William Kelly
Born: 1811
Death: 1888
Fight over Steel
William Kelly believed he’d been snubbed of the glory rightly due him. In Britain, Sir Henry Bessemer had introduced a new method of mass-producing steel from pig iron, and received a patent for the process in the U.S., in 1856. Bessemer’s process centers on the removal of impurities by blasting hot air through molten iron in a specially designed furnace. As temperatures rise, hot air is blown into the furnace, oxidizing the carbon and cleansing the metal to form pure steel. Steel, cheaply mass produced, was now possible, but not without enormous difficulties in refining the process; still, it was a milestone that changed the world. Think of what steel is used for today: the world’s skyscrapers are nothing without the steel bodies that hold them up; steel train tracks do not erode as easily as their iron forebears, enabling the railroads to spread throughout the world, without worrying over the most fundamental aspects, the rails; Shipping and construction equipment; the list of steel’s uses are endless, but for millennia, the process of producing it en masse was far too expensive to even attempt. No longer. The problem was, Henry Bessemer was now to experience the misfortune of having his patent stripped from him, by a disgruntled Kentuckian who claimed to have preempted Bessemer’s process by several years.
William Kelly was an iron manufacturer with a mission. Like Bessemer, Kelly sought a way to mass-produce iron with less carbon, and thus sturdier than pig iron, which contained larger quantities of carbon, making it far weaker than desired. So, upon seeing the heat generated when one of his workers blew air into a molten vat of pig iron, Kelly realized the possibilities. In his 1857 patent, Kelly concluded that his process was “enough to carry the metal through, without chilling, all the various manipulations of refining without the aid of any other heat than…[the] chemical union of oxygen and carbon.” Disgruntled to find that Bessemer had achieved similar results and was receiving widespread recognition for it, Kelly went on a letter-writing campaign, challenging Bessemer’s assertions of having gotten the process down first.
Claiming to have had his process down the year before Bessemer, Kelly wrote to the Scientific American: “I have reason to believe my discovery was known in England three or four years ago, as a number of English puddlers visited this place,” (Kelly’s ironworks in Kentucky), “to see my new process. Several of them have since returned to England and may have spoken of my invention there.” Though unsubstantiated, Kelly’s claims of precedence led to a court battle that ultimately stripped Bessemer of the U.S. Patent for his process. Kelly, however, was not the only man claiming credit for the mass manufacture of iron, for he and Bessemer had to deal with another competitor in the form of Robert Mushat, an Englishman. like Bessemer. But in the United States, the matter was firmly settled on the side of Kelly. He wasn’t able to do much of anything with it as the Panic of 1857 soon tanked his finances and he was obliged to sell his patent. The problem was, the Patent Office later renewed his patent, even as Bessemer tried to renew his own in the United States. Kelly may have won over Bessemer, but his name is not linked with the now-classic process of forging steel; in that, at least, Bessemer was victorious.
William Kelly. Improvement in the Manufacture of Iron. U.S. Patent 17,628. June 23, 1857; Ramirez, Ainissa. The Alchemy of US: How Human and Matter Transformed One Another. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020), 36 -38.
“Air boiling of iron - Another Claimant.” Scientific American Vol 12.6, October 18, 1856.
“Defeat of Mr. Bessemer’s American Patent.” Mechanics’ Magazine, July 25, 1857; Temin, Peter. Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Interpretation. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 126 -128.
Ramirez. The Alchemy of Us, 38.