Questions about American History?

Question

I was doing my AP American History hw, and i got stuck with two questions....can someone please help me and tell me what it is?

1. how did the Bessemer-Kelly Process revolutionize industry?

2. Describe the careers of Morgan and Carnegie

Answer 1

1-"High-volume production of low-cost steel" in Britain and the U.S. by the Bessemer-Kelly process soon revolutionized building construction and provided steel to replace iron in railroad rails and many other use.

2-In relationship to each other, Both were involved in Financing,Banking and Corporations such as Steel,Oil,and Textiles.
Morgan,The Most Famous Banker Ever,manged to convince Carnegie to merge with him and Develop US Steel,the worlds First Multi-Billion Dollar Corporation.

Answer 2

Try doing a search on Wikipedia. They have lots of background information.

Answer 3

Throughout his life, Bessemer was a prolific inventor, but his name is chiefly known in connection with the Bessemer process for the manufacture of steel. Though this process is no longer commercially used, at the time of its invention it was of enormous industrial importance because it lowered the cost of production of steel, leading to that material being widely substituted for others which were inferior in almost every respect but that of cost. Bessemer's attention was drawn to the problem of steel manufacture in the course of an attempt to improve the construction of guns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bessemer

William Kelly (August 22, 1811 - February 11, 1888), born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was an American inventor. Kelly studied metallurgy at the Western University of Pennsylvania. Instead of getting a job as a scientist, Kelly, his brother, and his brother-in-law started a dry goods and commission business, which they called McShane & Kelly. After a fire destroyed their warehouse, William and his brother John decided to move to Eddyville, Kentucky in 1847 to enter the iron industry.

In 1846, they purchased an iron manufacturing company in Lyon county on the Cumberland River, called Eddyville iron-work. They then renamed the factory Kelly & Company.

Before the technique of injecting air into molten iron was discovered by Kelly and by Bessemer, iron was available as cast iron, a strong but brittle metal made in a blast furnace by treating iron ore with coke derived from coal, and wrought iron, a more malleable and flexible metal made by heating iron ore in a low oxygen environment in a bloomery heated by charcoal and producing "blooms", which were 100 to 200 pound lumps of very low carbon iron mixed with slag. The blooms then had to be worked repeatedly by hammering with a steam hammer and folding it to work out the slag. This could in turn be converted to steel by heating it for prolonged periods sealed in stone boxes with charcoal, to add back carbon. The resulting steel could then be formed into larger shapes by heating it to welding temperature and hammering it together into a mass. Other laborious and expensive methods made small amounts of steel from special ores. [1] [2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kelly_%28inventor%29

Kelly started experimenting with his "air-boiling process," a process of blowing air up through molten iron to reduce the carbon content, in 1847. His initial goal was to reduce the amount of fuel required for iron and steel making, because of the immense amount of timber required to make the charcoal. He discovered that, contrary to the expectations of his iron workers, the injected air did not cool the molten iron, but instead combined with the carbon to cause the iron to boil and burn violently until the carbon was greatly reduced, improving the quality of the iron or converting it to steel. [3] [4] [5] His experiments began in 1847. The same process was later independently invented and patented by Henry Bessemer. [6]

Kelly was college-educated in metallurgy, while Henry Bessemer in his autobiography described no education, other than a practical knowledge of typecasting and machining learned at his father's type foundry. Bessemer had previously invented and patented several useful processes in such diverse fields and typemaking, railway operation, and sugar refining. Bessemer said that in 1854 "My knowledge of iron metallurgy was at that time very limited...", but somehow he was able to build, without a long series of progressive improvements, a functioning converter to blow air into molten iron and convert it to steel. [7] Kelly later asserted that English workmen at his plant had informed Bessemer of Kelly's experiments. Kelly applied for a patent after Bessemer patented the process, and was granted patent 17,628 in 1857. The core claim of his patent was "Blowing blasts of air, either hot or cold, up and through a mass of liquid iron, the oxygen in the air combining with the carbon in the iron, causing a greatly increased heat and boiling commotion in the fluid mass and decarbonizing and refining the iron." [8]In 1871 the U.S. patent office granted Kelly a renewal of his patent for 7 years while rejecting applications for renewal by Bessemer and Robert Mushet, who had also received patents for the process.[3] Other sources say that Kelly and Bessemer devised the steel making technique independently.[9][10] The financial panic of 1857 resulted in Kelly's bankruptcy, and he was forced to sell his patent.[4] With the patents jointly licensed, invention priority disputes became of little interest to the business world. Kelly received only about 5% of the patent royalties paid to Bessemer, and Bessemer's name was used for the process. [11] Bessemer already had a well known steel making operation in England, and Kelly was little known.

The companies owning the Kelly and Bessemer patents began selling the product under the name "Bessemer Steel" in 1866.[4] The Bessemer process, co-discovered by Kelly and Bessemer, greatly reduced the cost of steel and improved the quality, making possible the industrial growth of the UNited States from 1865 until the early 1900's. The Bessemer process was replaced by the open hearth process in the early 20th century.[6]



John Pierpont Morgan (April 17, 1837 – March 31, 1913) was an American financier, banker, philanthropist, and art collector who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation during his time. In 1891 Morgan arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thompson-Houson Electric Company to form General Electric. After financing the creation of the Federal Steel Company he merged the Carnegie Steel Company and several other steel and iron businesses to form the United States Steel Corporation in 1901. He bequeathed his large art collection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.[1] At the height of Morgan's career during the early 1900s, his interests held 341 directorships and he controlled over 100 corporations worth more than $22 billion in assets. [2] [3] By 1901, he was one of the wealthiest men in the world. He died in Rome, Italy, in 1913 at the of age of 76, leaving his fortune and business to his son, Jack Pierpont Morgan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Morgan

Andrew Carnegie (November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American businessman, a major and widely respected philanthropist, and the founder of the Carnegie Steel Company which later became U.S. Steel. He is known for having built one of the most powerful and influential corporations in United States history, and, later in his life, giving away most of his riches to fund the establishment of many libraries, schools, and universities in Scotland, America and worldwide. Carnegie, a poor boy with fierce ambition, a pleasant personality, and devoted to both hard work and self improvement, started as a telegrapher. By the 1860s he had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, as well as bridges and oil derricks, and built a fortune as a bond salesman raising money in Europe for American enterprises. Steel was where he found his fortune. In the 1870s he founded the Carnegie Steel Company, a step which cemented his name as one of the “Captains of Industry”. By the 1890s it was the largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world. He sold it to J.P. Morgan's US Steel in 1901 and devoted the remainder of his life to large scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, and scientific research.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie