To the majority of the people of the United States to-day Kelly and his parallel part in the great invention are practically unknown, and thus not only he but the United States is without credit which should be ours.
Fortunately Kelly did not entirely fail to profit financially as so many times is the case with inventors. He received a total of about $500,000. Bessemer’s return from his process is said to have approximated $10,000,000 and he was knighted by the British sovereign.
More intimate details regarding Kelly and his work may be found in Munsey’s Magazine for April, 1906, where H. Casson gives information which he received direct from several of the men who knew and worked with Kelly.
While apparently not the originator of the process, Bessemer is without any doubt entitled to most of the credit he received. There is no proof that he had heard of Kelly’s experiments when he began his own or that he was aided by Kelly’s discoveries. He worked out the details of the process independently, as had Kelly, and it was Bessemer who put it on a commercial basis.
As has occurred with other new processes Bessemer’s first licensees were not particularly successful. When those who had bought the right to use his process had failed in their efforts to use it, and become discouraged as most of them did, he quietly bought back their rights and went ahead with his development of the process. Perhaps no man ever exhibited more perseverance in continuing experiments and development under very discouraging conditions than did Henry Bessemer. He had faith.
Sectional View of a Modern Converter Showing Air Duct and Tuyères
He had a genius for invention and was thorough in his experimental work. Practically no type of converter has since been brought out that he did not think of and try, and the process has been modified in but one or two important particulars in the years that have passed.
The essential part of the Bessemer process is the blowing of air through molten cast iron to remove the metalloids by which cast iron differs from steel and wrought iron, as has been explained before.
This being the essential point, and at first thought the lack of fuel seeming so peculiar, we must describe what happens during the Bessemer “blow.”