The silver state. [volume] (Winnemucca, Nev.) 1909-1925, 1913-02-04
ANNIVERSARY OF SIR
HENRY BfSSEMFR, INVENTOR

The 18TH day OF January was the
hundredth anniversary of Sir Henry
Bessemer birth. He was the man
who invented the "Bessemer pro-
cess of making steel. Up to his day
steel was a prohibitively expensive
product. 1t is made, as the public un-
Iderstands, by combining a certain
quantity of carbon with the soft iron,
but nobody had discovered how to do
this economically. There was a SUI
perstition in the world that magic was
more or less concerned in the process.
/ The best steel came from such places
as Damascus and Toledo, in Spain
where the secret Of making it was
I iealously guarded. Even if it had
/ teen revealed not much would have
been gained because the metal was
too costly for anything but sword
blades. pistol barrels and other i'm
plements both rare and fine. In 1770
steel prepared by some magic incanta-
tion was imported into England from
Hindustan at $4,000 a ton. Mediae
val literature is full of wonderful
stories about Toledo and Damascus
blades. The Toledo sword blade could
be bent into the form of figure eight,
and when released would spring back
/ into shape without a sign of deforma-
ton
Whether Sir Henry was the actual
/ inventor of the process which goes by
his name or not is still controverted
question. He patented his discovery
| in London in 1855. Seven years be-
/ fore that date William Kelly of Pitts
burg seems to have come upon it in
/ tdependently. When in 1856 Bessemer
applied for a patent in the United
States Kelly contested his right, and
the patent office decided the eontro-
versy in Kelly's favor. In 1870,
some fourteen years later. the latter
applied for a renewal of his patent.
/ Had he obtained it he would have pos
sessed the right to exact royalties
/ from every steel manufacturer in the
country, while Bessemer of course
was out of the game. Hence all the
steel men. moved by their economic
! interest, villifed Kelly as a pretender
and exalted Bessemer's claims TO the
/ invention. The latter made fortune
/ of $10.000.00 out of the discovery,
while his American rival made com
I parativelv little money, and is now as
good as forgotten. Such are the mys-
terious ways of fate.
I lbPSSeUltI ITOttSS II tNV-lplNs ~
begins by expelling the impurities
from motion iron by an air blast. The
/ temperature being very high, atmos-
pherie oxygen unites with the carbon
/ and other substances in the mass and
carries them away in vapor. This
leaves an admirably pure product,
/ but it is not steel. To make steel
from iron some carbon is a necessity
II of o+a1 do
pends upon getting the proportions
exactly right. Bessemer devised a
contrivance for effeeting this and,
thus completed his process. Whether
\ he invented the art of manufacturing
commercially available steel or not,
he is fairly entitled to the praise of
giving it to the world Kelly did not
push his invention. He seems to have
been of the true inventors tempera-
ment. richly endowed with speculative
and constructive genius, but incapable
/ in the market place. Bessemer formed
company to manufacture his steel
and soon made il dominant throughout
the world Naturally it rapidly en-
larged the capacities of the railroads.
In fact il made modern railroading
nossible.
Steel is now used for almost every
mechanical purpose where iron served
originally and the gain has been IN
>stimahle both in strength and endur-
ance, but in many of the more delicate
arts the Bessemer methods have now
been superseded. The gas engine, for
example. as it is used in aeroplanes
and automobiles demands tougher
and lighter metal than Bessemer steel
io,l ;nxraptarS haNa had recourse to
various new alloys. Iron forms the
main part of them all, but various
elements unheard of in 1885 are COM
bined with it to obtain the desired
properties. The latest combination
appears to be one of iron and vana-
d;nm which offers immense resistance
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