3-003-796 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Process of rolling armour-plates for Her Majesty's ships at the Atlas Steelworks, Sheffield, 1861. Making steel for British warships. 'This newly-occupied ground contains already sixty-two furnaces, to the majority of which there is attached a steam-engine boiler...The public health and comfort have also been regarded in diminishing, as far as possible, the production of black smoke...The steam-engines, great and small, from the donkey-engine that pumps water to the ponderous engines that do the heaviest work of the steam-hammers or the rolling-mills, are twenty-nine, and the steam-hammers number twenty-one...There are ten converting-furnaces, each capable of making thirty-five tons [of steel] at a time...furnaces and rolling-mills are being erected to carry out the manufacture of iron and steel by the Bessemer process, Mr. Bessemer has not gone farther than to make one ton at a time. Messrs. Brown and Co.'s furnace will convert at once four tons, and the ponderous ingots will be beaten into the shape they are to assume by a twelve-ton steam-hammer'. From "Illustrated London News", 1861.