Bessemer

Sir Henry Bessemer FRS (19 January 1813 – 15 March 1898) was an English inventor, whose steel-making process would become the most important technique for making steel in the nineteenth century for almost one hundred years from 1856 to 1950.^[2][3] He also played a significant role in establishing the town of Sheffield, nicknamed ‘Steel City’, as a major industrial centre.^[4][5]

Bessemer had been trying to reduce the cost of steel-making for military ordnance, and developed his system for blowing air through molten pig iron to remove the impurities. This made steel easier, quicker and cheaper to manufacture, and revolutionised structural engineering. One of the most significant inventors of the Second Industrial Revolution, Bessemer also made over 100 other inventions in the fields of iron, steel and glass. Unlike many inventors, he managed to bring his own projects to fruition and profited financially from their success. He was knighted for his contribution to science in 1879, and in the same year was made a fellow of the Royal Society.

Father: Anthony Bessemer[]

Bessemer's father, Anthony, was born in London into a Huguenot family, but moved to Paris when he was about 21 years old.^[6] 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,^[7] 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.^[8][9] According to Bessemer he was given his name by his godfather Henry Caslon, who employed his father as a punchcutter.^[10][11]

Early inventions[]

The invention from which Bessemer made his first fortune was a series of six steam-powered machines for making bronze powder, used in the manufacture of gold paint. As he relates in his autobiography,^[12] he examined the bronze powder made in Nuremberg which was the only place where it was made at the time. He then copied and improved the product and made it capable of being made on a simple production line. It was an early example of reverse engineering where a product is analysed, and then reproduced.

The process was kept secret, with only members of his immediate family having access to the factory. The Nuremberg powder, which was made by hand, retailed in London for £5 12s per pound and he eventually reduced the price to half a crown £ – 2 / 6, or about 1/40th.^[13] The profits from sale of the paint allowed him to pursue his other inventions.

Bessemer patented a method for making a continuous ribbon of plate glass in 1848, but it was not commercially successful (see his autobiography, chapter 8). He gained experience in designing furnaces, which was to be of great use for his new steel-making process.

Bessemer process[]

Main article: Bessemer process

Bessemer converter

Henry Bessemer worked on the problem of manufacturing cheap steel for ordnance production from 1850 to 1855 when he patented his method.^[14]

On 24 August 1856 Bessemer first described the process to a meeting of the British Association in Cheltenham which he titled "The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel." It was published in full in The Times. The Bessemer process involved using oxygen in air blown through molten pig iron to burn off the impurities and thus create steel.^[15] James Nasmyth had been working on a similar idea for some time prior to this. A reluctant patentor, and in this instance still working through some problems in his method, Nasmyth abandoned the project after hearing Bessemer at the meeting. Bessemer acknowledged the efforts of Nasmyth by offering him a one-third share of the value of his patent. Nasmyth turned it down as he was about to retire.^[16]

Bessemer converter, Kelham Island Museum, Sheffield, England in 2010

Many industries were constrained by the lack of steel, being reliant on cast iron and wrought iron alone. Examples include railway structures such as bridges and tracks, where the treacherous nature of cast iron was keenly felt by many engineers and designers. There had been many accidents when cast iron beams collapsed suddenly, such as the Dee Bridge disaster of May 1847, the Wootton bridge collapse and the Bull bridge accident of 1860. The problem recurred at the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879, and failures continued until all cast iron under-bridges were replaced by steel structures. Wrought iron structures were much more reliable with very few failures.

Though this process is no longer commercially used, at the time of its invention it was of enormous industrial importance because it lowered the cost of production steel, leading to steel being widely substituted for cast iron and wrought iron. Bessemer's attention was drawn to the problem of steel manufacture in the course of an attempt to improve the construction of guns.^[17]

Implementation[]

Bessemer licensed the patent for his process to five ironmasters, but from the outset, the companies had great difficulty producing good-quality steel.^[18] Mr Göran Fredrik Göransson, a Swedish ironmaster, using the purer charcoal pig iron of that country, was the first to make good steel by the process, but only after many attempts. His results prompted Bessemer to try a purer iron obtained from Cumberland hematite, but even with this he had only limited success^[17] because the quantity of carbon was difficult to control.

Robert Forester Mushet had carried out thousands of experiments at Darkhill Ironworks, in the Forest of Dean, and had shown that the quantity of carbon could be controlled by removing almost all of it from the iron and then adding an exact amount of carbon and manganese, in the form of spiegeleisen. This improved the quality of the finished product and increased its malleability.^[19][20][21]

When Bessemer tried to induce makers to take up his improved system, he met with general rebuffs and was eventually driven to undertake the exploitation of the process himself. He erected steelworks in Sheffield in a business partnership with others, such as W & J Galloway & Sons, and began to manufacture steel. At first the output was insignificant, but gradually the magnitude of the operations was enlarged until the competition became effective, and steel traders generally became aware that the firm of Henry Bessemer & Co. was underselling them to the extent of UK£10–£15 a ton. This argument to the pocket quickly had its effect, and licences were applied for in such numbers that, in royalties for the use of his process, Bessemer received a sum in all considerably exceeding a million pounds sterling.^[17]

However Mushet received nothing and by 1866 was destitute and in ill health. In that year his 16-year-old daughter, Mary, travelled to London alone, to confront Bessemer at his offices, arguing that his success was based on the results of her father's work.^[12] Bessemer decided to pay Mushet an annual pension of £300, a very considerable sum, which he paid for over 20 years, possibly with a view to keeping the Mushets from legal action.^[12] Bessemer also had works in Greenwich, London, adjacent to the River Thames, from about 1865.^[22]

W. M. Lord has said with regard to this success that "Sir Henry Bessemer was somewhat exceptional. He had developed his process from an idea to a practical reality in his own lifetime and he was sufficiently of a businessman to have profited by it. In so many cases, inventions were not developed quickly and the plums went to other persons than the inventors."^[16]

Other inventions[]

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_%27Steel%27_%284671260%29.jpg)

Captioned "Steel", caricature of Bessemer by Leslie Ward in Vanity Fair, 6 November 1880

Bessemer was a prolific inventor and held at least 129 patents, spanning from 1838 to 1883. These included military ordnance, movable dies for embossed postage stamps, a screw extruder to extract sugar from sugar cane, and others in the fields of iron, steel and glass. These are described in some detail in his autobiography.

After suffering from seasickness in 1868, he designed the SS *Bessemer* (also called the "Bessemer Saloon"), a passenger steamship with a cabin on gimbals designed to stay level, however rough the sea, to save her passengers from seasickness. The mechanism – hydraulics controlled by a steersman watching a spirit level – worked in model form and in a trial version built in his garden in Denmark Hill, London. However, it never received a proper seagoing test as, when the ship demolished part of the Calais pier on her maiden voyage, investor confidence was lost and the ship was scrapped.^[23]

Continuous casting[]

Bessemer also obtained a patent in 1857 for the casting of metal between contrarotating rollers – a forerunner of today's continuous casting processes and remarkably, Bessemer's original idea has been implemented in the direct continuous casting of steel strip.

Death[]

Headstone of Sir Henry Bessemer, West Norwood cemetery

Bessemer died in March 1898 at Denmark Hill, London. He is buried in West Norwood cemetery, London SE27. Other influential Victorians such as Sir Henry Tate, Sir Henry Doulton and Baron de Reuters are buried in the same cemetery.

Honours and legacy[]

Bessemer was knighted by Queen Victoria for his contribution to science on 26 June 1879, and in the same year was made a fellow of the Royal Society.^[24] An honorary membership was conferred on Bessemer by the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland in 1891.^[25] In 1895, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[26] Sheffield's Kelham Island Industrial Heritage Museum maintains an early example of a Bessemer converter for public viewing.

A school was named after him in the town of Hitchin, and when the school was demolished in the 1980s the new road built in its place was named Bessemer Close in 1995. Bessemer Way in Rotherham is also named in his honour. In 2009, the public house "The Fountain" in Sheffield city centre 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.

In 2002 the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) was established from mergers encompassing historical organisations including the Iron and Steel Institute, of which Bessemer was president from 1871 to 1873; the latter organisation instituted the Bessemer Gold Medal under his tenure. IOM3 still recognises Bessemer's legacy with an annual award of the medal for outstanding services to the steel industry; recent recipients include Indira Samarasekera.

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. 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.^[27]

Henry Bessemer - Wikipedia

Knowledge Web Content (see main node)

Sir Henry Bessemer

Achievements: Bessemer steel-making process

Born: January 19, 1813; Charlton, Herfordshire, England.

Died: March 15, 1898; London, England (Aged 85)

Field & Discipline: Business; Invention; Engineering 

Education: Local school, Hertfordshire

Major Work:

"The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel Without Fuel" (1856)

"On the Manufacture of Cast Steel" (1865)

Life & Times:

After making pencils from compressed plumbago waste, Bessemer became involved in type-founding and invented a fast type-composing machine, capable of setting five thousand characters an hour.   His next invention came in 1840, when he discovered a new method of making the bronze powder used for gilding.  Gold decorative work was very fashionable at the time and Bessemer’s invention made him rich.

 Toward the end of the 1840s, Bessemer toured Germany on holiday, visiting friends. He went to Cologne,  then travelled up the Rhine to Dusseldorf and Frankfurt, before going on to Nuremberg.  In 1849, he met a Jamaican sugar planter, who told him about production methods in the sugar industry.  Bessemer became convinced he could improve the sugar refining process.  At the Great Exhibition of 1851, he exhibited his process of separating molasses from crystallised sugar, along with a new design for a centrifugal pump.

 Britain became involved in the Crimean War in 1853 and it quickly became obvious that the poor quality of the army's artillery was going to prove critical.  Bessemer set out to find a way to make a gun out of stronger metal.  At the time, the only types of iron used for construction were cast iron and wrought iron. Cast iron was brittle, because of its carbon content, and was generally used for load-bearing constructions like columns.  The carbon could be removed, under a costly process invented by [superseded] Cort* and known as ‘puddling’, which produced wrought iron that, because of its better flexibility, was used for rails and girders.  Steel could then be produced by adding carbon to the purified wrought iron.  At that time, steel was only used for producing light items, like cutlery and tools. Bessemer decided to try and improve cast iron, from which most guns were made, by blending it with steel and, after successfully fusing the metals together, he took out a patent, on 10^th January 1855, for a reverbatory furnace. 

Previously, producing steel was a long and expensive process, which involved heating bars of wrought iron for six weeks in burning charcoal, so that they could absorb carbon from the charcoal.  Then the bars were broken up and melted in crucibles, before being poured into ingot moulds.  The amount of steel produced depended on how many crucibles a steelworks could put into operation.  Bessemer wanted to bypass the crucible process, so he had to find a metal that could be run straight into the moulds.  He found that, when a blast of air was forced through molten iron, oxygen combined with the waste products, which could be removed as slag, or, in the case of carbon, be expelled as a gas.  The heat generated by the process was enough to keep the metal in a molten state, ready for the moulds.

He presented his famous paper,  describing the process, to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856.  Unfortunately, the first steel he produced by the Bessemer process contained blowholes caused by excess oxygen, making the metal brittle.  A solution to the problem was fond when, in the same year, [process improved by] Mushet*, the son of a British ironmaster, found that if ‘speigel’, an alloy of manganese and iron, was added to the process, it would remove the excess of oxygen.

Spiegel not only had a de-gasifying effect but, as a recarburizer, it could be used to adjust the carbon content of the steel. Bessemer acknowledged the effectiveness of Mushet's contribution, but spiegel was only used to make steel products with a high carbon content.

Bessemer licensed his process to ironmasters around the country, but they soon ran into problems with the presence of phosphorus and sulphur in the metal, which contributed to sub-standard steel.  He recalled the licenses, then found a form of iron ore which was relatively phosphorus free.  In 1858, Bessemer established his steel works in Sheffield, Yorkshire, where gun-making became a speciality and in 1863, the company branched out into shipbuilding and the production of rail tracks.

The first American steel works using the Bessemer process were opened in1865 and, by the end of the century giant steel firms, like [process used by] Bethlehem Steel* and [process used by] Carnegie’s, had developed.  Bessemer’s contribution to the United States metal industry was so great that six towns and one county were named after him.  In Britain, [superseded by] William Siemens* introduced his regenerative gas furnace.  This was first used for steel production in 1865 and it eventually replaced the Bessemer process.

In 1879, Bessemer was knighted and he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and, that same year, Sidney Thomas and his nephew [nephew was] Gilchrist* developed a furnace lining which removed phosphorus and made it possible to use phosphoric ores in the manufacture of steel.

Extra Connections: His process was introduced to Germany by [process used by] Krupp*

He persuaded [sold process to] Napoleon III* to use his process

His process was used by [process used by] John Brown & Co* shipbuilders.

ASSESSEMENT: Bessemer became a pioneer in British and American steel production, by developing the first low-cost manufacturing method.

Oneliner: Henry Bessemer, inventor of steel-making process

Bibliography:

• Bessemer, Henry,Sir Henry Bessemer, FRS, An Autobiography, Engineering, London 1905.
• Dictionary of National Biography.

Wikipedia Bessemer Process

Henry Bessemer

Language: English

Father: Anthony Bessemer

Mother: Unknown.

Siblings: Unknown.

Spouse: Anne Allen.

Children: Two sons and one daughter.