Anthony Bessemer (1766–1836 or after 1840) was a British industrialist and

punchcutter Punchcutting is a craft used in traditional typography to cut letter punches in steel as the first stage of making metal type. Steel punches in the shape of the letter would be used to stamp matrices into copper, which were locked into a mould sh ...

, who spent large portions of his life in the Netherlands and France before returning to live in London and

Hertfordshire Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For govern ...

. His son was

Sir Henry Bessemer Sir Henry Bessemer (19 January 1813 – 15 March 1898) was an English inventor, whose steel-making process would become the most important technique for making steel in the nineteenth century for almost one hundred years from 1856 to 1950. He ...

, the inventor of the

Bessemer process The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. The key principle is steelmaking, removal of impurities from the iron by ox ...

for steel manufacture.

Early life

Born in 1766 at No. 6

Old Broad Street Old or OLD may refer to: Places * Old, Baranya, Hungary * Old, Northamptonshire, England *Old Street station, a railway and tube station in London (station code OLD) *OLD, IATA code for Old Town Municipal Airport and Seaplane Base, Old Town, M ...

in London, Bessemer moved to the Netherlands as a boy with his family and lived there from 1777 to 1787, then moving to Paris. As an engineer his work included draining machinery and microscope manufacture. With the upheaval of the

French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considere ...

he returned to London.

Career

Anthony Bessemer type foundry specimen 1830 cover

Bessemer acted as a

, an engraver of metal type, first for type foundries on the continent, then on returning to England for Henry Caslon (who was Henry Bessemer's godfather and namesake) and later for his own type foundry; according to

Jeans Jeans are a type of pants or trousers made from denim or dungaree cloth. Often the term "jeans" refers to a particular style of trousers, called "blue jeans", with copper-riveted pockets which were invented by Jacob W. Davis in 1871 and paten ...

his clients on the continent included the firm of

Firmin Didot Firmin Didot (; 14 April 176424 April 1836) was a French printer, engraver, and type founder. Early life Firmin Didot was born in Paris into a family of printers founded by François Didot, the father of 11 children. Firmin was one of his gra ...

, and he also sold a font to the Enschedé foundry in 1795. In the course of his work for Caslon he testified by letter to the London Society of Arts in May 1818 on the topic of new anti-forgery precautions on banknotes, and this provides testimony on his work rate for the specific case of cutting 4pt punches: "the time required to engrave a diamond lower case alphabet and doubles, consisting of 33 punches, would be about six weeks, and that the same time would be required for a set of capitals of 28 punches." Caslon testified that "at present there are only four or five persons in England who can execute diamond pttype". Some years after returning to England, he set up a

type foundry A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and Mono ...

Charlton, Hertfordshire Charlton is a hamlet in the county of Hertfordshire, in the East of England. It is a component hamlet of the market town of Hitchin, forming a part of the Hitchin Priory ward. Its rural character is protected as a Conservation Area. Situated east ...

with his business partner J.J. Catherwood (a former business partner of Caslon's), which later moved to London. Bessemer's son Henry was born while he lived in Charlton in 1813. Henry Bessemer took an early interest in his father's business and some of his early patents are for improved type-casting machinery. Bessemer auctioned his foundry in 1832. It had been assumed that he retired at this point; however Brazilian historian Orlando da Costa Ferreira proposed in the 1970s that Bessemer was the type-founder invited by the Brazilian government to set up a type foundry, who arrived there in October 1837. The project proved uneconomical: the government paid the founder compensation in October 1840 and he left in November, the year before his four-year contract was due to expire. Edna Lucia Cunha Lima, however, doubts that Bessemer is the type-founder in question, noting that Bessemer was quite elderly at this time and that the typefounder apparently required an interpreter to help understand French, something unlikely to be necessary for Bessemer who had lived in France. His specimen of 1830 has been reprinted by the British

Printing Historical Society The Printing Historical Society or 'PHS' is a learned society devoted to the study of the history of printing, in all its forms. History The Society was founded in London in 1964 by a group of teachers, scholars, students of design and bibliography ...

and digitised.

Notes

References

Sources

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External links

1830 specimen
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bessemer, Anthony 19th-century British engineers English typographers and type designers 1766 births People from Hitchin