business men. Our steel industry is thus another triumph of
American inventive skill, made possible by the richness of our
mineral resources and the racial energy of our people. An
elementary scientific discovery introduced the great steel age.
Steel, of course, is merely iron which has been refined--freed
from certain impurities, such as carbon, sulphur, and phosphorus.
We refine our iron and turn it into steel precisely as we refine
our sugar and petroleum. From the days of Tubal Cain the iron
worker had known that heat would accomplish this purification;
but heat, up to almost 1865, was an exceedingly expensive
commodity. For ages iron workers had obtained the finer metal by
applying this heat in the form of charcoal, never once realizing
that unlimited quantities of another fuel existed on every hand.
The man who first suggested that so commonplace a substance as
air, blown upon molten pig iron, would produce the intensest heat
and destroy its impurities, made possible our steel railroads,
our steel ships, and our steel cities. When William Kelly, an
owner of iron works near Eddyville, Kentucky, first proposed this
method in 1847, he met with the ridicule which usually greets the
pioneer inventor. When Henry Bessemer, several years afterward,
read a paper before the British Association for the Advancement
of Science, in which he advocated the same principle, he was
roared down as "a crazy Frenchman," and the savants were so
humiliated by the suggestion that they voted to make no record of
his "silly paper" in their official minutes. Yet these two men,
the American Kelly and the Englishman Bessemer, were the creators
of modern steel. The records of the American Patent Office
clearly show that Kelly made "Bessemer" steel many years before
Bessemer. In 1870 the American Government refused to extend
Bessemer's patent in this country on the ground that William