The Bessemer Process in the United States

While visiting Europe to obtain information on shipbuilding, armor, and armaments from 1862-1863, Alexander Lyman Holley visited Bessemer's Sheffield works, and expressed interest in licensing the process for use in the US. Upon returning to the US, Holley met with the famous inventor John Ericsson, who referred Holley to a pair of businessmen who had helped him build the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, John F. Winslow and John Augustus Griswold. With Winslow and Griswold's support, Holley returned to England in 1863, and paid Bessemer £10,000 to license the technology. The trio began setting up a mill in Troy, New York in 1865. The factory contained a number of Holley's innovations that greatly improved productivity over Bessemer's factory in Sheffield, and the owners gave a successful public exhibition in 1867. The Troy factory attracted the attention of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who wanted to use the new process to manufacture steel rail, and ended up funding Holley's second mill as part of its Pennsylvania Steel subsidiary. Between 1866 and 1877, the partners were able to license a total of 11 Bessemer steel mills. One of the investors they attracted was Andrew Carnegie, who saw great promise in the new steel technology after a visit to Bessemer in 1872, and saw it as a useful adjunct to his existing businesses, the Keystone Bridge Company and the Union Iron Works. Holley built the new steel mill for Carnegie, and continued to improve and refine the process. The new mill, known as the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, opened in 1875, and sparked the growth of the United States as a major world steel producer.