Henry Bessemer
Henry Bessemer, who was born on January 19, 1813, inherited his love of
inventing from his father. Old Bessemer had worked in Holland and helped to
build the first steam-engine in that country. Later he designed a new kind
of lathe and made some other inventions while he was in France before the
French Revolution of 1848.
Henry has born in a small village near Hitchin, in Hertfordshire. He never
cared much for toys or games or for playing with other children and loved
to watch the old flour mill in operation down by the water.
At an early age Henry became interested in drawing. He spent hours in the
fields where he sketched the farm animals or the leaves of trees. He soon
became very good at modeling as well.
As he grew older, he longed to try his hand at making moulds of his models
and then casting them in his father’s foundry. But his father did not allow
him to enter the foundry alone. He allowed him to enter it only when he
himself was three. This was because he did not want other people to know
about the technicalities of this work. But Henry ignored this rule and
every two months when the large melting furnace was used found his away
into the melting house. He was usually discovered, but he not only managed
to do his casting but also discovered his father’s production secrets.
Old Bessemer soon understood that his little son was really very much
interested in metals, and then he began to encourage him and to teach him.
[pic] Bessemer’s artillery
Henry went to school. When he was fifteen he asked his father to let him
leave school and work in his foundry: he wanted to learn more about metals.
And his father agreed.
Henry loved his work. The experience also gave him a useful insight into
technical draughtsmanship, and important branch of an inventor’s work, at
which, with his natural gift for drawing, he soon excelled. After about a
year Henry knew enough to begin to make articles of his own invention. One
of these articles was a small machine for moulding tiny bricks out of white
pipeclay. The bricks were quite useless, but young Bessemer was proud of
his work.
First Inventions
Early in 1830, when Henry was seventeen, his father decided to leave
Carlton where they then lived and to transfer his business to London. Henry
was very glad when he was told of his father’s plan.
In London he decided to become an inventor. For a time he had many and
varied ideas, but he failed to realize them. First he tried to cast metal
ornaments in brass instead of in dull lead. He sold some of his new
ornaments to gift shops, but he made only a small profit.
Bessemer then turned his attention to designing a new typesetting machine.
At that time a printer had to pick out all his letters by hand. It was very
tedious work.
Bessemer designed a machine with a key-boar rather like that of a piano
that sorted out the letters required in a fraction of the time simply by
depressing the necessary keys. It was a clever invention, and it worked
most efficiently. When it was tested it was found that an inexperienced
printer could set 6000 letters an hour whereas by the old hand method a
skilled man could set only about 1700 letters an hour.
In 1833, he started work at another idea. At that time all legal deeds and
documents, to make them legal, were a tamped with adhesive stamps. But
these stamps were easy to forge, and also they could be removed from old
and useless documents and used again. Bessemer discovered that the