Henry Bessemer

English inventor and metallurgist

• Born: January 19, 1813
• Birthplace: Charlton, Hertfordshire, England
• Died: March 15, 1898
• Place of death: London, England

Bessemer advanced the field of metallurgy by developing the Bessemer process for purifying molten iron. This process cut in half the cost of steel, made possible a great increase in production, and ushered in the “Age of Steel.”

Early Life

Henry Bessemer was born on January 19, 1813, in Charlton in Hertfordshire, just north of London, where his father, Anthony Bessemer, was an engineer and typefounder. Young Bessemer grew up in his father’s shops and, aside from an elementary education in local schools, soon demonstrated the initiative, inventiveness, and artistic talent that had characterized his parent. Anthony had moved to Holland from London as a young engineer, helping to erect the first steam pumping engine there, and went on to Paris to become a member of the French Academy of Sciences because of his skills, including engraving, die-sinking, and the invention of a copying machine. The French Revolution forced the family to flee to England, where the elder Bessemer started a firm making gold chains and then with William Caslon turned to manufacturing in the more profitable line of typefounding. Until the age of seventeen, Henry labored in his father’s workshop in Charlton; in 1830, his family moved to London, where he began his own trade in artwork of white metal.

At the age of twenty, in 1833, Bessemer married Anne Allen, daughter of Richard Allen of Amersham, in London; their marriage proved to be a long and happy one; she lived until June, 1897, less than a year before he died. They had two sons and a daughter who lived into the twentieth century. Anne’s three brothers joined her husband in his bronze and steel enterprises: John and Richard Allen managed the secret operations of the bronze works that Henry eventually turned over to Richard; William D. Allen aided in the steel experiments and then ran the steelworks at Sheffield. The Bessemers spent most of their lives in three homes: first the Baxter House, at St. Pancras, to which were added large buildings for Bessemer’s experimental work and the bronze factory; then Charlton, a country house and grounds; and finally, Denmark Hill, a home he enlarged with spacious grounds and gardens.

Photographs of Bessemer depict a man with a stern countenance, a short neck, and heavy eyebrows and side whiskers beneath a balding crown.

Life’s Work

Three major inventions occupied most of Bessemer’s active life. His first activities in artwork in white metal led him into copper-coating castings and then embossing metals, cards, and fabrics. He showed some of his work at exhibitions of the Royal Academy at Somerset House. There, Sir Charles Presley accepted his suggestion that forging and reusing old stamps on deeds and documents could be permanently halted by use of a perforated die with a date so that each parchment or paper would be pierced by the application of the government stamp. Bessemer was promised a government job in return for his invention, which was to save the British government an estimated 100,000 pounds annually. Months passed, however, and Bessemer was never rewarded for the new government stamp, which was installed by an act of Parliament on August 29, 1833. Years later, when the British ambassador refused him permission to accept the Grand Cross of the French Legion of Honor, Bessemer sought and received recognition for his invention. He was granted a knighthood in 1879.

During the 1830’s, Bessemer also worked successfully on compressing plumbago dust into marking material for cheaper black-lead pencils. He then designed a machine to make type for printers and later created a type-composing machine with a pianolike keyboard for James Young, who patented the device. He also created a device and method for stamping or embossing on Utrecht velvet.

Bessemer’s second great invention he dared not patent, but kept as a family secret for more than thirty-five years at great profit to himself and his brothers-in-law, who ran a plant for making bronze powder from solid brass. Replacing the secret pounding process of the German and Oriental suppliers of these “gold” powders—used to tint paints of all kinds—Bessemer devised a way of cutting tiny flakes from a solid bar of brass on a lathe, polishing and tinting them, and finally blowing them into graded sizes.

What was most impressive about Bessemer’s bronze-powder project was the extreme secrecy essential to designing the entire series of shop machines and equipment for the bronze manufacturing process. To prevent anyone from learning about the secret process, Bessemer had to design each part of each machine personally, then send each part to be manufactured to different firms in four different cities. Later, he and his relatives assembled the entire lot in the closed buildings erected behind his Baxter House. With only a few modifications, the entire plant was started without trouble, and the tiny bottles of various colored bronze powder were sold for high profits by the family. Bessemer’s income alone was large enough to finance his experiments for the rest of his career.

In 1849, the British inventor met a Jamaican sugar-planter who told him of the problems involved in crushing sugar juices from the stocks of cane. When the Society of Arts and Prince Albert offered a gold medal for the person who could effect the greatest improvement in sugarcane production, Bessemer began a serious effort to solve those problems. Instead of the traditional rolling action of sugar mills, he developed a lightweight, movable press with hydraulic pressure that compressed six-inch lengths of cane, producing a higher percentage of sugar than any other sugar mill. He patented the first of thirteen sugar-related inventions in 1849 and won the Gold Medal the next year.

At the London Crystal Palace International Exhibition in 1851, Bessemer exhibited his version of an early centrifugal pump, which he had patented two years earlier. He spent many hours each week as a consultant to other inventors and manufacturers who came to his office for advice.

The famous Bessemer process for making steel was his most important invention, for which the Patent Office of Great Britain granted him patent number 356, dated February 12, 1856. Between 1853 and 1883, Bessemer won more than seventy-five patents in England for making iron and steel, for construction of the Bessemer converter, and for numerous soft steel products that evolved from his extensive experimentation.

During the 1850’s, Bernard was already a well-established inventor. He turned his attention to finding a cheaper way to make malleable iron. Cast-iron (twelve-pounder) cannon used in the Crimean War were not strong enough to fire the twenty-four-pound and thirty-pound revolving projectiles that Bessemer had presented to the French government. Nevertheless, Bessemer’s projectile had proven itself; he came home with a burning desire to develop metal to build stronger cannon. While testing his small open-hearth furnace (some ten years before the Siemens-Martin patent on the open-hearth method of steelmaking), Bessemer accidentally discovered what he thought were two unmelted pieces of pig iron at the mouth of the furnace. Examination of them indicated that “they were merely thin shells of decarburized iron… showing that atmospheric air alone was capable of wholly decarburizing grey pig iron, and converting it into malleable iron without puddling or any other manipulation.”

Further trials led Bessemer to create a new style “Bessemer Converter,” with a movable furnace that tipped on its side while loading hot pig iron or pouring molten steel but that turned upright during the thirty-minute heating process. Air was forced into the furnace from the bottom below the melted pig iron, gradually consuming the silicon. As the carbon in the iron was burned, it created a much-intensified heat that purified the iron into steel. That first successful melting of pig iron into steel was exciting to the British inventor, and he reflected the wonderment of that event in his autobiography: “All this was a revelation to me, as I had in no way anticipated such violent results.”

Bernard invited his friend George Rennie, an engineer, to see the process and Rennie persuaded Bessemer to present his discovery to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, on August 13, 1856. The complete address, titled “The Manufacture of Iron Without Fuel,” was published in The Times of London on August 14, and within a few weeks Bessemer sold licenses to British ironmasters worth more than twenty-seven thousand pounds. This money repaid much of his costs and contributed to further research that gradually made the process commercially successful.

Within the next several years, Bessemer overcame many serious problems still plaguing his steelmaking process. Obtaining quantities of phosphorous-free iron for British steel manufacturers forced him to import Swedish ore until he could get pig iron from British mines refined sufficiently to make mild steel. He learned to add ferromanganese or spiegeleisen to remove excess oxygen, a technique patented by Robert Forester Mushet in 1856 in England (Bessemer claimed that he had previously developed the process but later granted Mushet an annual allowance as partial settlement of his claims). Eventually, Bessemer furnaces were lined with a special fire brick that aided in the removal of phosphorous; after 1878, the more widely available phosphorous iron ores expanded the tonnage of Bessemer steel production.

Much like Thomas Edison, Bessemer quickly turned many of his inventions into commercial enterprises, thereby accumulating a small fortune. In 1858, he founded his own steel plant at Sheffield. There, he designed all the supplementary equipment to support the Bessemer furnaces; in 1860, he was granted a patent on his movable converter with hydraulic controls. The five partners, including Bessemer and his brother-in-law William D. Allen, who ran the works, eventually sold the plant after fourteen years “for exactly twenty-four times the amount of the whole subscribed capital of the firm, notwithstanding that we had divided in profits during the partnership a sum equal to fifty-seven times the gross capital.” As production increased during the 1860’s and 1870’s, the price of Bessemer steel dropped rapidly. The transportation industries were the first to benefit.

The first steel rail, laid down as a test between two iron rails, was installed on May 9, 1862, at the busy Camden Goods Station of the London and North-Western Railway; it outlasted iron rails by seven times in two years and was only slightly worn when exhibited at a trade show. The railroad industry of Europe and the United States soon adopted the new steel rails at great savings and with added safety.

While boiler plate made from steel soon became an important use of the more durable metal in steam locomotives and steamships, the development of steel for shipbuilding, particularly for the rise of new naval vessels with protective armor plate, consumed millions of tons of steel. In 1863, at the age of fifty, Bessemer saw the first Bessemer steel used in the construction of a steel steamship.

At the end of the Civil War, the first Bessemer works built in the United States were opened by A. L. Holley at Troy, New York, in 1865. He had gone to England in 1864 and purchased the license to make steel under the Bessemer process and the right to use the Bessemer converter and machinery. A Michigan firm, however, had obtained the Mushet patent rights for the United States to use along with the Kelly Pneumatic Process, patented by the American inventor of a similar steel process. Consolidation of the two firms led to the construction of the Wyandotte Iron Works near Detroit, which made the steel rolled into rails by the North Chicago Rolling Mill on November 24, 1865, for track of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad.

William Kelly in Eddyville, Kentucky, had worked seven or more years near the Ohio River making malleable iron for sugar kettles for farmers and boiler plate for Cincinnati steamboat builders. After 1851, he erected a series of converters and learned that the carbon in pig iron could be burned out by air alone, because the carbon itself acted as a fuel if heated enough. When he learned that Bessemer had been granted a United States patent on November 11, 1856, Kelly quickly filed his own claim and on July 23, 1857, he was awarded a patent and an interference that placed his claim ahead of Bessemer. Unfortunately, in the Panic of 1857, Kelly went bankrupt and eventually lost all chance of income from his pioneering work.

Significance

At the age of fifty-nine, Sir Henry Bessemer retired from all business enterprises and devoted nearly a quarter of a century to four new pursuits: construction of an observatory and telescope, experiments with a solar furnace, installation of a diamond-polishing factory for his grandson, and his autobiography.

Many honors and awards were presented to Bessemer in his lifetime. Perhaps the highest was also the longest in coming, for on June 26, 1879, he was knighted by Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle for his unpatented invention of a stamp for dating government documents and deeds. The French government offered Bessemer the Legion of Honor award in 1856, but he was not allowed to accept it by his own nation. The Society of Arts conferred upon him its Albert Gold Medal in 1872 for his achievements in steel manufacturing. He was one of the founders of the Iron and Steel Institute and served for a time as its president; he established the Bessemer Gold Medal of that body to be granted to distinguished metallurgists of the world thereafter. In 1877, Bessemer was elected to the Institution of Civil Engineers; in 1879, he was made a Fellow in the Royal Society of London. Many other societies made him an honorary member for his inventions; at least six steelmaking towns and counties in the United States were named for him.

Within fifty-six years he was awarded 114 patents by the British Patent office, a record of achievement that reflects the ingenuity of the man and the spirit of inquiry that motivated him far beyond any monetary rewards.

Bibliography

Bessemer, Sir Henry. Sir Henry Bessemer, F.R.S.: An Autobiography. London: Offices of “Engineering,” 1905. This autobiography, with a concluding chapter by Bessemer’s son, is a rambling collection of the inventor’s reminiscences and letters about his unique experiments, discoveries, patents, and manufacturing ventures. Development of the Bessemer process for making steel is related in two hundred of the 380 pages of text; numerous illustrations and fifty plates help make this volume the major source of all that has been written about the process and the inventor.

Bodsworth, C., ed. Sir Henry Bessemer: Father of the Steel Industry. London: IOM Communications, 1998. Collection of essays commemorating the centenary of Bessemer’s death. The essays discuss the significance of Bessemer’s achievements. Illustrated with photographs and drawings.

Boucher, John N. William Kelly: A True History of the So-called Bessemer Process. Greensburg, Pa.: Private printing, 1924. This biography presents an American counterclaim that William Kelly of Eddyville, Kentucky, a native of Pittsburgh, discovered and used the “pneumatic process” successfully in converting molten pig iron into malleable iron (steel) at least seven years before Bessemer patented his process. The United States Patent Office upheld Kelly’s claim and granted him a patent in 1857, but the British exports of Bessemer rails and Bessemer converters swamped the American market and Kelly’s bankruptcy prevented him from gaining any financial rewards for his achievements in the Ohio Valley.

Boyns, T., ed. The Steel Industry. 4 vols. New York: I. B. Tauris, 1997. Comprehensive history contains information in volumes 1 and 2 about the steel industry in nineteenth century England.

Derry, T. K., and Trevor I. Williams. A Short History of Technology: From the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1961. This text is a sequel to the five-volume A History of Technology (see below). Good coverage of the Industrial Revolution and a chapter on “Coal and the Metals” includes developments in the making of inexpensive steel. Comparative tables showing chronological events of technological achievements in Great Britain, the Continent, and the United States, along with a selected bibliography for each chapter, enhance this introductory study.

Singer, Charles, ed. A History of Technology. 5 vols. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1954-1958. Volume 5 covers the late nineteenth century, 1850 to 1900; chapter 3, on the steel industry, is especially useful. The impact of Bessemer’s inventions in the steel industry is best seen in histories of the railroads, steamshipping, and structural steel industries, which burgeoned as a result of the manufacture of low-priced steel. The Bessemer process dominated the production of steel until the turn of the century; after 1900, the Siemens-Martin open-hearth process outstripped both the tonnage and cost of Bessemer process steel.