In 1858, Sir Henry Bessemer developed a process of steel making by blowing hot air through liquid pig iron to reduce the carbon content.

Once the Bessemer process began to gain widespread use, other alloys of steel began to follow, such as mangalloy, an alloy of steel and manganese, which exhibits extreme hardness and toughness.

One of his two great innovations was in the cheap and efficient mass production of steel by adopting and adapting the Bessemer process for steel making.

As the forests of Britain and Europe continued to be over-harvested to supply the keels of larger wooden boats, and the Bessemer process ( patented in 1855 ) cheapened the cost of steel, steel ships and boats began to be more common.

He also invested in fluidized hotbed technologies ( notably the Bessemer process ) and acquired many mines in Germany and France.

The 1880s saw the development of the Bessemer process for producing steel.

With the invention of the Bessemer process in the mid-19th century, steel became an inexpensive mass-produced material.

* 1075 – the Song Chinese innovate a partial decarbonization method of repreated forging of cast iron under a cold blast that Hartwell and Needham consider to be a predecessor to the 18th century Bessemer process.

* Production of steel revolutionized by invention of the Bessemer process

* October 17 – Henry Bessemer files his patent in the United Kingdom for the Bessemer process of steelmaking.

The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass-production of steel from molten pig iron.

The process is named after its inventor, Henry Bessemer, who took out a patent on the process in 1855.

The process using a basic refractory lining is known as the basic Bessemer process or Gilchrist-Thomas process after the discoverer Sidney Gilchrist Thomas.

Before the Bessemer process, Britain had no practical method of reducing the carbon content of pig iron.

The Bessemer process reduced the time needed to make steel of this quality to about half an hour while requiring only the coke needed to melt the pig iron initially.

Starting in January 1855 he began working on a way to produce steel in the massive quantities required for artillery and by October he filed his first patent related to the Bessemer process.

Bessemer licensed the patent for his process to four ironmasters, for a total of £ 27, 000, but the licensees failed to produce the quality of steel he had promised — it was " rotten hot and rotten cold ", according to his friend, William Clay — and he later bought them back for £ 32, 500.

Bessemer's name is chiefly known in connection with the Bessemer process for the manufacture of steel.

On 24 August 1856 Bessemer first described the process to a meeting of the British Association in Cheltenham which he titled " The Manufacture of Iron Without Fuel.

The steel price dropped as a direct result, and Bessemer steel was rapidly adopted for railway lines and girders for buildings and bridges.

Steel is often cited as the first of several new areas for industrial mass-production, which are said to characterise a " Second Industrial Revolution ", beginning around 1850, although a method for mass manufacture of steel was not invented until the 1860s, when Sir Henry Bessemer invented a new furnace which could convert wrought iron into steel in large quantities.

The success and growth of Carnegie Steel was attributed to Henry Bessemer, inventor of the Bessemer Process.

According to his autobiography Bessemer was working with an ordinary reverbatory furnace but during a test, some pieces of pig iron were jostled off the side of the ladle, and were left above the ladle in the furnace's heat.

Sir Henry Bessemer ( 19 January 1813 – 15 March 1898 ) was an English engineer, inventor, and businessman.

The invention from which Henry Bessemer made his first fortune was a series of six steam-powered machines for making bronze powder.

Bessemer patented a method for making a continuous ribbon of plate glass in 1848, but it was not commercially successful ( see his autobiography, chapter 8 ).

His results prompted Bessemer to try a purer iron obtained from Cumberland hematite, but even with this he had only limited success because the quantity of carbon was difficult to control.

When Bessemer tried to induce makers to take up his improved system, he met with general rebuffs and was eventually driven to undertake the exploitation of the process himself.

At first the output was insignificant, but gradually the magnitude of the operations was enlarged until the competition became effective, and steel traders generally became aware that the firm of Henry Bessemer & Co. was underselling them to the extent of UK £ 10 -£ 15 a ton.

In that year his 16 year old daughter, Mary, travelled to London alone, to confront Bessemer at his offices, arguing that his success was based on the results of her father ’ s work.

W M Lord has said with regard to this success that " Sir Henry Bessemer was somewhat exceptional.

Bessemer was a prolific inventor and held at least 129 patents, spanning from 1838 to 1883.

Bessemer was knighted for his contribution to science on 26 June 1879, and in the same year was made a fellow of the Royal Society.

In 2009, the public house " The Fountain " in Sheffield City Centre was renamed " The Bessemer ", in homage to Henry Bessemer who had a huge impact on the Steel City's development.

That a man who did so much for industrial development did not receive higher recognition from his own government was a source of deep regret to English engineers, who alluded to the fact that in the United States, where the Bessemer process found much use, eight cities or towns bore his name.

Bulat became popular in cannon manufacturing, until the Bessemer process was able to make the same quality steels for far less money.

The introduction of the Bessemer process and other steelmaking processes gradually replaced it, being able to produce steel of similar ( or better ) quality on a much larger scale more quickly and cheaply.

Kelly was college-educated in metallurgy, while Bessemer in his autobiography described no education, other than a practical knowledge of typecasting and machining learned at his father's type foundry, stating in 1854, " My knowledge of iron metallurgy was at that time very limited ...", but somehow he was able to build, without a long series of progressive improvements, a functioning converter to blow air into molten iron and convert it to steel.

Its peak of prosperity was in the 19th century when West Cumberland experienced a brief boom because haematite found locally was one of the few iron ores that could be used to produce steel by the original Bessemer process.

The Bessemer process was felt to produce steel that was well-suited to manufacture of rails, which was the Algoma complex primary product for the first two decades of its existence.

Dowlais Ironworks were the first business to license the Bessemer process, using it to produce steel in 1865.