Henry Bessemer's Life And Accomplishments

(lemelson.mit.edu) Henry Bessemer was the son of Anthony Bessemer, an inventor who created a new way to form gold chains. The discovery of this method allowed the Bessemer family to move to England, And once in England, Henry was born. Young Henry was a protege of his father. At the age of 17, Henry revolutionized the way that stamps were dated and thusly saved vast quantities of money for the postal service at the time. This drove Henry to live a life of invention and discovery. Over the course of his life he patented over 100 of his inventions including a sugar crusher. a dating system for stamps, and the Bessemer Converter. Of these inventions, Henry faced few challenges due to the success of his creations, making substantial riches time

This is when Bessemer got to work.
(britannica.com/Vol 15) In the attempt at making cheap steel to improve making guns, Bessemer found that if you put iron in a vat and blew oxygen through it from the bottom, the pig iron was able to rise to higher melting points. Similar to how adding salt to water makes it boil at higher temperatures results in less water loss while still being able to cook things. except instead of raising the temperature to stop it from boiling, it allowed to get hotter before melting. This happened because when the molten iron had air blown through it, the carbon and other impurities within the iron was burned out and a reliable rate thus bringing the melting point up consistently. Every time the process was completed a volcanic-style eruption shot forth impurities from the vat along with some of the pig iron. The happened because of the air bubble moving and dissipating through the molten mixture. The delay of the bubble was result of both oxidation reactions

It is theorized by some that Bessemer did not create the process but instead he stole it from someone else and built upon it for his own benefit. Nonetheless his discovery was just as valid as it was one of the contributing factors to the industrial revolutions as it allowed thousands of tonnes to be produced and set out in a single day. To this day Bessemer-Converter-inspired machines are what make the steel you see in foundations or in many household products. Robert Durrer crafted the first modern of the Bessemer converter with one slight modification being that instead of blowing air it blew in pure oxygen which allowed for purer steel and did not put in nitrogen like the previous method. But it is important to note that Bessemer did not invent the steel that was produced from his machinery. Steel of the similar caliber was produced by viking blacksmiths to craft extremely durable and effective