Alexandre Pourcel
Alexandre Pourcel (1841-1934)
1934 Obituary [1]
ALEXANDRE POURCEL, the doyen of French metallurgists, died at his home in Paris on March 15, 1934, at a very advanced age; he was born at Marseilles on February 24, 1841.
Having completed his studies at the Ecole Nationale des Mines, St. Etienne, he entered the service of the Compagnie des Fonderies et Forges de Terrenoire, La Voulte et Besseges, near St. Etienne, in 1866. He soon became the assistant and close friend of his chief, the late Mr. Valton, and together they introduced the direct Bessemer process at Terrenoire; in the following year (1868) they put down an open-hearth furnace plant.
In 1869, again in collaboration with Mr. Valton, Mr. Pourcel introduced, at the Terrenoire works, the Henderson carbon-lined open-hearth furnace for the manufacture of high-grade ferro-manganese, which until then had only been produced in the crucible. Mr. Pourcel was the first to use 80 per cent. ferro-manganese in the manufacture of mild Bessemer-steel ship plates, spiegel having been used prior to that for recarburisation in the converter, which material usually introduced too much carbon into the finished steel.
In 1874, Mr. Poured succeeded Mr. Valton as technical manager of the Terrenoii e Company; soon afterwards he turned his attention to the influence of silicon in the elimination of blow-holes, and it may be claimed on Mr. Pourcel's behalf that he was the first, in the late 'seventies, to succeed in producing sound steel castings of excellent quality. The commercial production of silicon or silico-manganese iron alloys was essential to the new process; Mr. Pourcel's discovery of a method of making them was a fortunate accident. With the object of increasing the manganese content in pig iron, he decreased the rate of descent of the burden in the blast-furnace, the coke charge remaining constant. The desired result was not attained; the resulting spiegel had lost its bright-facetted structure, and was fine-grained with numerous plates of graphite. Analysis revealed a silicon content of 10 to 12 per cent.— the material was in fact silico-spiegel.
From 1875 onwards the Terrenoire blast-furnaces produced regularly silico-spiegel containing 12 per cent. of silicon and 25 per cent. of manganese. Later, Mr. Poured manufactured, in the blast-furnace, manganese pig irons containing 25 per cent. of chromium and others containing 24 per cent. of tungsten; samples of these products aroused great interest at the Paris Exhibition in 1878. In the course of his attempts to produce chromium pigs, Mr. Poured found that the chromite blocks used were reduced only with great difficulty. This led him to employ similar refractory blocks for furnace linings. The Henderson carbon-lined reverberatory furnace suggested the use of carbon blocks for lining the hearth of a blast-furnace in which to make ferro-manganese. This method of making ferro-manganese was a serious undertaking for the period, and its success right from the commencement is a striking indication of Mr. Pourcel's technical knowledge and talent; it is, perhaps, in this connection that Mr. Pourcel's name will chiefly be remembered.
In 1875, he succeeded in making 65 per cent. ferro-manganese, and by 1878 the manganese content had been raised to 82 per cent. As a result the cost of this all- important material in steel manufacture was greatly reduced.
In 1879, he turned his attention to the basic open-hearth process, and in April of the following year the Terrenoire Company rolled its first basic open-hearth plates and sections.
In 1884, Mr. Pourcel severed his connection with the Terrenoire Company. He went to Spain to put down, in collaboration with the late Mr. E. Windsor Richards, a steelworks at Baracaldo, Bilbao, for the Sociedad de los Altos Hornos del Desierto; the plant comprised two blast-furnaces and three 12-ton Bessemer converters. In 1887, shortly after his return to France, he went to the Clarence Ironworks, Middlesbrough, at the invitation of the late Sir Lowthian Bell, to build a basic open-hearth furnace to treat Cleveland iron on a chrome-brick-lined hearth. Since 1891, and until recent years, Mr. Pourcel practised in Paris as a consulting metallurgist and engineer to a number of French and foreign companies, including the Soci6te de Commentry-Fourchambault et Decamville and the Terni Steel- works, Italy.
In 1892, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Societe des Ingenieurs Civils de France for his paper on ore processes. From that year till 1908 he was a member of the Comite d'Etudes attached to the Commission for the Testing of Constructional Materials appointed by the Minister of Public Works. In 1908, at its jubilee celebrations, the Societe de l'Industrie Minerale presented him with its gold "Medallle d'Honneur" for his services to metallurgical science. In 1909, he was elected an Honorary Member of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. Mr. Pourcel always took a great interest in the affairs of the Iron and Steel Institute. He became a member as long ago as 1879; in 1918 he was elected an Honorary Vice-President. His contributions to the proceedings of the Institute included papers dealing with the dephosphorisation of iron and steel (read in 1879), the manufacture of sound steel castings (1882), and the application of thermo-chemistry to metallurgical reactions (1889). In 1909 he was awarded the Bessemer Gold Medal in acknowledgment of his contributions to the advancement of the science and practice of iron and steel metallurgy.