Anthony Bessemer

Anthony Bessemer (1766 or after 1840

Early life Born in 1766 at No. 6 Old Broad Street in London, As an engineer his work included draining machinery and microscope manufacture. With the upheaval of the French Revolution he returned to London.

Career

Bessemer acted as a punchcutter, 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 his clients on the continent included the firm of Firmin Didot, and he also sold a font to the Enschedé foundry in 1795. Caslon testified that "at present there are only four or five persons in England who can execute diamond [4pt] type". (Bessemer is mentioned in Hansard's Typographia using this spelling, but the cutting of a diamond-size font for Caslon is credited to a Mr Bessimer, who is listed separately in the index.) Reed (1887) concluded that this was a misprint and that the two were likely one and the same. Caslon explicitly credited the cutting of his diamond type to Bessemer.

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. 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