Tanya Weaver looks back at the birth of the steel-making process, the first public demonstration of the TV and clever computer chess.
168 years ago
What a steel
American inventor William Kelly filed a patent on 20 January 1857 for a blast furnace for manufacturing steel. In this pneumatic process of steelmaking, air is blown through molten pig iron to oxidise and remove unwanted impurities.
Around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Sir Henry Bessemer (pictured) in the UK had discovered a similar process to produce inexpensive steel. While he patented his invention in 1855, the story goes that due to 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.
Image credit | Shutterstock29 years ago
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