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Sir Henry Bessemer was an English inventor, whose steelmaking process would become the most important technique for making steel in the nineteenth century for almost one century from year 1856 to 1950.
Background
Henry Bessemer was born January 19, 1813, in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Bessemer's father, Anthony, was born in London, but moved to Paris when he was 21 years old. He was an inventor who, while engaged by the Paris Mint, made a machine for making medallions that could produce steel dies from a larger model. He became a member of the French Academy of Science, for his improvements to the optical microscope when he was 26. He was forced to leave Paris by the French Revolution, and returned to Britain. There he invented a process for making gold chains, which was successful, and enabled him to buy a small estate in the village of Charlton, near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, where Henry was born.
Education
He left school to work for his father, a typefounder.
Career
In 1830 Bessemer set up his own business in London for producing art-metals, fusible alloys, and bronze powder. He was a prolific inventor, both before and after his key contribution to the iron and steel industries. He invented machines for composing type and for working graphite for pencils.
In 1854, following the rejection of an artillery invention, Bessemer sought an iron tougher than any then available and experimentally fused blister steel with pig iron. Apparently it was during these trials that he noted the effect of air in removing carbon from iron, a process essential for its conversion to steel. In 1855 he successfully produced a low-grade steel from molten pig iron in a side-blown fixed converter without any external source of heat. Bessemer patented the process in 1856 and described it in a paper, "Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel." Attracted by the promise of economy in time, labor, and fuel, many wrought-iron producers tried the process; all reported total failure to produce any useful material.
Bessemer, dumbfounded and discredited, sought both cause and cure. The principal causes were twofold: the "blow" left the metal full of oxygen, and typical British pig irons were phosphorus-rich. Both led to brittleness in forging. The former fault was recognized and cured by Robert Forester Mushet, while Bessemer's Swedish licensee, G. Göransson, established that phosphorus was the other trouble, but no immediate cure was forthcoming. Bessemer and his associates set up a steelworks in Sheffield in 1858, using phosphorus-free ore from Sweden and one part of England. There the familiar bottom blown tilting converter, in which the air blast supports the molten metal, was introduced in 1860, but Bessemer was unable to raise much new support among ironmasters.
By 1879, when Gilchrist and Thomas showed that phosphorus could be removed by using basic instead of acidic furnace linings and fluxes, the open-hearth steelmaking process, with its ability to accept cold scrap in the charge, had become established in Britain. Thus British steelmakers have never greatly utilized either acid or basic Bessemer plants; much of Europe and America, with their then less-developed iron industries, widely adopted the basic Bessemer process. In the United States part of the Bessemer process had been patented by William Kelly, and dual licenses were needed for its operation there. Any personal connection between these two men in their inventions seems most unlikely. Despite its initial drawbacks, the process made Bessemer a millionaire. Today Bessemer steelmaking is rapidly giving way to various oxygen steelmaking methods.
Bessemer died in London on March 15, 1898.
Achievements
That a man who did so much for industrial development did not receive higher recognition from his own government was a source of deep regret for English engineers, who alluded to the fact that in the United States, where the Bessemer process found much use, eight cities or towns bore his name.
The English inventor Sir Henry Bessemer was a pioneer in the manufacture of inexpensive steel through his development of the steelmaking process which bears his name. He also played a significant role in establishing the town of Sheffield as a major industrial centre.
One of the most significant innovators of the Second Industrial Revolution, Bessemer also made over 100 other inventions in the fields of iron, steel and glass. Unlike most inventors, he managed to bring his own projects to fruition and profited financially from their success.
Bessemer was knighted by Queen Victoria for his contribution to science on 26 June 1879.
Sheffield's Kelham Island Industrial Heritage Museum maintains an early example of a Bessemer Converter for public viewing. A street was named after him in the town of Hitchin (Bessemer Close) bordering the village of Ickleford in 1995, and Bessemer Way in Rotherham is so named in his honour.
In 2003 Bessemer was named among the top 10 technological innovators in Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B. C. to 1950.
In 2009, the public house "The Fountain" in Sheffield city center was renamed "The Bessemer" in homage to Henry Bessemer, who had a huge impact on the Steel City's development. In Workington, Cumbria, the local Wetherspoons pub is now named after him.
Quotations:
“I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right. ”
"I was quite unable to make any white metal alloy hard enough to be made into powder by my machinery. "
"It is true I had been successful on a small scale in overcoming one of the main difficulties in the new process, but there was still much to invent, and much that at that period I necessarily knew nothing about. "
"In such a case secrecy must be absolute to be effective, and although mere vague curiosity induced many persons of my intimate acquaintance to ask to be allowed to just go in and have a peep, I never admitted anyone. "
"I fear this little episode does not speak very favourably for my business capacity in those early days, for I certainly ought to have made much more than I did by this really important invention. "
"I had now arrived at my seventeenth year, and had attained my full height, a fraction over six feet. I was well endowed with youthful energy, and was of an extremely sanguine temperament. "
Membership
In 1879 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society.
The Honorary Membership was conferred on Bessemer by the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland in 1891. In 1895, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Royal Society
1879
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1895
Connections
Henry Bessemer married Ann Bessemer in 1834.
Father:
Anthony Bessemer
Anthony Bessemer was a British engineer and industrialist, who spent large portions of his life in the Netherlands and France before returning to live in London and Hertfordshire.
