and Jane M. (Lyman) Holley. His father was a manufacturer of cutlery with a large establishment in Lakeville, and was governor of Connecticut in 1857.
Holley was educated in academies in Salisbury and Farmington, Connecticut, and Stockbridge, Massachussets, then prepared for college under a private tutor and entered Brown University in the autumn of 1850.
At a very early age Holley gave evidence of a keenly observant mind and an inborn talent for drawing. As early as his tenth year he was familiar with the machinery in his father's knife manufactory and sketched it in great detail. Besides his skill in drawing, he developed a literary talent while still in preparatory school and published a number of school papers. He wrote and sold, before he entered college, "An Essay on Pen and Pocket Cutlery, " which was published in Henry V. Poor's American Railroad Journal. During his college career, which was brilliant, he continued his work of drawing, particularly locomotives. He invented, too, a steam-engine cut-off which was described by him in Appletons' Mechanics' Magazine and Engineers' Journal, July 1852.
Upon graduating in 1853, Holley entered the shops of Corliss & Nightingale, Providence, Rhode Island, as a draftsman and machinist, and worked especially on an experimental locomotive equipped with the Corliss valve gearing. In 1855 he joined the New Jersey Locomotive Works at Jersey City, New Jersey. Here he met Zerah Colburn, the superintendent, who was also the publisher of the Railroad Advocate, for which magazine Holley had written articles while with the Corliss company. Shortly after this meeting, Colburn sold the Advocate to Holley, who thereupon gave up his locomotive work and published Holley's Railroad Advocate until the financial crash of 1857. Holley and Colburn then induced a number of railroad presidents to send them abroad to study European railroad practice. Their report appeared in 1858 under the title, The Permanent Way and Coal-burning Locomotive Boilers of European Railways, with a Comparison of the Working Economy of European and American Lines and the Principles upon Which Improvement Must Proceed. It reflected much credit upon the authors and was profusely illustrated with Holley's own drawings, but to sell it Holley had to resort literally to house-to-house canvassing. About this time he met Henry J. Raymond, founder and editor of the New York Times, who immediately attached Holley to his staff, and between 1858 and 1875 the latter wrote nearly three hundred articles for this newspaper. He was also, during this period, technical editor of the American Railway Review, and, in addition, he wrote and published in 1860 American and European Railway Practice.
Although he had thoroughly established himself as a technical writer, Holley was ambitious to engage in more original engineering work. Accordingly, about 1861 he undertook the redesign of a locomotive for the Camden & Amboy Railroad and then joined Edwin A. Stevens, founder of Stevens Institute, Hoboken, New Jersey, in the latter's work on a floating gun battery. Holley made several trips to Europe seeking information in ordnance and armor for Stevens and while in England in 1862 he first learned of and investigated Henry Bessemer's newly invented process for making steel. On his return to the United States he interested Corning, Winslow & Company in the Bessemer process, and in May 1863 returned to England and bought for them the American rights to the patent. He was then engaged to design and build a Bessemer steel plant, and after bringing about a combination between the holders of the Bessemer patents and the holders of the conflicting American patents of William Kelly, he built a plant at Troy, New York, which he put into successful operation in 1865. From this time on, the career of Holley was substantially the history of Bessemer steel manufacture in the United States.
In 1867 he designed and built a Bessemer plant at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A year later he rebuilt the plant at Troy. Still later he planned the works at North Chicago and Joliet, the Edgar Thomson Works at Pittsburgh, and the Vulcan Works at St. Louis, besides acting as consulting engineer in the design of the Cambria Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and Scranton Steel works. He became the foremost steel-plant engineer and designer in the United States and, because of his original improvements in design whereby the manufacture of steel on a large scale could be accomplished, he is today recognized as the father of modern American steel manufacture.
Besides the patent for his steam-engine cut-off, which he received while in college, Holley obtained fourteen others, of which ten were for improvements in the Bessemer process and plant.
Holley developed ideas and concepts that directly influenced both education and industry for decades beyond his death. He was notable for his work for the steelmaker Corning, Winslow & Company, and his design of a new plant in Troy, New York was the first in the United States to begin steel production by the Bessemer process. He made significant improvements in the converter, and he designed numerous large steelworks in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Missouri, among other locations. During the whole of his extremely busy engineering life he was engaged in literary work and in addition to writing many articles for popular magazines and technical journals prepared and read many technical papers before the various engineering societies. The Holley medal is now given out by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in his honor. He received many honors, including being made an honorary member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1892; and in 1890 a monument was unveiled in Washington Square Park, New York bearing a bust of him.
Holley was a member of the American Institute of Mining Engineers and its president in 1876; a founder of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; a member of the British Iron and Steel Institute, and of the Institution of Civil Engineers in England. He was a trustee of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a member of the United States Board for Testing Structural Materials.
Among engineers, Holley’s enthusiasm was contagious, his eloquence captivating, and his character commanding. He was practical, aiming to simplify, to facilitate, to save labor, and to economize.
Holley was married to Mary Slade of New York City, who with two daughters survived him.
