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Henry Bessemer was born in 1813 in Charlton, Hertfordshire, son of Anthony Bessemer, a Huguenot inventor who had worked for the Paris Mint, entered the French Academy of Sciences at 26 and fled the French Revolution to make a fortune on gold chains. Henry, named for his godfather Henry Caslon of the type foundry, built his first fortune by reverse engineering expensive German bronze powder used for gold paint. He designed six steam-powered machines to replace hand grinding, cut the price from over five pounds a pound to about half a crown, and ran the London factory in total secrecy instead of filing a patent. In 1856, during the Crimean War, he told the British Association at Cheltenham he could make steel without fuel by blowing air through molten pig iron in a tilting, pear-shaped converter.

The five licensees who rushed to buy rights produced brittle, bubbled metal, because Bessemer had tested only low-phosphorus Welsh iron. Robert Forester Mushet of the Forest of Dean found the fix: burn out everything, then add back carbon and manganese as spiegeleisen. Bessemer answered the backlash by building his own Sheffield steelworks, undercutting rivals by 10 to 15 pounds a ton and earning over a million pounds in royalties. In 1866 Mushet’s 16-year-old daughter Mary confronted him in London, and he granted Mushet a 300-pound annual pension. Seasick, Bessemer later built a gimbaled, hydraulic cabin in his garden; the SS Bessemer smashed into the pier at Calais on its maiden voyage. He was knighted in 1879 and died in London in 1898.

• Only immediate family members were allowed inside his bronze powder factory.
• James Nasmyth, working on a similar air-blast idea, declined Bessemer’s offer of a one-third share of the patent.
• American William Kelly obtained a priority patent for the air-blast process in the United States in 1857.
• Bessemer held at least 129 patents, including movable stamp dies for the Post Office and an 1857 continuous casting design using water-cooled rollers.
• Eight American towns were named after him, and the Bessemer Gold Medal is still awarded each year.