Henry Bessemer Henry Bessemer, who was born on January 19, 1813, inherited his love ofinventing from his father. Old Bessemer had worked in Holland and helped tobuild the first steam-engine in that country. Later he designed a new kindof lathe and made some other inventions while he was in France before theFrench Revolution of 1848. Henry has born in a small village near Hitchin, in Hertfordshire. He nevercared much for toys or games or for playing with other children and lovedto watch the old flour mill in operation down by the water. At an early age Henry became interested in drawing. He spent hours in thefields where he sketched the farm animals or the leaves of trees. He soonbecame very good at modeling as well. As he grew older, he longed to try his hand at making moulds of his modelsand then casting them in his father’s foundry. But his father did not allowhim to enter the foundry alone. He allowed him to enter it only when hehimself was three. This was because he did not want other people to knowabout the technicalities of this work. But Henry ignored this rule andevery two months when the large melting furnace was used found his awayinto the melting house. He was usually discovered, but he not only managedto do his casting but also discovered his father’s production secrets. Old Bessemer soon understood that his little son was really very muchinterested in metals, and then he began to encourage him and to teach him.
[pic] Bessemer’s artillery
Henry went to school. When he was fifteen he asked his father to let himleave school and work in his foundry: he wanted to learn more about metals.And his father agreed.
Henry loved his work. The experience also gave him a useful insight intotechnical draughtsmanship, and important branch of an inventor’s work, atwhich, with his natural gift for drawing, he soon excelled. After about ayear Henry knew enough to begin to make articles of his own invention. Oneof these articles was a small machine for moulding tiny bricks out of whitepipeclay. The bricks were quite useless, but young Bessemer was proud ofhis work.First Inventions
Early in 1830, when Henry was seventeen, his father decided to leaveCarlton where they then lived and to transfer his business to London. Henrywas very glad when he was told of his father’s plan. In London he decided to become an inventor. For a time he had many andvaried ideas, but he failed to realize them. First he tried to cast metalornaments in brass instead of in dull lead. He sold some of his newornaments to gift shops, but he made only a small profit. Bessemer then turned his attention to designing a new typesetting machine.At that time a printer had to pick out all his letters by hand. It was verytedious work. Bessemer designed a machine with a key-boar rather like that of a pianothat sorted out the letters required in a fraction of the time simply bydepressing the necessary keys. It was a clever invention, and it workedmost efficiently. When it was tested it was found that an inexperiencedprinter could set 6000 letters an hour whereas by the old hand method askilled man could set only about 1700 letters an hour. In 1833, he started work at another idea. At that time all legal deeds anddocuments, to make them legal, were a tamped with adhesive stamps. Butthese stamps were easy to forge, and also they could be removed from old
and useless documents and used again. Bessemer discovered that thegovernments were losing a lot of money each year by such frauds. So hebegan to work out a new system of stamping in which adhesive stamps werenot used, and documents could be perforated with an impression of thestamp, which would be impossible either to forge or to remove. His idea, however, was not adopted because a simpler process of onlydating the stamps had become known by that time. However Bessemer soon was asked by a London firm if could work out somemethod of embossing velvet with figured designs. A number of firms hadtried to impress designs on the velvet by means of heavy rollers, but theirresults were not good. The long pile rode up and the designs disappeared.No matter what they did, they could not keep the pile flat. Bessemer, after a good deal of experimenting, decided that the only way tomake a good impression on the velvet was to heat the material and to embossit in that condition. There were many difficulties, Bessemer said letter,but in the end he solved his problem. He designed a machine with a metalroller in which he arranged a number of burners. These burners kept theroller in at a constant heat and the machine did the work perfectly. Some time later his sister asked him to gild her volume of flowerpaintings. While he was doing this Bessemer invented a way of producingcheap gold powder. He built a large machine for grinding brass, and placed it in a room ofhis house. Then he started his own factory of gold powder.[pic] Bessemer
More Useful Inventions
When his factory began doing so well, Bessemer again spent all his timeworking out inventions. During this period he designed a new press for
extracting the juice from sugar-canes, a steam fan for ventilating minesand centrifugal pump for land draining, which could raise twenty tons ofwater an hour. Bessemer also interested himself in railways. He invented method ofcontinuous braking for trains and introduced the use of luggage vans. For the improvement of glass production he perfected the making of opticalglass and invented a machine for making sheet glass.His Greatest Discovery Steal, a metal derived from iron, but stronger and not brittle was initself no new thing: what was new was Bessemer’s process for manufacturingit. This process helped to produce steal cheaply and greatly changedengineering and industry throughout the world. Before Bessemer’s discovery, steel was made out of brittle and very impurecats-iron by a long a laborious open hearth process. This steel was verycostly. Also, it could be made only in small bars, and not in the largeunits in which it is now made. So steel could not be used for making heavyarticles. Ships, railway lines, and, in fact, all heavy engineering workswere made out of iron, which was much less strong. Steel was so costly thatonly about fifty thousand tons were produced in Britain each year. Bessemer had built himself two new apparatuses for experiments. One wasspecial furnace and the other a melting bath. One day when he was blowingair over the top of the bath he saw that two little pigs of iron near thetop did not melt. As they still did not melt even when there was more heatand the temperature in the furnace became maximum, Bessemer prodded themwith a bar. Strangely enough, he found that they were no longer brittlelike cast-iron. They had become plastic. This was because the oxygen in the
air, which had come into close contact with these two pigs, haddecarbonized them. This did not happen to the metal submerged in the bathbecause it was not in contact with the oxygen in the air. The two pigs hadbeen decarbonized and had become malleable iron. The discovery gave Bessemer a brilliant idea. He knew that to make stealhe had to purify the iron. It could be done, he thought, not only byreducing the carbon content but also by removing the silicon andphosphorous in it. Then, when it had been purified, a very little carbonand some other chemicals were added to kill or calm the metal. It nowoccurred to Bessemer that, by forcing a current of air through the molteniron in a closed bath or converter, the oxygen in the air might drive outthe impurities in the iron. At the same time the impurities were carriedaway through the chimney. So he tried pouring some molten iron into a largecylindrical converter and blowing air into this. The experiment was successful. Bessemer found that he had, in fact,purified his iron without any form of external heating. In doing so, ha hadalso established a most important fact: that the process of oxidation (withthe removal of the impurities) in itself automatically raises thetemperature of the metal much higher than it is possible to attain bynormal furnace heating, and that oxidation can be brought about just aseasily by cold air as by hot air.[pic] Steel
Bessemer’s next task was to design a better and less dangerous converter.After making several father experiments, he decided that oxygen wouldpenetrate the molten metal more evenly, and the iron was purified moreefficiently and quickly when the air was introduced through the bottom of
the converter. So he built a new converter and it was most efficient. Bessemer could turnmolten pig iron into high-grade steel in only about fifteen minutes.The Bessemer Process of Steel Production Henry Bessemer patented his new process in 1856.but there were stilldifficulties and he had to overcome them before his system was adoptedeverywhere. He was sure that his system was good and decided to begin productionhimself. He built his own steel works in Sheffield and was soon producingvery cheap steel. He could produce it in large sheets and not only in smallbars. It was possible to use his steel in the construction of ships,bridges, railway lines, and in other large engineering and industrialworks. When Bessemer first suggested the use of steel for railway lines which wasa great novelty at the time to the chief engineer of the London and NorthWestern Railway, the letter was quite angry. “Mr. Bessemer, do you wish tosee me tried for manslaughter?” he said. But experience showed that Bessemer’s steel was of such high quality andso efficient that he damaged for it grew quickly. By 1880 Bessemer’sfactory was producing 830,000 tons of steel a year – nearly seventeen timesmore than the whole country had produced by the producing process. As the Bessemer process of steel producing became accepted everywhere,Bessemer himself came to be regarded as one of the great inventors of the19th century; and he received many awards and honors. In 1871 he waselected President of the Iron and Steel Institute, and eight years later hewas also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The United States of America, who had founded her own steel industry onthe Bessemer process, named two towns after him. Henry Bessemer retired in 1879, but even after his retirement, he still
led a very busy life and continued to do so until only a year or two beforehis death at eighty-five.[pic] Bessemer’s statue
Besides the new process of steel production, he made some inventions:machines for polishing diamonds and grinding mirror glass; a method ofasphalt paving; and a ship with a special kind of rotating saloon thatalways remained in an upright position, no matter how much the ship itselfrolled. This ship was built to save passengers from seasickness. Bessemeralso carried out experiments with a new telescope and with a solar furnace.He was always trying some new idea. Henry Bessemer was one of the most successful inventors of his day. Hereceived more than one hundred and fifty patents. His achievements wereremarkable because the only practical experience that he had ever receivedin either metallurgy or engineering before he began his work was the fewyears that he had spent in his father’s foundry. He had received no propertraining, but had acquired nearly all the technical knowledge in the courseof his own researches. His success was due to his personal characteristics– to his inventive mind, his energy, as well as to his superb skill as adraughtsman. Perhaps most important of all was confidence of success.