THE CREATORS OF THE AGE OF STEEL. 25a 



out at a cost of less than 4 shillings a pound. To this day, although forty years 

 have elapsed, no one has surprised this secret. Sir Henry Bessemer has years 

 since rewarded the faithfulness of his workingmen by giving them the factory 

 and the business, and they too, have made fortunes out of the trade. 



Between 1844 and 1850 Bessemer patented machines for the manufacture of 

 paints, oils and varnishes ; for the separation of sugar from molasses ; for a drain- 

 age pump capable of discharging twenty tons of water per minute; a machine for 

 poHshing plate-glass, substituting a vacuum for the plaster bed. Each of these 

 was meritorious as unique, and as profitable as they were ingenious. 



This much will show the surprising versatility of the man, and enable the 

 reader to grasp the character that revolutionized modern industry. 



The Crimean war turned Bessemer's attention to ordnance, he produced a 

 projectile which rotated without the aid of rifling from the gun, and made many 

 improvements in the guns themselves. The EngHsh authorities ridiculed his 

 improvements, the Emperor Napoleon was greatly struck with them and requested 

 Bessemer to continue his experiments at the expense of France. At one of the 

 subsequent tests Commander Minie said: "The shots rotate property, but if 

 you can not 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 im- 

 provement 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 ^to,ooo a 

 ton. A watchmaker named Huntsman, after a long course of experiments in 

 that year, produced equally good steel, which could be made at ;^ioo a ton, and 

 for a century Huntsman's process had been used without improvement. In the 

 English process before 1740 the bars of iron were heated with a cement of hard- 

 wood 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. Huntsman took the blistered steel, broke 

 it up into bits, and 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 blistered steel broken up and re-melted with carbon into steel ingots in 

 crucibles which could not hold more than thirty pounds each. Bessemer's exper- 

 iment 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 atmospheric air. A great many experiments 

 followed, all of them moderately successful. Mechanical difficulties almost insu- 

 perable stood in the way. At last he constructed a circular vessel three feet in 

 diameter and five feet high, able to hold 700 weight of iron. He bought a pow- 



