Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century

by Robert Routledge

“To those who are best acquainted with the nature of fluid iron, it may be a matter of surprise that a blast of cold air forced into melted crude iron is capable of raising its temperature to such a degree as to retain it in a perfect state of fluidity after it has lost all its carbon and is in the condition of malleable iron, which, in the highest heat of our forges, only becomes softened into a pasty mass. But such is the excessive temperature that I am enabled to arrive at with a properly shaped converting vessel and a judicious distribution of the blast, that I am enabled not only to retain the fluidity of the metal, but to create so much surplus heat as to remelt all the crop-ends, ingot-runners, and other scrap that is made throughout the process, and thus bring them, without labour or fuel, into ingots of a quality equal to the rest of the charge of new metal....

“To persons conversant with the manufacture of iron, it will be at once apparent that the ingots of the malleable metal which I have described will have no hard or steely parts, such as are found in puddled iron, requiring a great amount of rolling to blend them with the general mass, nor will such ingots require an excess of rolling to expel cinder from the interior of the mass, since none can exist in the ingot, which is pure and perfectly homogeneous throughout, and hence requires only as much rolling as is necessary for the development of fibre; it therefore follows that, instead of forming a merchant bar, or rail, by the union of a number of separate pieces welded together, it will be far more simple and less expensive to make several bars or rails from a single ingot. Doubtless this would have been done long ago had not the whole process been limited by the size of the ball which the puddler could make.

“The facility which the new process affords of making large masses will enable the manufacturer to produce bars that, in the old mode of working, it was impossible to obtain; while at the same time it admits of the use of more powerful machinery, whereby a great deal of labour will be saved and the process be greatly expedited.... I wish to call the attention of the meeting to some of the peculiarities which distinguish cast steel from all other forms of iron, viz., the perfectly homogeneous character of the metal, the entire absence of sand-cracks or flaws, and its greater cohesive force and elasticity, as compared with the blister steel from which it is made,—qualities which it derives solely from its fusion and formation into ingots, all of which properties malleable iron acquires in like manner by its fusion and formation into ingots in the new process; nor must it be forgotten that no amount of rolling will give the blister steel, although formed of rolled bars, the same homogeneous character that cast steel acquires by a mere extension of the ingot to some ten or twelve times its original length....

“I beg to call your attention to an important fact connected with the new process which affords peculiar facilities for the manufacture of cast steel. At that stage of the process immediately following the boil the whole of the crude iron has passed into the condition of cast steel of ordinary quality. By the continuation of the process the steel so produced gradually loses its small remaining portion of carbon, and passes successively from hard to soft steel, and from soft steel to steely iron, and eventually to very soft iron; hence, at a certain period of the process, any quality of metal may be obtained. There is one in particular which by way of distinction I call semi-steel, being in hardness about midway between ordinary cast steel and soft malleable iron. This metal possesses the advantage of much greater tensile strength than soft iron; it is also more elastic, and does not readily take a permanent set, while it is much harder and is not worn or indented so easily as soft iron; at the same time it is not so brittle or hard to work as ordinary cast steel. These qualities render it eminently well adapted to purposes where lightness and strength are specially required, or where there is much wear, as in the case of railway bars, which from their softness and lamellar texture soon become destroyed. The cost of semi-steel will be a fraction less than iron, because the loss of metal that takes place by oxidation in the converting vessel is about 2½ per cent. less than it is with iron; but as it is a little more difficult to roll, its cost per ton may fairly be considered to be the same as iron; but as its tensile strength is some 30 or 40 per cent. greater than bar iron, it follows that for most purposes a much less weight of metal may be used than that so taken. The semi-steel will form a much cheaper metal than any we are at present acquainted with. These facts have not been elicited from mere laboratory experiments, but have been the result of working on a scale nearly twice as great as is pursued in our largest iron works, the experimental apparatus doing 7 cwt. in thirty minutes, while the ordinary puddling furnace makes only 4½ cwt. in two hours, which is made into six separate balls, while the ingots or blooms are smooth, even prisms, 10 in. square by 30 in. in length, weighing about equal to ten ordinary puddle balls.”

The startling novelty of the methods and results described in this paper had the effect of paralyzing discussion at the time. But soon the voice of detraction was heard; many iron-masters ridiculed the idea of producing iron and steel without fuel, and indeed it may have been observed, the title of the paper notwithstanding, that first the silicon and carbon, and then the iron itself, really supplied the fuel. And we must remember that malleable iron in a molten state was then deemed an impossibility, for the hottest furnaces then known could not effect the fusion, however prolonged their action might be, yet Bessemer was to obtain five tons in this condition in the short space of half an hour with no other aid than cold air. Then it was said that Bessemer’s process of forcing air into melted cast iron had no claim of novelty, for it had been tried before and found valueless. Some iron-masters on trying experiments on a small scale and with imperfect appliances met with failures, and discredited the process at once; but five large establishments paid for licences sums amounting to £26,500 within three weeks of the reading of the paper. At the works of the Dowlais Iron Co., in South Wales, who were the first licensees, the first converter was set up under Bessemer’s personal superintendence, and at the first operation five tons of iron were produced direct from the blast furnace pig. This apparently satisfactory result proved quite otherwise when this iron came to be practically tested; for it was found quite useless! It was both “cold-short” and “red-short,” to use the technical terms,—the former of which means that although the sample may be welded, it is when cold brittle and rotten; the latter means that at a low red heat it breaks and crumbles under the hammer. Further trials were made, new experiments instituted, but the success that attended Bessemer’s early experiments could not be repeated, and as yet no one knew the reason why. Now it so happened that in the preliminary experiments an exceptionally pure pig iron had been made use of containing little or no phosphorus or sulphur, substances very deleterious in iron, and still more so in steel. With the capital obtained by the sale of his licences Bessemer quietly set to work to investigate the cause of his non-success, making daily experiments with a ton or two of metal at a time. These experiments extended over a period of two and a half years, and upon them Bessemer and his partner spent about £16,000, besides the £4,000 the preliminary researches had cost. But all difficulties were at length overcome, and the process was now found capable of turning out pure iron and steel when the pure pig iron of Sweden was used in the converter. In the meantime the licensees had made no attempts practically to carry out the process, which began to be denounced as visionary: it was “a mare’s nest”; it was “a meteor that had passed through the metallurgical world, but had gone out with all its sparks.” When Bessemer again brought the subject before the public, he found that no one believed in it; everyone said, “Oh, this is the thing that made such a blaze two or three years ago, and which was a failure.” Neither iron-makers nor steel-makers would now take it up. Bessemer and his partner thereupon joined with three other gentlemen to establish at Sheffield a steel-works of their own, where the invention should be carried into full practice. In due time works were erected, and they commenced to sell steel, receiving at first very paltry orders, for such quantities as 28 lbs. or 56 lbs.; but the orders soon became larger, and afterwards very much larger, for they were underselling the Sheffield manufacturers by £20 a ton, and their steel was undistinguishable from the higher priced article. Bessemer had now bought his licences back again, and in the course of his second set of experiments had patented each improvement as it occurred to him, finally bringing the mechanical apparatus to the degree of efficiency requisite for practical working, without which his primary idea would have been valueless. Before directing the reader’s attention to the form the apparatus had assumed, we may transcribe what Mr. Jeans, in the work above referred to, has told about the commercial success of the Bessemer steel-making firm:—

“On the expiration of the fourteen years’ term of partnership of this firm the works, which had been greatly increased from time to time out of revenues, were sold by private contract for exactly twenty-four times the amount of the whole subscribed capital, notwithstanding that the firm had divided in profits during the partnership a sum equal to fifty-seven times the gross capital, so that by the mere commercial working of the process, apart from the patent, each of the five partners retired after fourteen years from the Sheffield works with eighty-one times the amount of his subscribed capital, or an average of nearly cent. per cent., every two months,—a result probably unprecedented in the annals of commerce.”

Fig. 24.—Bessemer Converter.
A, Front view, showing the mouth, c; B, Section.

The form of the Bessemer apparatus as it finally left the inventor’s hands may now be considered: but in certain details and arrangements some modifications, dictated by the experience and requirements of individual establishments, have been made, leaving the principles of the apparatus unchanged. Thus instead of making the converting vessel turn on trunnions, it is sometimes constructed fixed, the fluid metal after conversion being let out at a tap-hole; the number and size of the tuyères are varied; and so with the disposition of the air chamber or tuyère box, the pressure of the blast, the capacity of the converter itself, etc. In capacity converters vary between 2½ tons and 10 tons; one of medium size is shown in elevation and section in Fig. [24], and may be described as an egg-shaped vessel about 15 ft. high and 6 ft. diameter inside. It is strongly made of wrought iron in two parts bolted together, and is lined inside with some thick infusible coating, of which more is to be said presently. The converter swings on trunnions, one of which is hollow, and admits the blast by the pipe b to the base of the vessel, whence it passes through the passages shown at e. The thickness of the lining at e may perhaps be 20 in., and passages for the air are perforated in fire-clay tuyères, of which there may be seven, each with seven perforations of half an inch diameter. To the other trunnion is attached a toothed wheel which engages the teeth of a rack receiving motion from hydraulic pressure. The iron for the operation is melted in a furnace having its hearth above the level of the converter; and to receive its charge the latter is turned so that the molten cast iron may be poured in from a trough until its surface is nearly on a level with the lowest of the tuyères. The blast having been turned on, the hydraulic power is set to work and the converter is slowly brought to an upright position. The pressure of the current of air prevents any of the fluid metal from entering the blow-holes. The blast of cold air is continued until all the silicon and carbon have been removed by oxidation. If the production is to be steel, there is then added to the contents of the converter, placed in position to receive it, a certain weight of melted cast iron of a special constitution, and the blow is resumed for a few minutes; or in more recent practice this special metal is added to the fluid metal run out of the converter into a spacious ladle in known quantity. On this addition an intense action takes place, attended by an extremely brilliant flame and a throwing out of cinder or slag. The metal thus added to the decarbonized iron is a carbonized alloy of iron and manganese obtained from an ore naturally containing the latter metal, and scarcely any phosphorus or sulphur. The charcoal pig from this ore is called spiegeleisen (German = mirror-iron) from its brilliant reflecting facets; it contains from 12 to 20 per cent. of manganese, with about 5 per cent. of carbon, and a considerable proportion of silicon. An exact chemical analysis of the particular spiegeleisen having been previously made, it is known what proportion of it is to be added to the decarbonized iron in order to convert this into a steel with any required content of carbon. The manganese probably acts by combining with oxide of iron diffused through the mass, and together with the silicon forming the very easily separated slag which is ejected.

The whole series of operations connected with the Bessemer process may be easily followed by the help of Fig. [25], which is taken from a beautiful model in the Museum of Practical Geology. This model, which was presented to the museum by Mr. Bessemer himself, represents every part of the machinery and appliances of the true relative sizes. C is the trough, lined with infusible clay, by which the liquid pig iron is conveyed to the converters, A. The hydraulic apparatus by which the vessels are turned over is here below the pavement, but the rack which turns the pinion on the axis of the converter is shown at B. The vessel into which the molten steel is poured from the converter is marked E, and this vessel is swung round on a crane, D, so as to bring it exactly over the moulds, placed in a circle ready to receive the liquid steel, which on cooling is turned out in the form of solid ingots. The valves which control the blast, and those which regulate the movements of the converter through the hydraulic apparatus, are worked by the handle seen at H. The crane, or revolving table, D, is also under perfect control, so that the crude pig iron is converted into steel, and the moulds are filled with a rapidity and ease that are positively marvellous to a spectator.