Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/833

Rh an intense white heat. Bessemer at first used extraneous heat to start the process, if not, indeed, during its progress, which shows that he was not then aware that the heat created by merely blowing in air would be sufficient. In his next patent he dispensed with the furnace around the crucible, and, instead of tapping the crucible from the bottom, he mounted it on trunnions, and, by tipping it up by machinery, poured the contents from the mouth. This apparatus is essentially the same as that used at the present day. It was soon found that, to produce steel by this process which would work properly, manganese, if not originally present, would have to be added. In the absence of manganese, sulphur and oxygen, in anything more than very minute quantities, make the steel crumble when worked at a red heat; it is said to be "red short." In the case of the oxygen, the manganese combines with it, and passes it into the slag; but with sulphur the reaction is different; its injurious effect is simply counteracted by the manganese: it is not removed from the steel. At first manganese was only employed in the form of spiegeleisen; but this use was liable to the difficulty that if enough spiegel was added to impart the requisite quantity of manganese, too much carbon would have been introduced, and alloys richer in manganese—known as ferro-manganese—have been sought and found.

By adding at the end of the process a known quantity of spiegel or ferro-manganese, containing a known quantity of carbon, steel of any required hardness could be obtained.

The year which saw the birth of the Bessemer process was doubly remarkable, for it was at that time that the regenerative system of heating was first introduced by Dr. Siemens. Nothing can be simpler than the principle involved in this method, yet it was destined to play a most important part in the progress of the arts. The idea was to store up the heat escaping in the waste gases from furnaces, and to employ it to raise the temperature of the gas and air previous to their combustion in the furnace. This was accomplished by causing the spent gases to pass through two chambers filled with loose brickwork. When these chambers have become heated to a high temperature, the waste gases are made to pass through two other similar chambers, and the air and gas necessary for combustion in the furnace are caused to pass through the highly heated regenerators. By causing the ingoing gases to pass alternately, at suitable intervals of time, through each pair of regenerators, a very high and, at the same time, uniform temperature can be obtained in the furnace, without any greater consumption of fuel than in the older methods. The success of this process depended entirely on the fuel being first converted into a combustible gas. This was done in a chamber to which only sufficient air is admitted to convert the carbon into carbonic oxide, which is then conducted by tubes to one of the regenerators to be heated, and thence to the furnace, where, coming in contact with air which has