It all began with some chrysanthemums. In the late 1830s, Henry Bessemer was making his start in London by creating innovative metal dies and embossing devices. But on a visit to his sister in his home village of Charlton in Hertfordshire, he found his talent for calligraphy called upon instead. She wanted him to write 鈥淪tudies of Flowers from Nature, by Miss Bessemer鈥� on her portfolio of watercolour paintings of chrysanthemums and other flowers from the garden. It seemed a simple enough task, so Henry dutifully set about making gold ink to complete the lettering. To do this, he would have to obtain 鈥済old powder鈥� from Mr Clark, the local art supplies merchant.
Bessemer soon discovered that he was being more generous to his sister than he had anticipated: the gold powder cost an extortionate seven shillings an ounce. He doubted the powder contained actual gold, and yet it was far more expensive than raw brass. He was determined to get to the bottom of it
THE more Henry Bessemer thought about it, the more perplexed he became. Just how could a tiny pot of faux gold cost so much? To determine what exactly was in the powder, Bessemer created a solution of the art shop鈥檚 powder and added dilute sulphuric acid to precipitate any actual gold. He watched impatiently: nothing happened. 鈥淚t is, probably, only a better sort of brass,鈥� he reasoned. But on inquiring with art suppliers, none could explain the powder鈥檚 origin. They only knew that it was made in Nuremburg, a centre of the brass trade, and that the manufacturing process was kept secret.
Advertisement
Bessemer quickly sensed a fortune to be made: 鈥淗ere was powdered brass selling retail at 拢5 12s. per pound,鈥� he recalled in his Autobiography, 鈥渨hile the raw material from which it was made cost probably no more than sixpence.鈥� He deduced that labour might account for the inflated price, and a visit to the reading room at the British Museum proved him right. Dipping into De Diversis Artibus, a 12th-century encyclopedia of craftsmanship written by the German monk Theophilus, he found a description of the method employed in Nuremburg: brass was pounded to leaf, then ground with a pestle and mortar, all the while being mixed with honey to prevent the particles from clumping. This glop needed repeated washings in hot water to remove the honey 鈥� a slow and laborious process, and an anomaly in the industrial age. What, Bessemer wondered, if he could manufacture it with steam power?
Bessemer tried using brass discs, ridged along their edges like a coin, and turning them against a lathe to throw off minute particles. His first tests were not promising: the powder had none of the lustre of the stuff he had bought in the art shop. Discouraged, he gave the project little more thought until a year later, when an acquaintance recounted a powder problem of a different sort. He suspected a local merchant had sold him arrowroot adulterated with starch, and exposed the cheat by examining the powder under a microscope, discovering two distinct varieties of particles. Intrigued by this example, Bessemer compared the Nuremberg powder and his own under a microscope and 鈥渟aw in a moment the cause of my failure鈥�. Powder made from brass leaf presented flat, paper-like particles that created a unified surface, while Bessemer鈥檚 lathe particles, though similar to the naked eye, were rough and curled-up, scattering light haphazardly and with little lustre.
Sensing that he was now on the right path, Bessemer spent months secretly toiling in his workshop. His new solution was to flatten the brass grindings by passing them through steel rollers. He then ran them through a tumbler assembly, where the friction of particles cascading over each other would polish them to a pleasing shine. Viewing a sample of the resulting powder, one importer offered Bessemer 拢500 a year for use of whatever machinery had produced it 鈥� whereupon Bessemer knew his invention must be worth a great deal more.
To make his fortune required the utmost secrecy, even from the Patent Office. He knew it would give the game away 鈥渋f all the details of my system were shown and described in a patent blue-book, which anyone could buy for a six pence鈥�. Piracy was rife. Thomas Edison later complained that 鈥測ou cannot do anything in court for five or six years, and the infringer knows this.鈥� But, he added: 鈥淎 trade secret is of value in the chemical line, for there it can be guarded.鈥� Machines could be reverse-engineered or copied from patent papers, unpatented powder could not. To create a lucrative monopoly, Bessemer had to keep his secret鈥ut how?
His solution, which he revealed much later, was ingenious. 鈥淭here were powerful machines of many tons in weight to be made; some of them were necessarily very complicated, and somebody must know for whom they were鈥So] when I had thus devised and settled every machine as a whole, I undertook to dissect it and make separate drawings of each part, accurately figured for dimensions, and to take these separate parts of the several machines and get them made: some in Manchester, some in Glasgow, some in Liverpool, and some in London, so that no engineer could ever guess what these parts of machines were intended to be used for.鈥�
Working with his three trusted brothers-in-law, by 1841 Bessemer had converted a building in north London into a factory. With block and tackle, the four men were able to move massive machinery into place in secret and without any outside assistance. The completed factory was a wonder of paranoiac design: it had only one entrance and no windows, and the machinery was divided between three compartments, with drive shafts passing blindly through holes in the wall. It ran automatically with a minimum of oversight, and no one could see more than a fraction of the interior. If they had, they would have found remarkable contrasts. In one room, grinding machinery ran with 鈥渢he screech of a hundred discordant fiddles鈥�, while in the next, powder was blown onto a cloth-covered table, where particles separated into grades of fineness by the distance they travelled. 鈥淚t is difficult to imagine the beauty of this golden snowdrift of 40 ft in length,鈥� Bessemer recalled.
Once restricted to higher-quality furniture and picture frames, mass-produced faux gold now came within everyone鈥檚 reach: gold picture frames, bronzed plaster statuary, and gold inks proliferated. By experimenting with different alloys and copper suppliers 鈥� he was particularly fond of melting down barrels of Russian kopeks 鈥� Bessemer also created an array of coloured powders. Yet the product was not perfect. 鈥淭hese finishes had a tendency to darken and become very unpleasant due to oxidation,鈥� says Malgorzata Sawicki, senior conservator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. Aware of this, Bessemer concocted a gold paint containing calcium succinate to slow oxidation, sold cheaply in paired ready-to-mix bottles of powder and medium.
Modern gold-coloured paints are made from mica coated with titanium oxide, which avoids the oxidation that bedevilled brass powder. But in the Gilded Age, it was Bessemer鈥檚 brass 鈥� or the more elegant sounding 鈥渂ronze鈥� it soon became 鈥� that provided the gilding. And the only way to get it was from his mysterious, windowless building. 鈥淲insor & Newton sold Bessemer鈥檚 Gold Paint and Preparation for decades,鈥� says Sarah Miller of the venerable art supply company. Indeed, its catalogue came to feature an array of affordable gold-coloured metallic products. The 1897 edition included various 鈥淔ine Coloured Bronze Powders鈥� for velvet, silk, lithographs and calligraphy. 鈥淲e also sold 鈥楤ric-A-Brac Gold Paint鈥� and 鈥楬andy Liquid Gold鈥�,鈥� says Miller.
Faux gold, once expensive, was now the stuff of bric-a-brac. Yet despite the powder鈥檚 popularity, Bessemer managed to keep his manufacturing process secret for more than 40 years. The steady income from his business freed him to pursue other inventions, and he went on to win 114 remarkably innovative and profitable patents 鈥� including the one he鈥檚 most remembered for, the Bessemer process that revolutionised steel-making. Not bad for a venture that started with a few watercolour paintings of chrysanthemums.