Bessemer Process Part 1

The machine that was about to change Belfast's steel industry had no foreign maker's plate, no imported patent, and no manufacturer's seal from some distant industrial kingdom.

There was only a small rectangular brass plate bolted onto the converter's lower support frame:

TEUCHER IRON & STEEL CORPORATION

PNEUMATIC STEEL CONVERTER No. 1

DESIGN: ERNEST TEUCHER

CAPACITY: 15 TONS

Ernest stood beneath it in absolute silence.

Months earlier, this vessel had existed only as graphite lines spread across his drafting desk at Oriel Estate. He remembered calculating the trunnion loads, reworking the removable bottom, changing the tuyere arrangement, rejecting cast bearings in favor of heavy forgings, and calculating the high-pressure blast requirements.

Then he had realized that a converter alone was useless unless he built an entire integrated steelworks around it.

Now the vessel towered above him—cold, real, and terrifyingly large.