Today in Technology History
An event that occurred on this date in the history of technology.
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June 23
If you ever have a great idea, do your best to protect it -- but don't be too secretive. That's the lesson of the life of William Kelly.
Kelly was the son of a wealthy landowner who reportedly built the first two brick houses in Pittsburgh, where Kelly was born in 1811. He had an inquisitive mind and a good schooling, but his creativity and education were squandered in the Philadelphia dry goods trade he labored in well into his thirties.
Click the picture above to see William Kelly's entire patent. Then, in 1846, Kelly's life changed completely: he got married, moved to Kentucky and started operating a foundry, where he manufactured large iron kettles. These kettles were made of wrought iron, which was produced by heating crude iron to high temperatures (using charcoal as a fuel) and then beating and burning the carbon impurities out of the iron.
Kelly had a latent interest in metallurgy, and he discovered quite accidentally that he could save money on charcoal if he blasted the hot iron with air. Instead of cooling the iron -- which would seem to make sense -- the air actually made the iron much hotter, since it allowed the carbon impurities themselves to act as fuel and to heat the molten iron. What's more, Kelly's process made the production of steel (a very strong iron alloy) somewhat easier.
During the first half of the 1850s, Kelly, working deep in the woods, secretly built a series of experimental furnaces based on his air-blasting discovery. Although his customers were unimpressed and his wife thought he'd gone crazy, he continued to experiment -- all the while keeping his discovery almost entirely to himself.
Then in 1856, an Englishman named Henry Bessemer beat Kelly to the punch: he discovered the same fundamental process on his own, and patented it. Kelly rushed to patent the air-blasting process for himself, and he was granted a U.S. patent exactly 146 years ago, on June 23, 1857. But by then it was too late. His discovery would be remembered as the "Bessemer process," and while Bessemer made about $10 million from the invention, Kelly made less than a twentieth of that amount and died in relative obscurity in 1888.
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