fuel would be unnecessary after the iron was melted if _powerful
blasts of air were forced into the fluid metal_. This is the basic
principle of the Bessemer process. The theory was that the heat
generated by the union of the oxygen of the air with the carbon of the
metal, would accomplish the refining. Kelley was trying to produce
malleable iron in a new, rapid and effective way. It was merely an
economy in manufacture he was endeavoring to attain.

To this end he made a furnace into which passed an air-blast pipe,
through which a stream of air was forced into the mass of melted metal.
He produced refined iron. Following this he made what is now called a
"converter," in which he could refine fifteen hundred pounds of metal in
five minutes, effecting a great saving in time and fuel, and in his
little establishment the old processes were thenceforth dispensed with.
It was locally known as "Kelley's air-boiling process." It proved
finally to be the most important, in large results, ever conceived in
metallurgy. I refer to it hurriedly, and do not attempt to follow the
inventor's own description of his constructions and experiments. When he
heard that others in England were following the same line of experiment,
he applied for a patent. He was decided to be the first inventor of the
process, and a patent was granted him over Bessemer, who was a few days
before him. There is no question that others were more skillful, and
with better opportunities and scientific associations, in carrying out
the final details, mechanical and chemical, which have completed the
Kelley process for present commercial uses. Neither is there any
question that this back-woods iron-making American was the first to
refine iron by passing through it, while fluid, a stream of air, which
is the process of making that steel which is not tool steel, and yet is
steel, the now almost universal material for the making of structures;
the material of the Ferris wheel, the wonderful palaces of the Columbian