hebig.org/blog
Personal webnode of Haiko Hebig

In a section called The Engineer 150, the British science magazine The Engineer has published a collection of key articles of the last 150 years in PDF format. My favorite is the reproduction of a speech delivered by Henry Bessemer to the British Association in August 1856:

The manufacture of iron in this country has attained such an important position that any improvement in this branch of our national industry cannot fail to be a source of general interest, and will, I trust, be a sufficient excuse for the present brief, and I fear imperfect paper

... on his revolutionary invention that led to the transition from manual (low quantity) steelmaking in puddling furances to industrialized (high quantity) steelmaking in converter vessels:

I constructed a cylindrical vessel of three feet in diameter, and five feet in height, somewhat like an ordinary cupola furnace, the interior of which is lined with fire bricks, and at about two inches from the bottom of it, I insert five tuyère pipes, the nozzles of which are formed of well-burnt fire clay, the orifice of each tuyère being about three-eights of an inch in diameter. [...] The vessel will then be in readiness to commence work, and may be so continued without any use of fuel until the brick lining in the course of time becomes worn away and a new lining is required.

It delivered the daily output of a puddling furnace within 20 minutes.

In 1875, British inventor Sidney Gilchrist Thomas introduced a different lining for Bessemer vessels that finally allowed for the use of high phosphorus iron - steelmaking on the continent set off, the "basic process", as Thomas called it (Thomasstahl in German), has dominated the industry for 90 years. Then, VOEST-ALPINE added the top-blow oxygen lance and scrap metal charging to the equation - the resulting "basic oxygen process" (LD-Verfahren in German) and its derivates are dominant to this day, no end in sight. Today, combined blowing from both the top and the bottom, charge weights of up to 400 tons and processing times of about 40 minutes per charge are common.

The Engineer, August 1856 - Henry Bessemer: On the Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel Without Fuel (PDF) →