Bessemer Process - Importance

Importance

The Bessemer process revolutionized steel manufacture by decreasing its cost, from £40 per long ton to £6–7 per long ton, along with greatly increasing the scale and speed of production of this vital raw material. The process also decreased the labor requirements for steel-making. Prior to its introduction, steel was far too expensive to make bridges or the framework for buildings and thus wrought iron had been used throughout the Industrial Revolution. After the introduction of the Bessemer process, steel and wrought iron became similarly priced, and most manufacturers turned to steel. Some claim the availability of cheap steel allowed large bridges to be built and enabled the construction of railroads, skyscrapers, and large ships; however, the largest ship of the 19th century was the iron SS Great Eastern launched in 1858, high pressure steam-powered locomotive railways appeared in 1825 with the opening of the Stockton and Darlington railway (the first passenger railway opened in 1830 between Liverpool and Manchester), and the first modern large suspension bridge was the Menai Suspension Bridge completed in 1826: the later two decades before mass produced steel. Other important steel products—also made using the open hearth process—were steel cable, steel rods and sheet steel which enabled large, high-pressure boilers and high-tensile strength steel for machinery which enabled much more powerful engines, gears and axles than were possible previously. With large amounts of steel it became possible to build much more powerful guns and carriages, tanks, armored fighting vehicles and naval ships. Industrial steel also made possible the building of giant turbines and generators thus making the harnessing of water and steam power possible. The introduction of the large scale steel production process paved the way to mass industrialisation as observed in the 19th–20th centuries.

However, as early as 1895 in the UK it was being noted that the heyday of the Bessemer process was over and that the open hearth method predominated. The Iron and Coal Trades Review said that it was "in a semi-moribund condition. Year after year, it has not only ceased to make progress, but it has absolutely declined." It has been suggested, both at that time and more recently, that the cause of this was the lack of trained personnel and investment in technology rather than any intrinsic to the process itself. For example, one of the major causes of the decline of the giant ironmaking company Bolckow Vaughan of Middlesbrough was its failure to upgrade its technology. The basic process, Thomas-Gilchrist process, remained longer in use, especially in the Continental Europe, where iron ores were of high phosphorus content and open hearth process was not able to remove all phosphorus; almost all inexpensive construction steel in Germany was produced with this method in the 1950s and 1960s . It was eventually superseded by basic oxygen steelmaking.