It begins with an Englishman
of French ancestry, Bessemer, and one Kelly, an Irish-American, born on
the old Fort Duquesne point. They had discovered and developed, each
without the knowledge of the other, the pneumatic process of treating
iron--that is, of refining it with air and making steel. Bessemer's name
became associated with the process. But the industry has made Kelly's
birthplace, the site of the old French fort, its capital (with another of
those poetic fitnesses that multiply as we put the present against the
past).
France not only gave to Pittsburgh her site but the crucibles in which her
fortunes lay. Bessemer was the son of a French artist living in London in
poverty. Young Bessemer had invented many devices, when Napoleon III, one
day in a conversation, complained to him that the metal used in making
cannon was of poor quality and expensive. He began experiments in London
at the Emperor's suggestion and later sent the Emperor a toy cannon of his
own making. It was in this experimenting, as I infer, that the idea struck
him of making malleable iron by introducing air into the fluid metal.
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