From the mixer the iron is taken to the converter to be turned into steel. And now we come to the most spectacular, the most impressive sight that is to be witnessed in the steel industry, the theme for the poet who may one day be born to sing the Song of Steel.
A Bessemer blow, a converter in action, is a small-sized Vesuvius in eruption, a volcano tamed and chained by man. From its great steel crater shoot forth flames to the height of perhaps 100 feet, showering sparks in every direction and creating a pyrotechnic display of unequalled splendor. Its glare lights up the countryside for miles around, and the hissing and roaring of the molten iron, or rather of the steel groaning in its birth throes, forms a fitting accompaniment. It is a sight that once seen will never be forgotten.
The Original Jones Mixer
Both England and America claim the invention of the Bessemer converter, the most epoch-making of all the discoveries in the steel trade and one that has influenced all industries, civilization itself, immeasurably. For before it existed steel could only be made by a slow and expensive process in small quantities, and was not available for the varied uses for which it is employed to-day. Had it not been for the Bessemer converter, there would have been no skyscrapers, no steel railroad cars, no steel ocean liners, no “Steel Trust.”
A Bessemer Blow
Shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century William Kelly in America and Henry Bessemer in England were struck by the same idea, that air could be used as fuel, that the oxygen in air, blown through a mass of molten iron, would burn out its impurities and would at the same time blow them away. The records are slightly in favor of Kelly as the earlier discoverer, although Bessemer got all the credit and a knighthood for his work, while the American got nothing. A Bessemer converter is actually a big retort with air holes at the bottom where molten iron is purified into steel with air.
The first attempts at “making steel with air” met with scant success. The pioneers of the new process encountered the same sort of opposition as later confronted George Westinghouse when his fertile brain gave birth to the air-brake. The youthful inventor secured an interview with Commodore Vanderbilt, then head of the New York Central System, and endeavored to interest him in his invention.
“Do you mean to tell me,” Vanderbilt asked, “that you propose to stop a railroad train running at full speed with nothing but air?”