THE CREATORS OF THE AGE OF STEEL. 255 



the Swedish import. Sheffield steel was selling at ^60 per ton ; he could buy 

 Swedish pig for ^^7 and turn it into steel at a very small cost. 



Steel is pure iron with a small percentage of carbon to harden it. The line 

 of demarcation between steel and iron is a difficult one to trace. Following the 

 discoveries made in India by J. M. Marshall, Bessemer introduced ferro man- 

 ganese into his cenverter and the pure iron was at once carburized into steel. 



The public, however, had lost confidence in Bessemer j he had spent his 

 private fortune, he had made steel, the point was now to sell that steel. Through 

 the assistance of Mr. Galloway, Bessemer bought in the licenses which he had 

 sold, works were erected, and steel produced at a profit at ^^42 a ton— Sheffield 

 was selling at ;^6o. This argument was unanswerable — the Bessemer process 

 had won, the iron-masters took out licenses under it and the age of steel began. 



The revolution spread over Europe and America; the process was especially 

 popular in Sweden, where the Crown Prince superintended its first trial. In 

 Prussia Herr Krupp, the great cannon maker, agreed to pay Bessemer ^5,000 

 for a license. With Bessemer's papers Krupp applied to the Government for a 

 patent, the patent was refused, and no royalty was ever paid to the inventor. 

 Belgium and France appropriated the new process, and declined to recognize 

 Bessemer. 



Bessemer had attacked the problem of making steel for the purpose of hav- 

 ing a better gun-metal than any then existing. Accordingly he returned to his 

 experiments with ordnance. Steel cannon were cast with a tensile strength of 

 thirty tons to the square inch, figures much greater than had been reached before. 

 A number of tests were ordered at Woolwich, but through rank favoritism the 

 matter was submitted to Sir William Armstrong, a rival cannon-maker, and very 

 naturally an adverse decision was rendered. The Government would not touch 

 the new metals, and Bessemer for the time being let the matter pass, concentrat- 

 ing his attention upon the industrial uses of steel, a field large enough for the ambi- 

 tion of any man. In 1861 he induced the London & Northwestern Railroad to put 

 down some steel rails as an experiment. In 1881 these rails were still in good 

 condition — iron rails had to be turned once in nine months. The next step was 

 the substitution of steel for iron in ship-building ; the next, an invention of steel 

 projectiles, which were found to penetrate the iron armor of ships as easily as 

 the old iron balls went through wooden vessels. At this time Bessemer was re- 

 ceiving ^100,000 a year from his business, but his inventive faculty was not let 

 lie dormant. The best known of his later devices was a ship built with an auto 

 matically balanced cabin in order to do away with sea-sickness. This was a 

 theoretical success, but a practical failure. Henry Bessemer's life-work was the 

 production of steel from cast iron ; all the other many achievements of his mind 

 were, after all, but side issues. In the first twenty years of the life of his inven- 

 tion he had saved to the industry of the world over a billion pounds sterling — 

 that is, the work of one man did nearly twice as much to build the wealth of the 

 world as the American civil war did to pull it down — indeed, figuring upon the 

 actual saving made, Bessemer's invention had saved enough money to humanity 



