In 1846 Kelly, with a brother, bought the Suwanee Iron Works, near Eddyville, Ky. After about a year they encountered the same difficulty that charcoal iron manufacturers usually have encountered—the failure of the supply of fuel. This difficulty Kelly, a better inventor than business man, apparently had not foreseen. His business was threatened unless some other way of refining his iron was found.
Crucible with Which Bessemer’s First Experiments Were Conducted
One day while watching the operation of his Finery Fire he noticed that the blast of air from the tuyère made the molten iron where it impinged very much whiter and apparently hotter than the rest. Like other iron makers, he had always supposed that a blast of cold air chilled molten iron.
It appears that Kelly was not long in surmising the truth. In a few days he had rigged up a crude apparatus and made soft iron from which a horseshoe and a horseshoe nail were fashioned by a blacksmith.
Fixed Converter of 1856 with Six Tuyères About the Sides
Being conservatives, Kelly’s customers were not slow in informing him that they did not want iron made by anything other than the “good old process” and he was obliged to accede to their demands or lose their trade.
Like Galileo, however, he had not really surrendered. In the woods near by he built and experimented with seven successive “converters,” as the furnaces are called in which Bessemer steel is made.
Upon learning that Bessemer of England had been granted a United States patent (1856), Kelly came before the patent office and proved that he had several years before used the same process. The priority of his invention was acknowledged, and a patent was granted to him also (1857).