ABSTRACT
Sir Henry Bessemer was born in 1813 near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, far from the main bases of the Industrial Revolution in the North and Midlands. The outbreak of the Crimean War, the first major European conflict for forty years, stimulated an interest in the manufacture of cannon, and Bessemer invented a rifled, self-rotating shell which could be fired from the smooth-bored cannon of the time. By 1880 Bessemer steel was being used on a big scale, after initial hesitancy on the part of practical engineers, for the manufacture of boilers. The London and North Western Railway Company began installing steel boilers in all its new locomotives from 1875 onwards. The first ship to be built from Bessemer steel was the Jason, launched on the Thames by Samuda Bros. in 1859. Bessemer's spectacular example generated a growing volume of intensive research into the metallurgical problems of the iron and steel trade.
