Other Inventions
Bessemer was a prolific inventor and held at least 129 patents, spanning from 1838 to 1883. They were chiefly concerned with manufacturing in five areas; iron, steel, glass, sugar, and cannons or other ordnance. He made ways to grow sugar more effectively, easyer ways to make glass and may more inventions that are still used today.
His autobiography describes all of his inventions, some in great detail, as one might expect from such an innovative man. It is also a very readable book which relates many amusing incidents in his long and fruitful career.
Among Bessemer's numerous other inventions were movable dies for embossed postage stamps, and a screw extruder for more efficiently extracting sugar from sugar cane.
After suffering from seasickness in 1868, he designed the SS Bessemer (also called the "Bessemer Saloon"), a passenger steamship with a cabin on gimbals designed to stay level, however rough the sea, to save her passengers from seasickness. The mechanism - hydraulics controlled by a steersman watching a spirit level - worked in model form and in a trial version built in his garden in Denmark Hill, London. However it never received a proper seagoing test as, when the ship demolished part of the Calais pier on her maiden voyage, investor confidence was lost and the ship was scrapped.
Bessemer also obtained a patent in 1857 for the casting of metal between contrarotating rollers - a forerunner of today's continuous casting processes and remarkably, Bessemer's original idea has been implemented in the direct continuous casting of steel strip.
Read more about this topic: Henry Bessemer
Famous quotes containing the word inventions:
“I’m afraid for all those who’ll have the bread snatched from their mouths by these machines.... What business has science and capitalism got, bringing all these new inventions into the works, before society has produced a generation educated up to using them!”
—Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)
“The treasury of America lies in those ambitions and those energies that cannot be restricted to a special, favored class. It depends upon the inventions of unknown men; upon the originations of unknown men, upon the ambitions of unknown men. Every country is renewed out of the ranks of the unknown, not out of the ranks of those already famous and powerful and in control.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)