the establishments and the increase in the capital invested described at the opening of this section.
This process of burning out the carbon and other impurities from the molten iron by forcing air and thus combining the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the iron, although it seems to have been devised almost simultaneously by Kelly in the United States and Bessemer in England, is usually denominated the “Bessemer process,” and while Kelly obtained certain patents and a half million dollars for his invention, Bessemer also obtained other patents and it is said ten millions of dollars for his.
The process of transforming iron into steel by the Bessemer process is described by Herbert N. Casson in “The Romance of Steel,” as follows:
“A converter is a huge iron pot twice as high as a man. It is swung on an axle, so that it can be tilted up and down. Although it weighs as much as a battalion of five hundred men, it can be handled by a boy. About thirty thousand pounds of molten iron are poured into it; and then, from two hundred little holes in the bottom, a strong blast of air is turned on, rushing like a tornado through the metal. Millions of red and yellow sparks fly a hundred feet into the air.
“The converter roars like a volcano in eruption. It is the fiercest and most strenuous of all the inventions of man. The impurities in the iron—the phosphorus, sulphur, silicon and carbon—are being hurled out of the metal in this paroxysm of fury. The sparks change from red to yellow; then suddenly they become white.
“‘All right!’ shouts the grimy workman in charge.
“The great pot is tilted sideways, gasping and coughing like a monster in pain. A workman feeds it with several hundred pounds of a carbon mixture, to restore a necessary element that has been blown out. Then it is tilted still farther; its lake of white fire is poured into a swinging ladle and slopped from the ladle into a train of huge clay pots,
pushed into place by a little locomotive. The converter then swings up and receives another fifteen tons of molten metal, the whole process having taken only a quarter of an hour.... Today there are more than a hundred Bessemer converters in the United States, breathing iron into steel at the rate of eighteen billion pounds a year. It is well worth a visit to Pittsburg to see one of these tamed Etnas in full blast. Nothing else in the world is like it.”
Discussing the importance of the discovery of the method by which common iron is thus cheaply and quickly transformed into steel, J. Russell Smith, in his “The Story of Iron and Steel,” says:
“Archaeologists and ethnologists agree that before the dawn of datable history a milestone of progress was marked when our ancestors had, at enormous cost, won a pound or so of iron per capita and begun the iron age. The keen analyst of the present, seeing our railways, our ships, our cannon, our sky scrapers, has erected another milestone, and this he calls the Age of Steel.