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The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. The key principle is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron.
Bessemer Way in Rotherham is also named in his honour. 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. In Workington, Cumbria, the local Wetherspoons pub is now named after him.
A similar process was discovered independently by Henry Bessemer and patented in 1855. Due to a financial panic in 1857, a company that had already licensed the Bessemer process was able to purchase Kelly's patents, and licensed both under a single scheme using the Bessemer name. Kelly's role in the invention of the process is much less known.
The Kelly-Bessemer process, because it reduces the amount of coke needed for blasting and increases the quality of the finished iron, revolutionized the mass production of high-quality steel and facilitated a drastic drop in steel prices and expansion of its availability.
Steel is an alloy composed of between 0.2 and 2.0 percent carbon, with the balance being iron. From prehistory through the creation of the blast furnace, iron was produced from iron ore as wrought iron, 99.82–100 percent Fe, and the process of making steel involved adding carbon to iron, usually in a serendipitous manner, in the forge, or via the cementation process.
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In the 1800s, the US switched from charcoal to coal in ore smelting, adopted the Bessemer process, and saw the rise of very large integrated steel mills. In the 20th century, the US industry transitioned from the open hearth furnace to the basic oxygen steelmaking process. After peaking in the 1940s and 1950s, the US iron and steel industry ...