Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
William Kelly, Inventor. William Kelly (August 21, 1811 – February 11, 1888), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was an American inventor.He is credited with being one of the inventors of modern steel production, through the process of injecting air into molten iron, which he experimented with in the early 1850s.
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. [8] [9] According to Bessemer he was given his name by his godfather Henry Caslon, who employed his father as a punchcutter. [10] [11]
The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. The key principle is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron.
Steelmaking is the process of producing steel from iron ore and/or scrap. Steel has been made for millennia, and was commercialized on a massive scale in the 1850s and 1860s, using the Bessemer and Siemens-Martin processes. Two major commercial processes are used.
In 1856, Englishman Henry Bessemer invented the Bessemer process, which allowed for mass production of steel from molten pig iron, reducing the cost of making steel by more than 50%. The first American steel mill to use the process was constructed in 1865 in Troy, New York.
Steel is an alloy composed of between 0.2 and 2.0 percent carbon, with the balance being iron. From prehistory through the creation of the blast furnace, iron was produced from iron ore as wrought iron, 99.82–100 percent Fe, and the process of making steel involved adding carbon to iron, usually in a serendipitous manner, in the forge, or via the cementation process.
He applied the principle of recovery of the hot gas in an open hearth furnace, a process invented by Carl Wilhelm Siemens. In 1865, based on the Siemens process, he implemented the process which bears his name for producing steel in a hearth by remelting scrap steel with the addition of cast iron for the dilution of impurities.
The "basic process" invented by Thomas, also known as the Gilchrist–Thomas process, was especially valuable on the continent of Europe, where the proportion of phosphoric iron is much larger than in Britain, and both in Belgium and in Germany the name of the inventor became more widely known than in his own country.