Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

THE MANUFACTURE OF IRON AND STEEL. 45 night a beggar piteously sought for shelter in the works. The vagrant was admitted, and coiled himself within the warm area BESSEMER CASTING PIT, YORKSHIRE STEEL AND IRON WORKS, SHEF- FIELD. A RANGE OF CARBURISING FURNACES. of the forge to sleep; but he slept with one eye open, and eagerly noted every move of the steel - making, for he was an iron- founder in the disguise of a tramp, and he took Huntsman’s secret out in his busy brain, be- neath his ragged cap. But this process, the production of cast steel by the fusion of converted bar iron of the required degree of hardness, did not content the investigator Bessemer. Restive with inventive genius, he set up a factory at Baxter House, St. Pancras, and experi- mented, often unsuccessfully, but never disheartened. He erected a converter, and discovered that by forcing streams of air at high pressure through the bottom of the fireclay lined vessel filled with molten metal he could make steel ! Nobody believed it; and one ironmaster, going to the British Association at Cheltenham, said incredulously: “ Why, there’s a fel- low come down from London who says he can make steel from cast iron with- out fuel! Hah ! ha -h ah!” What Bessemer did, striv- ing against failure o o and contempt, was to produce pure malleable iron at a reasonable price. But he wished to go further: to make steel serviceable and inexpensive; to produce pure iron with a small percentage of carbon to harden it. He finally succeeded, and Bessemer steel became indispensable on railway track and in a thousand industries. But steel is impossible without iron, and though pessimists declare that some, of our methods are antiquated, and that foreign competition is ousting us from distant and