Sir Henry Bessemer (19 January 1813 – 15 March 1898) was an English inventor, whose steel-making process was the most important technique for making steel in the nineteenth century for almost one hundred years. He played a significant role in establishing the town of Sheffield, nicknamed ‘Steel City’, as a major industrial centre.
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 made at least 128 inventions in the fields of iron, steel and glass. Unlike many inventors, he brought his own projects to fruition and profited financially from their success. In 1879, he was knighted for his contribution to science and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
Bessemer's father, Anthony, was born in London into a Huguenot family and moved to Paris aged about 21. 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 Sciences 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 where 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. According to Henry Bessemer he was given his name by his godfather Henry Caslon, who employed his father as a punchcutter.
Bessemer made his first fortune with a series of six steam-powered machines for making bronze powder, used in the manufacture of gold paint. At the time, bronze powder was only made in Nuremberg. Bessemer examined the Nuremberg bronze powder then copied and improved the product such that it could be produced on a production line. It was an early example of reverse engineering.
The process was kept secret with only members of his immediate family having access to the factory. The hand-made Nuremberg powder retailed in London for £5 12 shillings (£5.60p) per pound; he reduced the price to £ – 2 / 6 (£0.12p).
The profits from 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 ( chapter 8). He gained experience in designing furnaces, which was of use for his new steel-making process.
Henry Bessemer's attention was drawn to the problem of steel manufacture in the course of an attempt to improve the construction of guns.
Bessemer worked on the problem of manufacturing cheap steel for ordnance production from 1850 to 1855 when he patented his method. However, William Kelly, an American inventor in Kentucky, received a priority patent in 1857, effectively nullifying Bessemer's 1855 US patent.
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. 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.
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 licensed the patent for his process to five ironmasters, but from the outset, the companies had great difficulty producing good-quality steel. 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 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.
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.
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. 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.
Bessemer also had works in Greenwich, London, adjacent to the River Thames, from about 1865.
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 sufficient 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."
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.