William Kelly

William Kelly (1811-1888) developed a process in the early 1850s for producing malleable iron and steel without puddling, by injecting air into molten iron. A similar process was discovered independently by Henry Bessemer, which became known as the Bessemer Process.

By 1858, according to John E. Fry of the Cambria Steel Works, Kelly's experiments "had not accomplished anything that would give ground to his claim of being the inventor of the pneumatic process of converting cast iron into its malleable products, or in substantiation of the rather vague claim allowed him in his first patent, issued subsequent to the issue of yours (i.e. Bessemer's) in this country (i.e. Britain)".

In 1872 Alexander Lyman Holley wrote that 'The American experiments of Kelly, which antedated those of Bessemer were successful only to a limited extent, because these conditions were not fully met. He blew air downwards into the metal at low pressure, and in few and large streams; hence his iron chilled before decarburisation was complete. His crude method of handling the metal increased this difficulty. Bessemer first treated crude iron with air blasts in a crucible set in a furnace, and thus maintained its fluidity. But the cost of this outside heating, the smallness of the product, and the difficulty of applying the blast and maintaining the blast pipe, rendered the process abortive. Nor was this what we now know as the Bessemer process, for that, as we have observed, hinges up on the generation of the heat from the fuel contained in the iron. .....'

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