Talk:Henry Bessemer

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What do people mean by his father was "born to a cow in London"? Is this a joke or actually a myth? Can someone take it out/clarify?

This article has been sbjected to a continuous barrage of vandalism for many months Chevin (talk) 08:04, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

• This article is extremely sketchy as to Bessemer's education and as to when he started experimenting on the air injection process which made him famous. Needs substantial editing.Edison 23:13, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup example

From the article:

Five firms applied without delay for licences to work under his patents, success did not at once attend his efforts; indeed, after several ironmasters had put the process to practical trial and failed to get good results, it was in danger of being thrust aside and entirely forgotten. Its author, however, instead of being discouraged by this lack of success, continued his experiments, and in two years was able to turn out a product, the quality of which was not inferior to that yielded by the older methods. But when he now tried to induce makers to take up his improved system, he met with general rebuffs, and finally was driven to undertake the exploitation of the process himself.

The first sentence is a run-on and the comma usage is excessive. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Timhoooey (talk • contribs) 03:52, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Just a guess, but I suspect the authors of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which this article is taken from, were well aware of their house style... — iridescent 16:42, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice that you reverted my edits of the Henry Bessemer article. I was unaware that it was copied word-for-word from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. I'm a fairly busy student and I added the cleanup tag to the article because I had trouble quickly reading certain sections of it. You seem very knowledgeable of Wikipedia. Do you think that the goal of the encyclopedia should be to adhere to authoritative texts - even when the style of writing is foreign and difficult to read for most users - or to present information in a simple and readable way? I advocate the latter point. Wikipedia articles should be easy to read and presentable as to a layperson. A more appropriate place for preserving the exact wording of the article as it appeared in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition is the Wikisource project pertaining to it. I am not alone in my view. There is a Wikipedia content guideline regarding the usage of primary sources. It states that material from the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica may be used as the basis of an article and that primary source material should be stored in an appropriate repository. Timhoooey 02:22, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More cleanup needed

This paragraph needs cleaning/fixing because of ambiguity--

Henry Bessemer's father, Anthony, was born in London, but moved to Paris when he was 21 years old. He was an inventor who while he was engaged by the Paris Mint, made his fortune with a machine for making medallions that could produce steel dies from a larger model. He became a member of the French Academy of Science, for his improvements to the optical microscope, when he was only 26. He was forced to leave Paris by the French Revolution, and returned to Britain. There he invented a process and dies for making gold chains, which was quite successful, and enabled him to buy a small estate in the village of Charlton, near Hitchin in Hertfordshire.

My problem with it is: Where does Anthony Bessemer's part in this paragraph end? You introduce the object of the sentence (Henry) and then talk about his father (Anthony) on and on and on, or so one would believe. Can we have some lucidity and clarity? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Linmhall (talk • contribs) 03:49, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] January 2008

Would somebody knowledgable check the edits made by certain unknown contributors. Chevin (talk) 10:21, 29 January 2008 (UTC)