Abstract
Sir Henry Bessemer FRS has a long record of stunning achievements, most famously his revolutionary steelmaking process. He was not scientifically trained, yet his inventive capacity and entrepreneurial drive made him an outstanding success in his lifetime. Indeed, he believed that his lack of a traditional education left him less constrained in his thinking. Not having a formal, scientific education was not unusual in Bessemer’s time, but was less common in the era of that other steel hero, Harry Brearley, a self-taught metallurgist. In Brearley’s first autobiographical book, Steel-Makers [H. Brearley: ‘Steel-makers’, 1933, UK, Longmans, Green & Co.], he was critical of university professors with their attention being more on metallography than metallurgy, which Brearley saw as being left to the works. He wrote, “… it is a grievous mistake to suppose that what the University Faculty does not know cannot be worth knowing. Even a superficial observer might see that the simplifications, and elimination of interferences, which are possible and may be desirable in a laboratory experiment, may be by no means possible in an industrial process which the laboratory experiment aims to elucidate.” This lecture considered the ability of researchers, particularly those in universities, to mitigate this grievous mistake by accurately representing industry conditions through a combination of techniques, including using industry data, laboratory experiments and the ubiquitous computer modelling. Examples are taken from the author’s own experience with thermomechanical processing, wear and fatigue of rails, oxidation of steel in the rolling mill, and the integrity of rolling mill rolls.
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