Bill Jones (steelmaking)
industrialist of Welsh parents (1839 - 1889)
William Richard Jones (1839 – September 29, 1889) was an American steelmaking inventor and manager highly valued by his last employer, Andrew Carnegie.
Early life
Jones was born in Luzerne, Pennsylvania, in 1839. His family had come from a mining area in Wales and immigrated to America for a better life nine years before his birth. Bill Jones was one of eleven children. His mother died when he was only eight. He attended public school in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, but was expelled for sticking up for a classmate, causing controversy with a teacher. Due to the ill health of his father, Reverend John Jones, he began working at the age of ten in 1849, beginning an apprenticeship at the Lehigh Crane Iron Works, under David Thomas who was a friend of his father's in Wales. During this time, he was learning the skills which would help him become a leading figure in the industry years later. When Bill was fourteen, his father succumbed to his illness. Jones was then in the care of his stepmother, who was left with ten children.
“Bill Jones (steelmaking)” enters the record as industrialist of Welsh parents (1839 - 1889). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bill, Jones and steelmaking can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60760756. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1839, 1889 and 1849.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Jones (steelmaking)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.