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Henry Bessemer |
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Henry Bessemer |
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Sir Henry Bessemer |
British inventor and engineer (1813–1898)
Bessemer was the son of a mechanical engineer who had fled from the French Revolution. After leaving the village school in Charlton, where he was born, he worked as a type-caster, until the family moved to London in 1830. At the age of 17 he set up his own business to produce metal alloys and bronze powder. In 1843 he had an idea that made his fortune. On purchasing some ‘gold’ paint (made of brass) for his sister he was horrified at its high price. He designed an automatic plant to manufacture the paint and made sufficient money to pursue a career as a professional inventor.
During the Crimean War (1853–56) Bessemer invented a new type of gun with a rifled barrel. To manufacture the gun he needed a strong metal that could be run into a mold in a fluid state. At that time cast iron (pig iron) contained carbon and silicon impurities, which made it brittle. Wrought iron, which was relatively pure, was made by a laborious process of refining pig iron. The temperature of the furnace, while sufficient to melt the pig iron, was not sufficient to keep the purer iron molten. The refined metal was extracted in lumps after which it was ‘wrought’. Bessemer proposed burning away the impurities by blowing air through the molten metal. The Bessemer converter that he invented is a cylindrical vessel mounted in such a way that it can be tilted to receive a charge of molten metal from the blast furnace. It is then brought upright for the ‘blow’ to take place. Air is blown in through a series of nozzles at the base and the carbon impurities are oxidized and carried away by the stream of air.
Bessemer announced his discovery in 1856. At first his idea was accepted enthusiastically and within weeks he obtained £27,000 in license fees. However, though the process had worked for him, elsewhere it failed dismally because of excess oxygen trapped in the metal, and because of the presence of phosphorus in the ores. (By chance Bessemer's ore had been phosphorus-free.) His invention was dropped and Bessemer found himself the subject of much ridicule and criticism. Bessemer established his own steelworks in Sheffield (1859) using imported phosphorus-free iron ore.
Robert Mushet (about 1856) solved the problem of the excess oxygen by the addition of an alloy of iron, manganese, and carbon to the melt. Bessemer's process then worked provided nonphosphoric ores were used, but it took much time and determination to convince ironworkers after the initial failure. The invention eventually reduced the price of steel to a fifth of its former cost, made it possible to produce it in large quantities, and made possible its use in a variety of new products. The problem of dealing with the phosphorus impurities was solved in 1878 by Sydney Gilchrist Thomas and Percy Carlyle Gilchrist. Bessemer retired a rich man in 1873.
Biography:
Sir Henry Bessemer |
The English inventor Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) was a pioneer in the manufacture of inexpensive steel through his development of the steelmaking process which bears his name.
Henry Bessemer was born Jan. 19, 1813, in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. He left school to work for his father, a typefounder. In 1830 Bessemer set up his own business in London for producing art-metals, fusible alloys, and bronze powder. He was a prolific inventor, both before and after his key contribution to the iron and steel industries. He invented machines for composing type and for working graphite for pencils; at age 20 he was an exhibitor at the Royal Academy.
Fixed Converter
In 1854, following the rejection of an artillery invention, Bessemer sought an iron tougher than any then available and experimentally fused blister steel with pig iron. Apparently it was during these trials that he noted the effect of air in removing carbon from iron, a process essential for its conversion to steel. In 1855 he successfully produced a low-grade steel from molten pig iron in a side-blown fixed converter without any external source of heat. Bessemer patented the process in 1856 and described it in a paper, "Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel." Attracted by the promise of economy in time, labor, and fuel, many wrought-iron producers tried the process; all reported total failure to produce any useful material.
Bessemer, dumbfounded and discredited, sought both cause and cure. The principal causes were twofold: the "blow" left the metal full of oxygen, and typical British pig irons were phosphorus-rich. Both led to brittleness in forging. The former fault was recognized and cured by Robert Forester Mushet, while Bessemer's Swedish licensee, G. Göransson, established that phosphorus was the other trouble, but no immediate cure was forthcoming.
Tilting Converter
Bessemer and his associates set up a steelworks in Sheffield in 1858, using phosphorus-free ore from Sweden and one part of England. There the familiar bottom blown tilting converter, in which the air blast supports the molten metal, was introduced in 1860, but Bessemer was unable to raise much new support among ironmasters. By 1879, when Gilchrist and Thomas showed that phosphorus could be removed by using basic instead of acidic furnace linings and fluxes, the open-hearth steelmaking process, with its ability to accept cold scrap in the charge, had become established in Britain. Thus British steelmakers have never greatly utilized either acid or basic Bessemer plants; much of Europe and America, with their then less-developed iron industries, widely adopted the basic Bessemer process. In the United States part of the Bessemer process had been patented by William Kelly, and dual licenses were needed for its operation there. Any personal connection between these two men in their inventions seems most unlikely. Despite its initial drawbacks, the process made Bessemer a millionaire. Today Bessemer steelmaking is rapidly giving way to various oxygen steelmaking methods.
Bessemer was knighted in 1879; he died in London on March 15, 1898.
Further Reading
The major work on Bessemer is his autobiography, Sir Henry Bessemer: An Autobiography (1905). W. H. Chaloner, People and Industries (1963), includes a chapter on Bessemer. The metallurgical background is in J. C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (1962).
Additional Sources
Bessemer, Henry, Sir, Sir Henry Bessemer, F.R.S.: an autobiography, with a concluding chapter, London; Brookfield, VT., USA: Institute of Metals, 1989.
British History:
Sir Henry Bessemer |
Bessemer, Sir Henry (1813-98). Bessemer distinguished himself as a professional inventor. His most successful invention was the process which bears his name for making steel—previously an expensive material in short supply—available in bulk. Invented in 1856, it involved blowing air through molten cast iron so that itcombined with excess carbon in the melt to produce mild steel in substantial quantities. Steel from ‘Bessemer converters’ came to be used extensively in railway lines, ship plate, and forgings for large guns.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
Sir Henry Bessemer |
Bibliography
See his autobiography (1905, new ed. 1924).
Wikipedia:
Henry Bessemer |
| Henry Bessemer | |
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| Born | Henry Bessemer 19 January 1813 Charlton, Hertfordshire, England[1] |
| Died | 15 March 1898 (aged 85) London |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | engineer and inventor |
| Known for | Development of the Bessemer process for the manufacture of steel. |
Sir Henry Bessemer (19 January 1813 – 15 March 1898) was an English engineer and inventor. Bessemer's name is chiefly known in connection with the Bessemer process for the manufacture of steel.
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Henry Bessemer's father, Anthony, was born in London, but moved to Paris when he was 21 years old. He was an inventor who while he was 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[citation needed], for his improvements to the optical microscope, when he was only 26. He was forced to leave Paris by the French Revolution of 1848, 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 in 1813.
The invention from which Henry Bessemer made his first fortune was a series of six steam-powered machines for making very fine brass powder which was used as a gold paint. As he relates in his autobiography, he examined the gold paint made in Nuremberg which was the only source of gold paint 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 reconstituted. Each employee knew only his part of the process, so secrecy was assured. It was a closely guarded secret, with only a few trusted employees and members of his immediate family involved. It was a widely used alternative to a patent, and such trade secrets are still used today. The cost of the Germany-sourced powder, which was made by hand, was £5 10s 0d and he eventually reduced the price to half a crown, or about 1/40th.[2] 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). However, he gained experience in design of furnaces, which was to be of great use for his new steel-making process.
Bessemer worked on the problem of manufacturing cheap steel for the purposes of ordinance production from 1850 to 1855 when he patented his method.[3] On 24 August 1856 Bessemer first described the process to a meeting of the British Association in Cheltenham which he titled "The Manufacture of Iron 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.[4]
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 and later failures such as the Wooton 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. Bessemer's attention was drawn to the problem of steel manufacture in the course of an attempt to improve the construction of guns.
Bessemer licensed the patent for his process to five Ironmasters, but from the outset, the companies had great difficulty producing good quality steel.[5] Mr 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 until Robert Forester Mushet, who had carried out thousands of experiments at Darkhill, in the Forest of Dean, showed that adding an exact amount of carbon and manganese, in the form of spiegeleisen, improved the quality of the finished product, increasing its malleability.[6][7][8]
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, on ground purchased with the help of friends, 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 $20 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 pound sterling.
Of course, patents of such obvious value did not escape criticism, and invalidity was freely urged against them on various grounds. But Bessemer was fortunate enough to maintain them intact without litigation, though he found it advisable to buy up the rights of one patentee, while in the case of Robert Forester Mushet, was freed from anxiety by the patent being allowed to lapse in 1859 through non-payment of fees.
Mushet's procedure was not absolutely essential and Bessemer proved this in 1865 by exhibiting a series of steel samples made using his process alone, but the value of Mushet's procedure was shown by its near universal adoption in conjunction with the Bessemer Process. Whether or not Mushet's patents could have been sustained is not known, but in 1866 Robert Mushet's 16 year old daughter travelled to London alone to confront Henry Bessemer at his offices, arguing that Bessemer's success was based on the results of her father’s work. Bessemer decided to pay Mushet an annual pension of £300, a very considerable sum, which he paid for 25 years; and it is possible that this was done with a view to keeping the Mushets from legal action.[7][9]
In 1866, Bessemer also provided finance for Zerah Colburn, the American locomotive engineer and journalist, to start a new weekly engineering newspaper called Engineering, and based in Bedford Street, London. It was not until many years later that the name of Colburn's benefactor was revealed. Prior to the launch of Engineering, Colburn, through the pages of The Engineer, had given support to Bessemer's work on steel and steelmaking.
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Bessemer was a prolific inventor and held at least 129 patents, spanning from 1838 to 1883. They were chiefly concerned with manufacturing in five areas; iron, steel, glass, sugar, and cannons or other ordnance.
His autobiography describes all of his inventions, some in great detail, as one might expect from such an innovative man. It is also a very readable book which relates many amusing incidents in his long and fruitful career.
Among Bessemer's numerous other inventions were movable dies for embossed stamps, and a screw extruder for more efficiently extracting sugar from sugar cane.
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.[10]
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.
Bessemer died in March 1898 in Denmark Hill, London. He is buried in West Norwood cemetery, London SE27, where he has good company with influential Victorians such as Sir Henry Tate, Sir Henry Doulton and Baron de Reuters also being buried within the same cemetery.
Henry Bessemer was Knighted for his contribution to science on 26 June 1879, and in the same year was made a fellow of the Royal Society. Sheffield's Kelham Island Industrial Heritage Museum, maintains an early example of a Bessemer Converter for public viewing. He has also had a Street named after him in the town Hitchin (Bessemer Close) bordering the village of Ickleford in 1995, and has a road named Bessemer Way in Rotherham 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.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
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