The St. Johns herald., 1895-01-17
ENRICHED THE WORLD.
Sir Henry Bessemer and His Proc
 ess Of Making Steel
4. First Thought ty Scientists to Ee Wis Ionary and Impract:ca5Ie, But Uiti- mately Proved to Be SpIen-
 did Success.

The man who inaugurated the reign of steel by so vastly increasing it's 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- matic 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 Tyndall 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 a 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 burized 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 been an adept it is more than probable 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 a small way, after having visited mn merous iron works to make himself acquainted with existing processes.
 It 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 powerful air blast blown throughout the charge, and not merely on the top, as in the old finery 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. It 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 sul- phur untouched. This might have been remedied by using pure pigs containing but traces of these clements; but 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 a month of its first public announcement at the Cheltcn- ham meeting of the British association in 1856, had brought to it's discovercr the sum of twenty-seven thousand pounds sterling in advance license fees, was now condemned by scientists and practical men as visionary scheme.