The Dalles daily chronicle. [volume] (The Dalles, Or.) 1890-1948, 1894-09-22
ENRICHED THE WORLD.
Sir Henry Bessemer and His Proc
ess Of Making Steel.
At First Thought by Scientists to Be WIS.,
IOnary and ImpractIcable, But U1ti-
nately Proved to Be SpIen-
did Success.

The man who inaugurated the reign
of steel by so vastly increasing its uses,
and invented method of manufacture
which makes the product even lower
in cost than the kind of metal it was
destined so largely to replace, ranks
among the worlds greatest inventors,
though, says Harper's Monthly, he did
not reach his goal unaided by the skill
and genius of colaborers. The pneu-
matte process of making steel by which
Sir Henry Bessemer added more to the
wealth of the world than any man of
his generation furnished curious ex-
ample of what Tyndal called the sci
entific use of the imagination. Bes-
semer, like Siemens and Thomas, who
share with him the honors of modern
iron metallurgy, was not practical
worker in the metals, but unlike them,
he was absolutely ignorant of aught
beyond superficial chemical knowledge.
When he grasped the conception of
burning out the impurities of pig
metal by the oxidizing power of air
and thus reducing the excessively car
buried material to the malleable
state, he knew nothing of the tradi-
tions and science of the problem he
was daring enough to attack. Had he
that he would have been so imprisoned
by the past as never to have reached
out so daringly into the unknown. He
began his experiments secretly in
small way, after having visited nm
merous iron works to make himself
acquainted with existing processes.
1t was not till the end of eighteen
months that the fundamental princi-
pie of his great future success became
perfectly clear to him-that of render
ing cast iron malleable by a powerful
air blast blown throughout the charge,
and not merely on the top, as in the
old fnery and pudding furnace. The
heat developed was SO great as to keep
even wrought iron fused, and the hap
py inventor found by and by that he
had succeeded in making iron in small
quantities. 1t cannot be related here
how he fought through the early diff
culties of his work, and how the iron
masters of the age were alike aston
ished and delighted at his primary re-
suits. The shock of the inventor was
scarcely less great when he discovered
that in making iron in large quantities
his process did not answer all his an
ticipations. His earlier successes had
been with pig iron smelted from high
grade ores, comparatively free from
sulphur or phosphorus. The attempt
to work the process commercially in
volved the. use of the common pig,
which made up the bulk of the smelt-
ing material The intense heat of the
furnace burned out the carbon and the
silicon, but left the phosphorus and sui
phur untouched. This might have been
remedied bv using pure Digs containing
but traces of these clements; but a
graver defect attended the process. In
many of the operations the ingot had
no consistency; it crumbled under the
hammer or in the rolls. In the language
of the shop, it was rotten. The pro-
cess, which, within month of its first
public announcement at the Chelten-
ham meeting of the British association
in 1856, had brought to its discoverer
the sum of twenty-seven thousand
pounds sterling in advance license fees,
was now condemned by scientists and
practical men as a visionary scheme.