Henry Bessemer (Bessemer Henry)

(1813-1898)
Born January 19, 1813 in Charlton (county of Hertfordshire). Father Bessemer, typefounder invented many mechanical devices, and under his influence Henry from an early age was interested in mechanics and metallurgy. The evidence that he had received vocational training, no. Bessemer patented more than a hundred inventions in various fields of technology: from the production of bronze powder to the printing of casting equipment to the sugar mill, centrifugal pumps and large telescopes. The most important was the development of his invention in 1856 ways to get started without additional heating, blowing air through molten pig iron in a pear-shaped reservoir, now called the Bessemer converter. By this method Bessemer came doing to improve the quality of steel for gun barrels. His first attempts were unsuccessful: he did not immediately find the appropriate converter design, and in addition, using low-quality iron from South Wales. And only four years later, in 1860, after the invention of the rotating converter with air through the bottom, Bessemer process was widely used in England and abroad. Bessemer received many honorary awards, t.ch. Austrian Order of Franz Joseph and medals of Napoleon III. In 1879 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of London, erected in knighted. He was one of the founders of the British Iron and Steel Institute and in 1873 established the Bessemer gold medal for outstanding achievements in the production of ferrous metals. In the last years of his life engaged in the construction reflecting telescope. Bessemer died in London on March 15, 1898