Bessemer process
When Bessemer's patent for the process was reported by Scientific American, Kelly responded by writing a letter to the magazine.
He wrote that "I have reason to believe my discovery was known in England three or four years ago, as a number of English puddlers visited this place to see my new process.
Bessemer claimed that it "was the spark which kindled one of the greatest revolutions that the present century had to record, for during my solitary ride in a cab that night from Vincennes to Paris, I made up my mind to try what I could to improve the quality of iron in the manufacture of guns.
Starting in January 1855, he began working on a way to produce steel in the massive quantities required for artillery and by October he filed his first patent related to the Bessemer process.
This had the effect of improving the quality of the finished product, increasing its malleability—its ability to withstand rolling and forging at high temperatures and making it more suitable for a vast array of uses.
This partnership began to manufacture steel in Sheffield from 1858, initially using imported charcoal pig iron from Sweden.
[10][16] A 20% share in the Bessemer patent was also purchased for use in Sweden and Norway by Swedish trader and Consul Göran Fredrik Göransson during a visit to London in 1857.
During the first half of 1858, Göransson, together with a small group of engineers, experimented with the Bessemer process at Edsken near Hofors, Sweden before he finally succeeded.
Later in 1858 he again met with Henry Bessemer in London, managed to convince him of his success with the process, and negotiated the right to sell his steel in England.
In 1862 Göransson built a new factory for his Högbo Iron and Steel Works company on the shore of Lake Storsjön, where the town of Sandviken was founded.
Holley secured a license for Griswold and Winslow to use Bessemer's patented processes and returned to the United States in late 1863.
The Troy factory attracted the attention of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which wanted to use the new process to manufacture steel rail.
One of the investors they attracted was Andrew Carnegie, who saw great promise in the new steel technology after a visit to Bessemer in 1872, and saw it as a useful adjunct to his existing businesses, the Keystone Bridge Company and the Union Iron Works.
Prior to the opening of Carnegie's Thomson Works, steel output in the United States totaled around 157,000 tons per year.
Industrial chemist Sidney Gilchrist Thomas tackled the problem of phosphorus in iron, which resulted in the production of low grade steel.
The manager there, Edward Martin, offered Thomas test equipment and helped him draw up a patent issued in May 1878.
Before it was introduced, steel was far too expensive to make bridges or the framework for buildings and thus wrought iron had been used throughout the Industrial Revolution.
Quality problems, such as brittleness caused by nitrogen in the blowing air,[30] prevented Bessemer steel from being used for many structural applications.
It has been suggested, both at that time and more recently, that the cause of this was the lack of trained personnel and investment in technology rather than anything intrinsic to the process itself.
[33] For example, one of the major causes of the decline of the giant ironmaking company Bolckow Vaughan of Middlesbrough was its failure to upgrade its technology.
The Bessemer process was so fast (10–20 minutes for a heat) that it allowed little time for chemical analysis or adjustment of the alloying elements in the steel.
Bessemer converters did not remove phosphorus efficiently from the molten steel; as low-phosphorus ores became more expensive, conversion costs increased.
