Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 .
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.
A similar process was discovered independently by Henry Bessemer and patented in 1855. Due to a financial panic in 1857, a company that had already licensed the Bessemer process was able to purchase Kelly's patents, and licensed both under a single scheme using the Bessemer name. Kelly's role in the invention of the process is much less known.
Eventually, after many experiments, Huntsman was able to make satisfactory cast steel, in clay pot crucibles, each holding about 34 pounds (15 kg) of blistered steel. A flux was added, and they were covered and heated by means of coke for about three hours. The molten steel was then poured into moulds and the crucibles reused.
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 is best known for inventing the Harvey process for case hardening the front surface of steel armor plate. The resulting Harvey armor was widely used on armoured ships in the 1890s. He invented the process while living in Orange, New Jersey , and died there on August 28, 1893.