Bessemer announces a cheap steel process
- Date
- 1856
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- United Kingdom
- Era
- Modern
- Significance
In 1856 the English engineer Henry Bessemer publicly described his new process for making steel, presenting it on 11 August at the Cheltenham meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science after securing patents earlier that year.
The Bessemer process blew air through molten pig iron in a tilting converter, burning off carbon and impurities and producing large quantities of steel in well under an hour, where older methods had been slow and costly. By making steel cheap and abundant for the first time, the process transformed it from a scarce material into the structural backbone of modern industry. Bessemer steel enabled stronger and longer-lasting railway rails, larger ships, bridges, machinery and, later, the steel-framed buildings of the modern city. Though the process required low-phosphorus ores and was later supplemented and surpassed by the open-hearth and Gilchrist-Thomas methods, it launched the age of mass-produced steel and is regarded as one of the central technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century.
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Empires active in 1856
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- French Colonial Empire (Second)1830 CE – 1962 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
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- Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species24 November 1859
- Maxwell formulates the theory of electromagnetism1865–1873
- Opening of the Suez Canal17 November 1869
- Bell Patents the Telephone1876
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A Little History of Science
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