Bessemer, Sir Henry

Bessemer, Sir Henry (bĕs`əmər), English engineer and inventor, b. Charleton, Hertfordshire. He made experiments to obtain stronger material for gun manufacture and discovered the basic principle of the Bessemer process. In 1856 he read before the British Association at Cheltenham his important paper "The Manufacture of Iron without Fuel." He built a successful converter and later erected the Bessemer Steel Works at Sheffield, which began to operate in 1859 and soon produced iron so cheaply that he could undersell his competitors. In the United States the Bessemer process was patented in 1857, but Bessemer's priority right there was challenged by William Kelly, and in the end the battle between the two interests was settled by a consolidation of the rival companies. Bessemer received many honors for his signal achievement and was knighted in 1879.

Bibliography

See his autobiography (1905, new ed. 1924).

---

Bessemer, Sir Henry

Bessemer, detail of an oil painting by Rudolf Lehmann; in the Iron and Steel Institute, London

(credit: Courtesy of The Iron and Steel Institute, London; photograph, The Science Museum, London)

(born Jan. 19, 1813, Charlton, Hertfordshire, Eng.—died March 15, 1898, London) British inventor and engineer. Son of a metallurgist, he set up his own casting business at 17. At that time the only iron-based construction materials were cast iron and wrought iron. So-called steel was made by adding carbon to pure forms of wrought iron (see wootz); the resulting material was used almost entirely for cutting tools. During the Crimean War Bessemer worked to devise a stronger cast iron for cannon. The result was a process for the inexpensive production of large, slag-free ingots of steel as workable as any wrought iron. He eventually also discovered how to remove excess oxygen from the iron. The Bessemer process (1856) led to the development of the Bessemer converter. See also basic Bessemer process; R.F. Mushet; puddling process.