William Kelly (inventor)

He is credited with being one of the inventors of modern steel production, through the process of injecting air into molten iron, which he experimented with in the early 1850s.

After a fire destroyed their warehouse, William and his brother John decided to move to Eddyville, Kentucky in 1847 to enter the iron industry.

In 1846, they purchased an iron manufacturing company in Lyon County on the Cumberland River, called Eddyville iron-work.

This could in turn be converted to steel by heating it for prolonged periods sealed in stone boxes with charcoal, to add back carbon.

The resulting steel could then be formed into larger shapes by heating it to welding temperature and hammering it together into a mass.

[5] Kelly was college-educated in metallurgy, while Bessemer in his autobiography described no education, other than a practical knowledge of typecasting and machining learned at his father's type foundry, stating in 1854, "My knowledge of iron metallurgy was at that time very limited...", but somehow he was able to build, without a long series of progressive improvements, a functioning converter to blow air into molten iron and convert it to steel.

Kelly writes, "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's renewal was rejected for the sole reason that his British patent with which it had been made co-terminal had duly expired at the end of its fourteen years of life, and it would have been inequitable to give Bessemer protection in the United States while British iron-masters were not under similar restraint.

[3] The Bessemer process greatly reduced the cost of steel and improved the quality, making possible the industrial growth of the United States from 1865 until the early 1900s.