Wauan the prophet Hosea, who is also called Biglow, declared that Civilisation does git torrid Sometimes upon a powder cart," he only accentuated in a quaint way the notion of the great Verulam that Inman progress depends largely on mechanical inventions and scientific discovery. Such diverse facts as the introduction of the horse and the trick of reducing iron from its ore have biassed the development of whole races of mon, The ingenious Mr. Lecky goes further and does not hesitate to credit the amelioration of the British character to so small" thing as hot drinks. Our forbears it seems, quaffed mighty ale, and were as coarse and cruel, as the lave (=rest: Burns): in the seventh century in came tea, coffee chocolate and, being male by woman's gentle hand and drank in her presence, manners began to assuage. Of course there is a deeper view of social progress than this: a wag amongst philosophers. struck deep into the trath when he attributed it all to the struggle of two compatible but dissimilar desires of man's heart—the wish to catch and eat; the wish neither to be caught nor eaten; to-day however ami for our present purpose we want to insist. on the mechanical inventions phase of civi-ised progress.
Who late Thomas Huxley never told a bigger truth than when he advised the British working man that the Education Vote (now £7,000,000 year) was well spent if it occasionally caught in the elementary schools a Faraday or a Lord Relvin, Ignoring the higher aspects of their eases, viz. the increase of knowledge ant the subjection of intractable matter to mind, it is surely too obvious that the labours of these men have hugely increased the comforts of life and the material wealth of their country and age. In the final estimate of beneficence the man who replicas a wooden scraper of the ground by a deep-cutting, light, steel plonghshare is surely in the same field as he who plants and lives and reaps with increase. It is on this ground we call our readers' attention to the modest English gentleman who recently passed away at the ripe age of 86-—Sir Henry Bessemer. His life may or may not adorn a tale, it certain ly does prove a moral, and is worth a more adequate recognition than the normal obituary notice in the Times} and its echo through the weekly Press. We venture on this remote siding of the great world of maunfactire to add our word' of praise to the very great prince who has fallen in the Israel of industry.
Ever since, and indeed before, man was able to record his own.history he} has known the curiously diverse properties of the three modified forms of iron, cast iron, steel, and malleable iron; properties so diverse as to suggest incompatible origins instead of a slight alteration in the quantity of an impurity, carbon, in the metal.
From Tubal Cain to Harry Bessemer men knew the wrinkle how to transform one to the other, but they knew it badly. Steel-making right down the ages was a deadly art costing much in labour, time, and coal, and still more in the thews and lives of men. the output limited and in the mass of variable quality, as the limitation of human strength only allowed small quantities to be made at one time. In the forties' young Bessemer bent the stress of an ingenious and strenuous mind to the problem; after some years of labour and costly experiment and many heart-breaking failures he at last came across the simple solution. He blew a blast of hot air through themolten cast iron thus at once continuing the heat and burning out the impurities. The mechanical means by which this was effected were perhaps more wouderful than the principle of decarboniron: none but have witnessed the spectacle of a Bessemer converter at the crisis of the process can form an idea of the impressiveness, The beautiful simplicity and the celerity of the oper: tion—it is the Niagara of the inclu: trial world.
The modern battleship, the Forth and Brooklyn bridges, the Atlantic liners, the towers of Babel which disadorn Chicago and New York, the terrific guns of our age, the permanent ways of one railways, the steel cables with which the modern Pack has ginlled the earth, are all in a sense the legitimate offspring of Sir Henry Bessemer, Without his pregnant invention, we should still be in the iron age with its severe limittions in weight, elasticity, and e: pense. We deliberately call his i vention pregnant, it gated the researches of Gilchrist and how ts to get quit of phosphorus, the improvements of Suellers and Holley, and the kindred beautiful open-hearth process of Siemens and Martin, Bessemer and these great followers have turned the manufacturing world upside down by their means; the last forty years have witnessed the greatest revolution in material that the industrial world has ever seen. The great triumphs of modern engineering "are as clearly due to Bessemer ax those of surgery are due to Pasteur and Lister; without his work steel would have been as it used tu be a costly exotic, beautiful as engineer's ideal but impossible as a reality. At the time of the Crimean War England produced some 50,000 tons of steel per anna at a cost! varying from £50 to £70 2 ton; in} 1890 over 2,250,000 tons were made, nearly 1,000,000. of which took the form of steel rails at £5 per ton. The world's production in that year exceeded 8,250,000 tous. As the saving on coal in producing a to" of steel then and now is nearly tw? tons, it will be seen what this implies. Bessemer steel retains the toughness of the best iron, is more than half as strong again, and has all but completely superseded iron for armour plates, the hulls of ships, bridges, girders, roof spans, rails, boilers; it has also largely displaced wood, stone, brass, and bronze; its strength, lightness, and cheapness have enabled the modern engineer to do feats which his immediate predecessor would have scoffed at as the dream of a heated imagination; og. brid; the Forth.
Henry Bessemer was -a born inventor nor was his active mind ever at rest. The noble fortune which in his case happily followed his efforts enabled him to follow up all kinds of expensive hobbies. Renders of that charming novel Madcap Violet well remember the heroine's schoo! escapade and how she in her famous truancy walked down Green Lane through the Dulwich fields; we always think of her skirting Sie Henry's grounds and ox-periment shops. He wrought some notable improvements in diamond cutting machinery for the benefit of his son-in-law, he tried to abolish seasickness by putting the whole passenger accommodation of a channel steamer into gimbals; but the failure was comally complete, He went to enormous expense in experiments and machinery for improving the objectives of astronomical telescopes, but nothing he subsequently did is ever to be mentioned with his magnum opus in steel making.
He must have been a thorn in the side of his illustrious next-door neigh-hour, John Raskin, who abominates steel and all its works (in mass), yet curiously enough like steel-iminer Nasmyth, Bessemer was an artist and in 1833 was actually in the Academy, He possessed strong force of character Vand when Sheffield to a imi paohpoohed his great invention, be boldly bearded the ' Blades' in their den; he established a steel factory in the great GCutlers' Town and by irresistible competition rammed his invention down their unwilling throats, When he was alling better steel than theirs in illiiniable quantities at less than half the price they had to ery for quarter and him royalties for the use of his Scientific men as usual were cxtholie jand prompt in their recognition of his genius; he had more old medals and fellowships than teeth bat only from the ted States and England did he gather costive as sta of its citizen, In 1879 Benjamin Disraeli, the Bart of Beaconsfield, yave him—m Esrhlom, like the Foleys? a Barony like the, potter-man Guinness and ths boer-maker Bass? No. What then knighthood, like Lipton who sells ten and sausages, and gives largely to the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.