Henry Bessemer devised a quicker, more efficient way of making steel, which led to steel replacing cast iron as the metal of preference in making railroad tracks, military weapons, and structures like bridges and skyscrapers. His invention, the Bessemer furnace, or converter, enormously raised the annual production of steel in England and helped move along the Industrial Revolution, a period of fast-paced economic change that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century. One of the first to adopt Bessemer’s steelmaking process wholeheartedly was American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919; see entry), who built a world-class fortune as a result
