Henry Bessemer

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Henry Bessemer : biography

19 January 1813 – 15 March 1898

Sir Henry Bessemer (19 January 1813 – 15 March 1898) was an English engineer, inventor, and businessman. Bessemer’s name is chiefly known in connection with the Bessemer process for the manufacture of steel.

Anthony Bessemer

Bessemer’s father, Anthony, was born in London, but moved to Paris when he was 21 years old. He was an inventor who, while he was engaged by the Paris Mint, made a machine for making medallions that could produce steel dies from a larger model. He became a member of the French Academy of Science,William T. Jeans The creators of the age of steel, Chapman and Hall Limited, 1884 pp. 12-13 for his improvements to the optical microscope, when he was only 26. He was forced to leave Paris by the French Revolution, and returned to Britain. There he invented a process for making gold chains, which was successful, and enabled him to buy a small estate in the village of Charlton, near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, where Henry was born.

Gallery

Image:WNC_Bessemer.JPG | Gravestone of Sir Henry Bessemer, West Norwood cemetery

Other inventions

Bessemer was a prolific inventor and held at least 129 patents, spanning from 1838 to 1883. These included military ordnance, movable dies for embossed postage stamps, a screw extruder to extract sugar from sugar cane, and others in the fields of iron, steel and glass. These are described in some detail in his autobiography.

After suffering from seasickness in 1868, he designed the SS Bessemer (also called the "Bessemer Saloon"), a passenger steamship with a cabin on gimbals designed to stay level, however rough the sea, to save her passengers from seasickness. The mechanism – hydraulics controlled by a steersman watching a spirit level – worked in model form and in a trial version built in his garden in Denmark Hill, London. However it never received a proper seagoing test as, when the ship demolished part of the Calais pier on her maiden voyage, investor confidence was lost and the ship was scrapped., Chapter XX, Sir Henry Bessemer, F.R.S. An Autobiography,

Bessemer also obtained a patent in 1857 for the casting of metal between contrarotating rollers – a forerunner of today’s continuous casting processes and remarkably, Bessemer’s original idea has been implemented in the direct continuous casting of steel strip.

Later years and death

Bessemer died in March 1898 in Denmark Hill, London. He is buried in West Norwood cemetery, London SE27. Other influential Victorians such as Sir Henry Tate, Sir Henry Doulton and Baron de Reuters are buried within the same cemetery.

Early inventions

The invention from which Henry Bessemer made his first fortune was a series of six steam-powered machines for making bronze powder, used in the manufacture of gold paint. As he relates in his autobiography, he examined the bronze powder made in Nuremberg which was the only place where it was made at the time. He then copied and improved the product and made it capable of being made on a simple production line. It was an early example of reverse engineering where a product is analysed, and then reconstituted. The process was kept a closely guarded secret, with only members of his immediate family having access to the factory. It was a widely used alternative to a patent, and such trade secrets are still used today. The Nuremberg powder, which was made by hand, retailed in London for £5 12s per pound and he eventually reduced the price to half a crown, or about 1/40th.

The profits from sale of the paint allowed him to pursue his other inventions.

Bessemer patented a method for making a continuous ribbon of plate glass in 1848, but it was not commercially successful (see his autobiography, chapter 8). However, he gained experience in design of furnaces, which was to be of great use for his new steel-making process.

Honours and legacy

Bessemer was knighted for his contribution to science on 26 June 1879, and in the same year was made a fellow of the Royal Society. He was conferred with Honorary Membership of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland in 1891. In 1895, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sheffield’s Kelham Island Industrial Heritage Museum, maintains an early example of a Bessemer Converter for public viewing. He has also had a Street named after him in the town Hitchin (Bessemer Close) bordering the village of Ickleford in 1995, and has a road named Bessemer Way in Rotherham in his honour. In 2009, the public house "The Fountain" in Sheffield City Centre was renamed "The Bessemer", in homage to Henry Bessemer who had a huge impact on the Steel City’s development. That a man who did so much for industrial development did not receive higher recognition from his own government was a source of deep regret to English engineers, who alluded to the fact that in the United States, where the Bessemer process found much use, eight cities or towns bore his name.