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.
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Famous quotes containing the word inventions:
“In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)