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Capital One Bank Guy (0:00)
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Aaron Manke (0:38)
Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Inventors have come to occupy a comical place in our cultural imagination. We picture wacky people trying to get rich quick off of a niche device that barely works. The movie Gremlins probably had a lot to do with this. Who could forget the scene where the mom uses her husband's inventions to dispatch the monsters in increasingly grotesque ways? Pop culture touchstones like this might cause us to forget that inventors originally occupied a very noble place in society, and without one inventor in particular, the modern world might have never come to be. Henry was the epitome of the wacky inventor archetype. Born in 1813 in England, he eventually grew into a man who was endlessly curious and self assured. Anytime he encountered some modern invention or tool, he immediately wanted to take it apart and figure out how he could make it better. Case in point, when he purchased an expensive gold picture frame for his sister, he immediately wondered how he could make it cheaper. He invented a bronze paint that made wooden frames look just as good at a fraction of the price. The invention was a huge success, but by 1854, Henry had set his mind on more life and death inventions. The Crimean War had broken out and Henry wondered if he could find a way to make cannons that fired more accurately. The iron ones of the time used round cannonballs that had a tendency to drift off target. At first, no one took him seriously. A guy who designed better home decor didn't seem like the person to trust with military equipment. But one chance evening while traveling in Paris, Henry met with an unlikely dinner guest. The guest was none other than Emperor Napoleon iii, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. He could see the wisdom in Henry's idea and encouraged his passion for the topic. Anyone who cared this much about the minutiae of technology would surely accomplish Whatever he set his mind to. And as it turns out, Henry's interest in cannons led him to some incredible discoveries. He began with the shells, making them heavier and cutting grooves into them so that they spun in the air to keeping their trajectory. The only problem with this was that they were too heavy for most iron cannons to fire. And so he needed a better cannon. A cannon made of steel. At the time, steel had an almost mythical quality to it. The inventors of the day were just as stumped as to what made good steel as the blacksmiths of the middle ages. All they knew was that good steel came about when you mixed molten iron with carbon and tried to remove the impurities of other elements. It took a lot of heat and specifically designed apparatuses. To do this. Henry set up his own special device. Imagine a large metal capsule suspended on an axle between two legs. It had an opening at the top and it could be tilted forward to add to or empty. At first, Henry just tried to get the iron hotter and hotter to see if he could burn away the impurities. But when Henry happened to notice some molten iron in his workshop turned into steel when it came in contact with the air, he completely changed his approach. Henry fed a tube into the bottom of this bucket like device. He still dumped molten iron into the top, but then after that was done, he would blow cold air up through this tube in the bottom of the bucket. A few moments passed and the device suddenly erupted with a volcano like stream of smoke and molten iron shooting from the top. It almost caught the workshop on fire. But when Henry tested the end result, he found that it was carbon free malleable iron. He had removed the impurities. Now he just add back in the right amount of carbon to make steel. Henry made his device just a little bigger so the chemical reaction of oxygen and carbon could be safely contained. The resulting gases still burned off through the top and any remaining impurities could be skimmed off the top of the molten metal. A small precise amount of carbon would then be added back in. And when the metal cooled, it was now pure malleable steel. Henry Bessemer's device became known as the Bessemer converter. Henry and his process for making iron is now known as the Bessemer process. He patented that process and became a millionaire as manufacturers all over the globe used his steel to make buildings, weapons, cars and railroad tracks. One curious mind was all it took to send the world erupting into the future.