The process differs essentially from the Bessemer process in the refractory lining of the converter. The latter, being made of dolomite fired with tar, is basic, whereas the Bessemer lining, made of packed sand, is acidic. Phosphorus, by migrating from iron to slag, allows both the production of a metal of satisfactory quality, and of phosphates sought after as fertilizer, known as "Thomas meal". The disadvantages of the basic process includes larger iron loss and more frequent relining.
After having favored the spectacular growth of the Lorraine iron and steel industry, the process progressively faded away in front of the Siemens-Martin open hearth, which also used the benefit of basic refractory lining, before disappearing in the mid-1960s: with the development of gas liquefaction, the use of pure oxygen became economically viable. Even if modern pure oxygen converters all operate with a basic medium, their performance and operation have little to do with their ancestor.
G. Reginald Bashforth, The manufacture of iron and steel, vol. 2: Steel production, London, Chapman & Hall Ltd, 1951, 461 p.
Thomas Turner (dir.), The metallurgy of iron: By Thomas Turner...: Being one of a series of treatises on metallurgy written by associates of the Royal school of mines, C. Griffin & company, limited, coll. "Griffin's metallurgical series", 1908, 3rd ed., 463 p. Шаблон:ISBN
Walter MacFarlane, The principles and practice of iron and steel manufacture, Longmans, Green, and Co, 1917, 5th ed.
R.W. Burnie, Memoir and letters of Sidney Gilchrist Thomas, Inventor, John Murray, 1891
William Tulloch Jeans, The Creators of the Age of Steel, 1884, 356 p. Шаблон:ISBN
Hermann Wedding (translated from German by: William B. Phillips, PH. D. & Ernst Prochaska), Wedding's basic Bessemer process ["Basische Bessemer - oder Thomas-Process"], New York Scientific Publishing Company, 1891, 224 p.
Jean Duflot, Encyclopædia Universalis, "Sidérurgie"
