From the glacial speeds of the Bronze Age, humanity had been propelled to the breathless developments of the Iron Age. But for a long time, iron and steel remained too difficult to produce, too expensive. Even after the Industrial Revolution, the first steamships were mostly wooden, with steel providing only the essential components (boiler, chimney, joints). Enter another one of my father’s great heroes, Henry Bessemer, who invented a technique for producing large quantities of steel cheaply by blowing air through molten pig iron to burn off the impurities. It was then, according to Dad, that
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