Henry Bessemer

Henry Bessemer was an English inventor and metallurgical engineer whose Bessemer process made mass production of steel from molten pig iron practical for the first time. Patented in 1856, the process blows air through molten iron to burn off carbon and impurities, converting it to steel in minutes rather than the days required by earlier methods, and it slashed the cost of steel enough to enable the railway, shipbuilding and structural steel booms of the later nineteenth century. He founded a Sheffield steelworks to prove the process commercially and was knighted in 1879 for his contributions to industry. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/