| Abstract: | Abstract Until the year 1856, when Bessemerpatented his new process for the easier and' cheaper manufacture of wrought iron, the production of iron in Great Britain in the form of cast and wrought iron had predominated over its conversion into steel. In the early 1850s only a very small percentage of the annual output of pig iron was converted into steel. Although in Bessemer's patent, only wrought iron was specified as the object of the new process, it was recognized that the real value of the process lay in its applicability to the conversion of pig iron into: steel in a single short operation. There was an inevitable lag in the widespread adoption of the new process for which a number of factors were responsible. Firstly, there were initial disappointments over the effectiveness of Bessemer's process: although Mushet's addition of spiegeleisen to the molten metal in the converter rescued Bessemerfrom failure,1 several years of technical improvement and improvization were necessary before the generality of manufacturers were' ready to concentrate on Bessemer steel,2 A second important cause of the delay in the widespread adoption of the Bessemer process lay in the susceptibility of the British iron and steel industry to severe cyclical fluctuations. By the middle 1860s, when the conservatism of steel manufacturers was beginning to thaw in the face of successful production by the early pioneers of the Bessemer process, a more general development of Bessemer steel seemed likely. These years, however, were years of the depression which reached its nadir in 1867–8. Only when recovery from this depression was well established at the end of the decade did Bessemer steel really come into its own. The real expansion of Bessemer steel production came, therefore, not in the few years after 1856, but in the few years after 1870. Steel rails accounted for a large part of this increase. In 1867, some 2,277 tons of Bessemer steel rails were made in Great Britain: by 1882 this figure had risen to 1,438,155 tons.3 |
