William Franklin Durfee was born in 1833 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of William and Alice Sherman (Talbot) Durfee. His father, a carpenter by trade, acquired a wide reputation for his ability in erecting buildings of large dimensions. A steel furnace, erected for Anderson & Woods in Pittsburgh, in 1868, was one of his achievements.
William received a practical mechanical training under the tutelage of his father and then took a course of special study in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard.
At the age of twenty Durfee established himself as an engineer and architect in New Bedford, and soon received an appointment as city surveyor.
In 1861 he served in the state legislature. As secretary of the military committee, he was active in forwarding legislation for the equipment of troops at the beginning of the Civil War.
While holding this office he introduced a resolution requesting Congress to repeal “all laws which deprive any class of loyal subjects of the Government from bearing arms for the common defense”. This is said to have been the first definite proposal for the arming of colored troops.
In 1862, at the invitation of his cousin, Z. S. Durfee and the latter’s partner, Capt. E. B. Ward, he went to the Lake Superior district to undertake to test the suitability of certain ores of that district for the manufacture of steel by the process invented by William Kelly, and almost identical with the Bessemer process.
He designed the machinery and apparatus necessary to test the merits of the Kelly process on a large scale, and superintended the construction of a plant at Wyandotte, Michigan, ten miles from Detroit, which was opened in the fall of 1864. Here, in September of that year, he supervised the making of the first Bessemer steel produced in America. From this steel, on May 25, 1865, the first American steel rails were rolled. Durfee also established in connection with the plant at Wyandotte a steelworks analytical laboratory, the first ever built in the United States. This achievement alone would have made him a memorable figure in American industrial progress. Upon leaving the Wyandotte works, he built the Bayview Merchant Mill at Milwaukee.
Later he became connected with the Wheeler & Wilson Company at Bridgeport, building for them at Ansonia, Connecticut, the first furnace for refining copper by the use of gaseous fuel ever constructed in the United States.
While he was at Bridgeport he became general manager of a company that controlled patents for the production of castings in wrought iron, and he helped to develop a machine for the production of horseshoe nails. He had a gift for machinery design which he could readily turn to practical advantage, and he found a place for it continually in the various later connections of his life, such as the Pennsylvania Drill Company at Birdsboro, and the C. W. Hunt Company on Staten Island for which he acted as shop superintendent.
Technical papers which he found time to write were published in the proceedings and publications of the societies to which he belonged, such as the Iron & Steel Institute, the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. To this latter organization he bequeathed his extensive library, rich in mechanical antiquities collected throughout a lifetime, and it may now be found as a part of the Engineering Societies Library in New York City.
Durfee had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the history and past achievements of engineering and combined a talent for research work with his more practical ability.
In in 1880 Durfee married Annie Swift of Boston.
