Henry Bessemer

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Bessemer was born on the 19th of January 1813 in the village of Charlton, near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, into a family already fluent in the language of invention. His father, Anthony, had built machines for the Paris Mint, been elected to the French Academy of Sciences, and fled France during the Revolution before settling in England. The family estate in Charlton was purchased with profits from a process Anthony devised for making gold chains. Henry grew up inside that tradition of turning a good idea into a good income.

  By the time he died on the 15th of March 1898, Henry Bessemer held at least 129 patents. His steel-making process alone reshaped the physical world for almost a century. It is the process that let railway bridges stop collapsing, that drove Sheffield to become an industrial capital, and that made a man underselling his competitors by ten to fifteen pounds per ton into a multimillionaire. How a self-taught English inventor pulled that off, and at what human cost, is the story that follows.

• 2. The Nuremberg Secret

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  Bronze powder was worth its weight in precious metal in the mid-nineteenth century. Nuremberg had a monopoly on making it, and in London the hand-made product sold for five pounds and twelve shillings per pound weight. Bessemer bought samples, studied them, and reverse-engineered the process. He then built six steam-powered machines to produce bronze powder on a production line.

  The price he charged came down to two shillings and sixpence per pound. That is a fraction of the Nuremberg price. To protect the advantage, he sealed the operation: only immediate family members were allowed inside the factory. The profits bankrolled every experiment that followed, and that discipline of secrecy would mark his career. When he eventually turned to glass, he patented a method for making a continuous ribbon of plate glass in 1848. It was not commercially successful, but it gave him something equally valuable: experience designing the furnaces he would need for steel.

• 3. Guns, Air, and Molten Iron

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  The problem that would make Bessemer famous began with cannons. Working on ways to improve gun construction, he turned his attention to the cost of steel for military ordnance and spent the years from 1850 to 1855 developing his solution. On the 24th of August 1856, he stood before a meeting of the British Association in Cheltenham and described the process under the title "The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel."

  The idea was straightforward and radical at the same time. By blowing air through molten pig iron, the oxygen burned off the impurities and left steel behind, without additional fuel. James Nasmyth had been working toward a similar idea before that meeting in Cheltenham. He abandoned his own project after hearing Bessemer speak. Bessemer offered Nasmyth a one-third share of his patent in acknowledgment. Nasmyth declined; he was about to retire.

  In the United States, an American inventor in Kentucky named William Kelly had developed a parallel approach, and Kelly received a priority patent in 1857, effectively nullifying Bessemer's 1855 American patent. The dispute left Bessemer's international reach compromised, even as the British ironmaking world was about to be turned upside down.

• 4. Bridges That Broke

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  Before Bessemer's process took hold, engineers had no reliable choice between cast iron and wrought iron, and the difference between them could be lethal. Cast iron failed suddenly, without warning, under stress. The Dee Bridge disaster of May 1847 was one example. The Wootton bridge collapse followed. The Bull Bridge accident of 1860 came next. The Tay Bridge disaster of 1879 repeated the pattern.

  Wrought iron was far more dependable, with very few structural failures recorded. But it was expensive and difficult to produce at scale. Steel, which offered wrought iron's reliability at a lower cost, was the obvious solution, yet the making of it remained slow and costly. The Bessemer process changed that equation. Failures in cast iron railway under-bridges continued until every one of them was replaced by steel. The full replacement of cast iron with steel structures was not a luxury; it was a reckoning with a material that had been killing people.

• 5. Sheffield and the Fight for Adoption

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  Bessemer licensed his patent to five ironmasters at the outset, and every one of them struggled to produce steel of acceptable quality. The process worked on paper but not reliably in practice. Goran Fredrik Goransson, a Swedish ironmaster, became the first person to make good steel by the process, using purer charcoal pig iron from Sweden, though even he succeeded only after many attempts.

  The real solution came from Robert Forester Mushet, working at Darkhill Ironworks in the Forest of Dean. Mushet had conducted thousands of experiments and found that stripping almost all carbon from the iron and then adding a precise amount of carbon and manganese, in the form of spiegeleisen, gave the finished steel the consistency and malleability the process lacked. Without that fix, the Bessemer process would have remained a curiosity.

  When Bessemer tried to persuade established makers to adopt the improved system, they refused. He built his own steelworks in Sheffield, in partnership with companies including W and J Galloway and Sons, and began making steel himself. The firm of Henry Bessemer and Co. started underselling the competition by ten to fifteen pounds per ton. That margin shifted the industry. Licences for the process were applied for in such numbers that Bessemer eventually collected royalties considerably exceeding one million pounds sterling. Sheffield, already nicknamed Steel City, became a major industrial centre in part because of the works he built there.

• 6. Mushet's Daughter

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  Robert Forester Mushet received nothing from the success he helped create. By 1866 he was destitute and in poor health. That year, his sixteen-year-old daughter Mary travelled to London alone and walked into Bessemer's offices to confront him directly. She argued that her father's work was the foundation of his fortune.

  Bessemer responded by arranging an annual pension of three hundred pounds for Mushet, a very considerable sum. He continued paying it for over twenty years. W. M. Lord later noted that Bessemer was exceptional among inventors precisely because he had taken an idea all the way to a practical reality in his own lifetime, and had been enough of a businessman to profit from it. The pension to Mushet may have been genuine gratitude, or it may have been a calculation to forestall legal action. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. What is certain is that Mushet never sued, and Bessemer paid.

• 7. Seasickness and the Saloon Ship

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  After a bad crossing in 1868 left him seasick, Bessemer designed a passenger steamship with a cabin mounted on gimbals. The cabin was meant to remain level regardless of how violently the sea moved beneath it. Hydraulics controlled by a steersman watching a spirit level would keep the motion constant. A model worked. A trial version built in his garden at Denmark Hill in London also worked.

  The ship was named the SS Bessemer. On her maiden voyage, she demolished part of the Calais pier. Investor confidence collapsed, and the ship was scrapped. It was among the few ventures where Bessemer's commercial instincts failed to save a technically promising idea from a disastrous public debut. He also obtained a patent in 1857 for casting metal between counter-rotating rollers, a forerunner of the continuous casting processes used in steelmaking today. That idea, unlike the saloon ship, eventually found its moment.

• 8. Honours and Aftermath

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  Queen Victoria knighted Bessemer on the 26th of June 1879 for his contribution to science, the same year he was made a fellow of the Royal Society. An honorary membership from the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland came in 1891. Election as an International Member of the American Philosophical Society followed in 1894, and in 1895 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  English engineers felt he deserved more recognition from his own government. Their complaint was pointed: in the United States, where the Bessemer process found wide use, eight cities or towns bore his name. Bessemer died at Denmark Hill, London, in March 1898 and was buried at West Norwood cemetery in London SE27, alongside other influential Victorians including Sir Henry Tate, Sir Henry Doulton, and Baron de Reuters.

  The Bessemer Gold Medal, established under his tenure as president of the Iron and Steel Institute from 1871 to 1873, is still awarded annually by the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining for outstanding services to the steel industry. Recent recipients include Indira Samarasekera. An early Bessemer converter is kept on public view at Sheffield's Kelham Island Industrial Heritage Museum, the same city where the firm of Henry Bessemer and Co. once undersold every rival in the trade.