[1] Born in Washington, Pennsylvania, he was the inventor of the Acheson process, which is still used to make silicon carbide (carborundum).

[5] He left school at the age of 16 to help support his family after his father died, and worked as a surveying assistant for the Pittsburgh Southern Railroad.

[7][8] In 1881, he was sent to the International Exposition of Electricity in Paris,[9] as part of the team led by Charles Batchelor, and he remained in Europe in 1882 to install demonstrations of the Edison system of electrical lighting in Antwerp City Hall in Belgium and in La Scala in Milan,[10] among other public places.

By 1910 its dynamos were generating 10,000 hp of electricity and producing ten million pounds of silicon carbide per year.

Twenty years later it was “supplying the world with enough silicon carbide to influence the entire metallurgical, stone, abrasive paper, leather, jewelry, rice, and high temperature electrical heating element industries.” [4] Acheson had received a patent on his method of producing Carborundum on February 28, 1893, although a 1900 decision gave "priority broadly" to the Electric Smelting and Aluminum Company "for reducing ores and other substances by the incandescent method".

[13] Acheson received 70 patents relating to abrasives, graphite products, reduction of oxides, and refractories.