For centuries steel had been laboriously made from pig iron by beating the hot iron on an anvil until the flying sparks had reduced its carbon content to 2 percent. In 1847 an American, William Kelly, and in 1855 an Englishman, Henry Bessemer—neither one experienced enough in the iron trade to have a closed mind—independently discovered that a blast of air forced through molten iron would burn off its carbon rapidly, and doing so generated enough heat to keep the iron molten. American manufacturers had little faith in the neophyte Kelly or his counterintuitive idea, but Bessemer had already made a fortune and a reputation from other inventions. Bessemer was able to design, construct, and demonstrate a converter in the form of a large, pear-shaped vessel into which a blast of air could be forced and which could then be tilted to pour out a dazzling, white-hot gusher of molten steel. The old process had required a worker to labor 15 days to produce 50 pounds of steel. The Bessemer process turned out five tons of steel in 30 minutes.
The Bessemer process ran into trouble when it was found to work only on low-phosphorus pig iron, the supply of which was limited in England. Swedish ore, however, was low in phosphorus, as were the rich ore deposits in the Marquette region of Michigan, made accessible by the Sault Ste. Marie Canal in 1855. Alexander Holley, an energetic and eloquent American journalist sent to England by
Bicycling 35
The Union government to report on British technology during the Civil War, saw the Bessemer converter in action and was converted himself. Upon his return he became its foremost prophet and promoter in the United States. He led in forming a pool of the Kelly and Bessemer patents in 1866. Holley also devised major improvements in the design of the converters. He designed six of the 11 Bessemer plants operating in the United States in 1880 and was consulted on three others. The remaining two were copied from one of the first six.
At Chicago in 1885 the world’s first true skyscraper—that is, one supported not by its walls but by a steel skeleton—used steel from Andrew Carnegie’s works for the last half of its framework. By then the age of steel had arrived: Steel was recognized as by far the most available and reliable metal for all kinds of structures and machines.
By the end of the century the Siemens-Martin open-hearth process was outstripping Bessemer’s converters. The new process, developed in England and France, was more flexible in the kinds of scrap and ore that could be fed into it and was easier to control. By 1950, 90 percent of the steel produced in Great Britain and the United States was open hearth. After 1960 the newer all-oxygen process replaced both the Bessemer and open-hearth processes. Nevertheless the Bessemer process had secured its place in history by physically transmuting the instruments of industry, transportation, and construction.
Further reading: John N. Ingham, Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820-1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991); Joseph Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
—Robert V. Bruce
Bicycling (1870-1900)
A bicycle craze gripped Gilded Age America. The earliest bicycles were far from safe. Americans originally rode the velocipede, a crude French bicycle. The high two-wheel bike consisted of a wooden frame and tires covered by iron. The bike, called “the bone shaker,” could not be used on streets and caused frequent injuries. Young people saw the Harlan brothers use the bike in acrobatic acts and practiced secretly in barns and abandoned lofts. During the 1870s the English marketed a more popular bicycle in the United States. This bicycle was an iron frame with a huge wheel in front and a small one in back, both with solid rubber tires. Riders, perched about seven feet above the ground, risked permanent injuries from falls.
Bicycling became a popular pastime. Boston lawyer Charles Pratt, the father of American cycling, founded the Boston Bicycling Club and a periodical, Bicycling World.
On May 30, 1880, he summoned American bicyclists to Newport, Rhode Island, where they formed the League of American Wheelmen, which soon boasted 10,000 members. The number of cyclists grew from 20,000 in 1882 to over 100,000 by 1890, and clubs formed in most American towns. Bicycle parades, competitive drills, hill climbs, and races became popular. On July 4, 1884, so many riders jammed the Boston Common that the planned race was canceled. Thomas Stevens excited the nation with his bicycle trip around the world, leaving his San Francisco home in April 1883 and arriving in Boston that August. He went on to bike across Europe through the Middle East, India, and the Orient, returning to San Francisco in 1887 amid a wild municipal celebration.
Initially women found bicycle riding difficult because of the high front tire. Manufacturers in the 1880s offered a cheaper, light-frame “safety bicycle” with moderate-sized wheels of equal proportion. The frame was indented in the middle to accommodate fashionable long skirts. Women loved the safety bicycle, which was simple to operate. Their Michaux Club of Manhattan performed intricate bicycle drills to popular music.
The invention of the safety bicycle and a substantial drop in bicycle prices led to a cycling craze in the 1890s. Ten million bicycles were on the road, and countless enthusiasts joined bicycle clubs, read cycling magazines, and attended races. The classic 1890s tune, “Daisy Bell,” popularized the bicycle, too, ending with “But you’ll look sweet upon the seat, / Of a bicycle built for two.”
Velodromes for racing sprang up in several eastern cities. Large crowds watched the racers careen around the board tracks at full tilt. Manufacturers paid the racers to promote the Imperial, Monarch, Columbia, and other bikes. Albert Shock excelled at endurance racing, pedaling 1,009 miles in 72 hours. The six-day race also flourished, with contestants completing as many laps as possible in six days. However, the New York State legislature declared these bike races inhumane after it learned that contestants circled the tracks without relief for 144 hours. Charles Murphy in June 1899 pedaled a paced mile in just 57.8 seconds on a wooden track between rails over a level stretch at Hempstead, New York.
Major Taylor, a black racer from Indianapolis, broke the racial barrier in professional bicycling. Taylor, the world’s fastest bicyclist, won the national sprint championships in 1898, 1899, and 1900 and broke many world records. Taylor attracted large crowds but frequently faced racial slurs. White riders colluded in throwing him from his bicycle, and he was physically attacked by a white bicyclist after a race. Promoters prohibited him from racing in all southern and several northern tracks. The League of American Wheelmen originally allowed African Americans into membership, but when southern white affiliates began
Lithograph of the Springfield Bicycle Club's exhibition and tournament in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1883 (Library of Congress)
Withdrawing in the early 1890s, the league restricted memberships to whites in 1894.
The bicycle craze was short lived. In the 20th century, the automobile provided a more convenient mode of getting out into the countryside, and it gradually replaced the bicycle in popularity.
Further reading: Peter Nye, Hearts of Lions: The History of American Bicycle Racing (New York: Norton, 1988); Andrew Ritchie, Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racer (Mill Valley, Calif.: Bicycle Books, 1988); Robert A. Smith, A Social History of the Bicycle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972).
—David L. Porter
Bierstadt, Albert (1830-1902) artist Perhaps the most renowned American landscape painter of the 19th century, Albert Bierstadt was born at Solin-gen, Germany, on January 7, 1830. When he was two years
Old, he came to the United States with his parents. They settled in the prosperous whaling port of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where his father, a cooper, made casks for whale oil. After his public school education, Bierstadt was inspired to become an artist apparently while working for a picture framer. He became acquainted with local artists and acquired some training from them. By 1850 he had a studio, offered lessons in monochromatic (shades of one color) oil painting, and during the next few years exhibited and sold some of his work. He realized, however, that to excel as a painter he needed training abroad. In 1853 he went to Dusseldorf, Germany (only a few miles from his birthplace), where his mother’s cousin, Johann Peter Hasen-clever, was an established artist. Unfortunately, Hasen-clever died before Bierstadt arrived, but he was befriended by two American art students, Worthington Whittredge and Emanuel Leutze, and studied under the landscape painter Andreas Achenbach. Bierstadt worked diligently; traveled in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy; and in 1857 returned to New Bedford with a trunk full of paintings and sketches. His reputation grew when he exhibited his Lake Lucerne at the 1858 Annual of the American Academy of Design in New York. Critics noted the painting’s merits and that it was the largest of the 636 paintings in the exhibition. Bierstadt loved to paint nature on a grand scale.
Eager to experience and communicate the grandeur of the American West, Bierstadt in 1859, accompanied by B. F. Frost, an artist friend, joined the annual expedition of Frederick West Lander, superintendent of the wagon road through South Pass (in present day Wyoming) to the west coast. Traveling with Lander from St. Joseph, Missouri, as far as South Pass, Bierstadt and Frost took numerous stereoscopic (three-dimensional) photographs. Reveling in the beauty of the Wind River Range, they lingered there for a few weeks, before heading back east. Reflecting on what he had seen and prepared to exploit it, Bierstadt declared: “Our own country has the best material for the artist in the world.” Although the stereographs were disappointing, Bierstadt’s sketches and studies proved invaluable.
Upon his return Bierstadt moved into the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City. Utilizing his trip, he produced over the next few years large canvases celebrating the West and won praise. With the onset of the Civil War his paintings of spectacular Edens ready for settlement resonated in the patriotic breasts of Northerners. These pictures confirmed their faith in the Manifest Destiny of their nation, a faith that God ordained its westward expansion. Although with Leutze, Bierstadt briefly visited and sketched the Army of the Potomac near Washington, D. C., he was more interested in western scenery than in southern battlefields. Therefore, in 1862 he began planning a second western trip. Sensing a connection between Bierstadt’s paintings and the nation’s purpose and morale, Senator Charles Sumner predicted that “our country will gain in honor” from such a trip, which “will benefit us all.”
In Spring 1863 Bierstadt headed west. He was accompanied by Fitz Hugh Ludlow, the popular author of the autobiographical The Hasheesh Eater (1857), who also wrote rave reviews of Bierstadt’s paintings for the New-York Evening Post. Fond of Ludlow and of his wife, Rosalie, Bierstadt may also have thought the trip would cure Ludlow of his addiction. Bierstadt planned to sketch their journey, while Ludlow wrote it up. Following a more southerly route than on his previous trip, Bierstadt and Ludlow visited Denver and Colorado Springs, Salt Lake City, Yosemite, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, before arriving home for Christmas, having come by way of Panama. Bierstadt plunged into work, but Ludlow, still addicted to hashish and alcohol, was divorced by his wife.
Soon Bierstadt was admired as the equal of the great American landscape artist Frederic E. Church. At New York’s 1864 Sanitary Fair (which raised money to help the U. S. Sanitary Commission care for sick and wounded soldiers), Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains was exhibited opposite Church’s The Heart of the Andes, in the same room as Leutze’s George Washington Crossing the Delaware. Just as Leutze took liberties with how Washington crossed the Delaware, both Bierstadt and Church attempted to catch the uplifting spirit of the scenes they depicted rather than to present reproductions of them. Critical acclaim led to sales and prosperity. Bierstadt reputedly sold The Rocky Mountains for a record-breaking $25,000.
Bierstadt enhanced his success by combining admirable personal characteristics with a knack for self-advertisement. Handsome and gentlemanly, kind and generous, he made friends among fellow artists (including Church) and prominent business, political, social, and intellectual leaders. He also increased his sales and exposure by scheduling exhibits of his paintings (charging a modest admission fee). In 1866 in Washington, D. C., Congressman Rutherford B. Hayes, intensely patriotic and prone to exaggerate the virtues of anything western, viewed Bierstadt’s Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie and exclaimed: “By gaslight the effect is incomprehensible, such brilliancy and light and shade.” Hayes later, as president, entertained Bierstadt and his wife at the White House, and Bierstadt subsequently gave Lucy Hayes a painting.
By 1866 Bierstadt was at the pinnacle of his profession and a wealthy man. In November he married Rosalie Osborne Ludlow and planned a mansion for her, called Malkasten, at Irvington, New York, overlooking the Hudson River. From 1867 to 1869 he and his wife visited Europe, where he did much sketching, met the emperor of France (who awarded him the Legion of Honor), the queen of England and her prime minister, the pianist Franz Liszt, and the poet Robert Browning. After returning to New York for two years, the Bierstadts spent 1871 to 1873 in California. Bierstadt was in Yosemite with the photographer Eadweard Muybridge and in the Mt. Whitney vicinity with the geologist Clarence King.
In the 1870s tastes in art began to change, and Bierstadt’s popularity began to decline. Once admired as grand, his paintings began to be perceived as grandiose. Critics blamed his Dusseldorf training for the exaggerated effects, brilliant coloring, melodramatic scenes, and monumental size of his paintings. While many, including the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, still championed Bierstadt’s works, their sales slackened. Collectors preferred the nontheatrical Impressionist landscapes, with their nuanced treatment of light and color. Bierstadt’s ego sustained a blow when the American selection committee for the 1889 Paris Exposition rejected The Last of the Buffalo.
Bierstadt also had personal problems. His wife, whom he loved dearly, was in delicate health and by 1878 required a great deal of attention. Although their income was reduced, she spent almost every winter at an expensive hotel in Nassau, in the Bahamas, and they made several trips to Europe. In November 1882 their mansion Malkas-ten burned, destroying many paintings and Native American artifacts. It was a severe blow, but $125,000 in insurance money helped support their extravagant lifestyle. When Rosalie died at Nassau in 1893, at the age of 52, Bierstadt was in debt. A year later he married Mary Hicks Stewart, a wealthy widow, but she did not bail him out. To satisfy his creditors he sold paintings at reduced prices. He continued to paint on a diminished scale and promoted inventions and improvements. These ranged from Henry Schulhof’s pistol through his own designs for railway cars that could be expanded into dwellings (he patented at least six) to an acetylene generator invented by the scientist-philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Bierstadt died in New York on February 18, 1902.
Further reading: Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Fer-ber, Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise (New York: Brooklyn Museum/Hudson Hills Press, 1990); Matthew Baigell, Albert Bierstadt (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981); Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York: Harrison House/Harry N. Abrams, 1988).
World History
