Henry Bessemer

Henry Bessemer (born January 19, 1813, Charlton, Hertfordshire, England—died March 15, 1898, London) inventor and engineer who developed the first process for manufacturing steel inexpensively (1856), leading to the development of the Bessemer converter. He was knighted in 1879.

Bessemer was the son of an engineer and typefounder. He early showed considerable mechanical skill and inventive powers. After the invention of movable stamps for dating deeds and other government documents and the improvement of a typesetting machine, he went to the manufacture of “gold” powder from brass for use in paints. The florid decoration of the time demanded great quantities of such material, and Bessemer’s secret process soon brought him great wealth.

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He developed other inventions, notably sugarcane-crushing machinery of advanced design, but he was soon devoted to metallurgy. In his time there were but two iron-based construction materials: cast iron made by the treatment of iron ore with coke in the blast furnace and wrought iron made from cast iron in primitive furnaces by the laborious manual process of “puddling” (stirring the melted iron to remove carbon and raking off the slag). Cast iron was excellent for load-bearing purposes, such as columns or bridge piers, and for engine parts, but for girders and other spans, and particularly for rails, only wrought iron was suitable. Puddling removed carbon, which makes cast iron brittle, and produced a material that could be rolled or forged, but only in “blooms,” or large lumps of 100–200 pounds, and that was full of slag. The blooms had to be laboriously forged together by steam hammers before they could be rolled to any useful length or shape. The only material known as steel was made by adding carbon to pure forms of wrought iron, also by slow and discontinuous methods; the material was hard, would take an edge, and was used almost entirely for cutting tools.

During the Crimean War, Bessemer invented an elongated artillery shell that was rotated by the powder gases. The French authorities with whom he was negotiating, however, pointed out that their cast-iron cannon would not be strong enough for this kind of shell. He thereupon attempted to produce a stronger cast iron. In his experiments he discovered that the excess oxygen in the hot gases of his furnace appeared to have removed the carbon from the iron pigs that were being preheated—much as the carbon is removed in a puddling furnace—leaving a skin of pure iron. Bessemer then found that blowing air through melted cast iron not only purified the iron but also heated it further, allowing the purified iron to be easily poured. This heating effect is caused by the reaction of oxygen with the carbon and silicon in the iron. Using these new techniques, which later became known as the Bessemer process, he was soon able to produce large, slag-free ingots as workable as any wrought-iron bloom, and far larger; he invented the tilting converter into which molten pig iron could be poured before air was blown in from below. Eventually, with the aid of an iron-manganese alloy, which was developed at that time by Robert Forester Mushet, Bessemer also found how to remove excess oxygen from the decarburized iron.

His announcement of the process in 1856 before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, brought many ironmasters to his door, and many licenses were granted. Very soon, however, it became clear that two elements harmful to iron, phosphorus and sulfur, were not removed by the process—or at least not by the fireclay lining of Bessemer’s converter. It was not until about 1877 that the British metallurgist Sidney Gilchrist Thomas developed a lining that removed phosphorus and made possible the use of phosphoric ores of the Continent.

Bessemer had, unknown to himself, been using phosphorus-free iron, but the ironmasters were not so lucky. Their iron was perfectly satisfactory for the puddling process, in which phosphorus is removed because the temperatures are lower, but it could not be used in the Bessemer process. Bessemer was forced to call in his licenses and find a phosphorus-free source of iron in northwestern England; thus he was able to enter the steel market on his own. Once the phosphorus problem was recognized and solved, he became a licensor once again, and vast profits flowed in. It became clear that “mild steel”—as it was known to distinguish it from the hard tool steels—could more clearly and reliably be used in place of wrought iron for ship plate, girders, sheet, rods, wire, rivets, and other items. The invention of the open-hearth (Siemens-Martin) process in the late 1860s eventually outstripped that of the Bessemer process. This has now yielded place, in great measure, to oxygen steelmaking, which is a further development and refinement of the Bessemer process.

In his later years—the process had not become a clear success until he was nearing 70—Bessemer continued to invent and make discoveries. The solar furnace he built was more than a successful toy; he designed and built an astronomical telescope for his own amusement; and he developed a set of machines for polishing diamonds that helped to reestablish that trade in London. However, the passenger ship he designed with a main cabin mounted on gimbals to prevent seasickness was not a success.

Apart from his knighthood, he received many honours, such as the Fellowship of the Royal Society. Bessemer’s An Autobiography (1905), with a concluding chapter by his son, Henry Bessemer, is the only comprehensive biography and the source of most material written about him since.