CREATORS OF THE AGE OF STEEL 45 



properly, but if you cannot get a stronger metal for your 

 guns, such heavy projectiles will be of little use." That 

 remark produced the Bessemer process for making steel. 

 He knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about metallurgy; 

 he had no idea how any improvement was to be made, and 

 yet he resolved to attack this problem of steel making and 

 solve it. 



Prior to 1740 the best steel was made in Hindostan, and 

 cost 10,000 a ton. A watchmaker named Huntsman, after 

 a long course of experiments in that year, produced equally 

 good steel, which could be made at 100 a ton, and for a 

 century Huntsman's process had been used without im- 

 provement. In the English process before 1740 the bars 

 of iron were heated with a cement of hardwood charcoal 

 dust, which added carbon to the metal, and made what is 

 called "blistered steel." The heating had to be continued 

 several days. This was as yet unfit for forging, and the 

 bars had to be broken into lengths of about eighteen inches, 

 raised to a welding heat, and hammered with a "tilting 

 hammer," a process which produced good steel. Hunts- 

 man took the blistered steel, broke it up into bits, put it 

 into crucibles with coke dust, fused the whole, and so made 

 cast steel. 



When Bessemer began his work, this process was the 

 only one in use. The iron had first to be melted into pigs, 

 the pigs heated with carbon into blistered steel, the blis- 

 tered steel broken up and remelted with carbon into steel 

 ingots in crucibles which could not hold more than thirty 

 pounds each. Bessemer 's experiment produced first a cast 

 iron better and stronger than any known before. 



At the end of eighteen months the idea struck him of 

 rendering cast iron malleable by the introduction of atmos- 

 pheric air. A great many experiments followed, all of 

 them moderately successful. Mechanical difficulties almost 

 insuperable stood in the way. At last he constructed a 

 circular vessel three feet in diameter and five feet high, 

 able to hold seven hundred-weight of iron. He bought a 



