Siemens

“ Siemens was able to produce a great variety of electrical instruments for measuring and other auxiliary purposes, all of which bear the name of his firm, and have proved exceedingly useful in a practical sense.
Among the most interesting of Siemens's investigations were his experiments on the influence of the electric light in promoting the growth of plants, carried out during the winter of 1880 in the greenhouses of Sherwood. These experiments showed that plants do not require a period of rest, but continue to grow if light and other necessaries are supplied to them. ”

“ Siemens had been trained as a mechanical engineer, and, although he became an eminent electrician in later life, his most important work at this early stage was non-electrical; indeed, the greatest achievement of his life was non-electrical, for we must regard the regenerative furnace as his MAGNUM OPUS. Though in 1847 he published a paper in Liebig's ANNALEN DER CHEMIE on the 'Mercaptan of Selenium,' his mind was busy with the new ideas upon the nature of heat which were promulgated by Carnot, Clayperon, Joule, Clausius, Mayer, Thomson, and Rankine. ”

“ The first five years of Siemens's stay in England were thus productive of small encouragement, and in 1849 he even discussed the idea of emigrating with Carl and Frederick to California, then in the first flush of the gold discoveries. The next invention about which the brothers busied themselves, though it contained within itself the germs of ultimate success, was no more profitable than its predecessors. The regenerative steam engine and condenser seem to have been mainly the invention of William Siemens, though the idea had previously been suggested by others. ”

“ The Physical-Technical Institute will always stand as a memorial to the man who preached in Germany the doctrine of the closest co-operation between abstract science and the industries. Germany adopted it first; the United States adopted it many years later. Helmholtz and Siemens always represented to me the highest symbol of this co-operation.
Bismarck and Moltke, Helmholtz and Siemens, were the great power which the young German eagle had discovered in his pinions; and he flew as he had never flown before, and his flight astonished me when I was a student in Berlin. ”

“ As a public man and a manufacturer of great resources his influence in assisting the introduction of the light has been immense. The number of Siemens machines and Siemens electric lamps, together with measuring instruments such as the Siemens electro-dynamometer, which has been supplied to different parts of the world by the firm of which he was the head, is very considerable, and probably exceeds that of any other manufacturer, at least in this country. ”

“ Though of high scientific interest, the apparatus appears to have failed at the time from its very sensitiveness; the waves on the surface of the sea having a greater disturbing action on its readings than the change of depth. Siemens took a great interest in this very original machine, and also devised a form applicable to the measurement of heights. Although he laid the subject aside for some years, he ultimately took it up again, in hopes of producing a practical apparatus which would be of immediate service in the cable expeditions of the s.s. Faraday. ”

“ The fervent heat of the Siemens furnace led the inventor to devise a novel means of measuring high temperatures, which illustrates the value of a broad scientific training to the inventor, and the happy manner in which William Siemens, above all others, turned his varied knowledge to account, and brought the facts and resources of one science to bear upon another. ”

“ Siemens, would be capable of transmitting a thousand horse-power to a distance of say thirty miles—an amount sufficient to give the light of a quarter million of candles, and suffice to illuminate a town of moderate size. Two eminent American investigators, Professors Houston and Thomson, of Philadelphia, having just made an investigation with the especial purpose of determining the practicability of transmitting the power of Niagara to great distances by means of electricity, go even further than Dr. Siemens. ”

“ In Berlin he had become acquainted with Werner Siemens, the eminent German discoverer and inventor in the electrical field, and head of the great firm of Siemens & Halske, and also with the parties managing and controlling the General Electricity Company of Berlin, which has since grown into the principal electrical manufacturing and contracting company in Germany. He proposed to them and to his syndicate, before his return to New York, that they should join with him and enter the electrical business in the United States by an alliance with existing American interests. ”

“ WITH Werner Siemens, says a German biographer, died a prince of science, a pathbreaker in the region of electro-technics, a man whose activity extended far beyond his own narrow district, bearing fruit in other branches of human achievement; one of the greatest industrial characters, not of Germany only, but of the whole world; an industrial character, however, to whom gain was never an object in itself, but who rather found in it the incentive to new scientific studies.
Ernst Werner Siemens was born at Lenthe, Hanover, December 13, 1816, and died in Berlin, December 6, 1893. ”

“ He accepted for the subjects of his Friday night discourses all sorts of topics—artificial stone, machinery for pen-making, lithography, Ruhmkorff’s induction coil, a process for silvering mirrors, and lighthouse illumination by electric light. His very last lecture was on Siemens’s gas-furnaces. He could be just as enthusiastic over the invention of another as over some discovery of his own. ”

“ In 1859 William Siemens became a naturalised Englishman, and from this time forward took an active part in the progress of English engineering and telegraphy. He devoted a great part of his time to electrical invention and research; and the number of telegraph apparatus of all sorts—telegraph cables, land lines, and their accessories—which have emanated from the Siemens Telegraph Works has been remarkable. The engineers of this firm have been pioneers of the electric telegraph in every quarter of the globe, both by land and sea. ”

“ As much as to his improvements in the electric telegraph, the practical applications of electricity owe to Siemens's invention of the dynamo-electric machine in the winter of 1866, which opened to them entirely new fields in the development of power and light. ”

“ Siemens may be truly said to have made peculiarly their own, viz., the electrical transmission and distribution of power; for I firmly believe that in the future, although not perhaps in the near future, the practical consequences of this will be such as are little dreamed of now; and this opinion is, I know, held by men far more competent to judge than I am. ”

“ While thus busy with the development and practical application of electrotechnics, as he called it, Siemens observed and participated in the advancement of other branches of science; and we find him now busy in investigating the geological structure of the earth; now engaged, with his brother Wilhelm, in researches concerning the cause of the sun's heat and the means by which it is maintained, or studying with his brother Friedrich new problems of heat ”

“ Siemens Brothers and Company was transacted. As chairman of these large undertakings, and principal inventor of the processes and systems carried out by them, he had a hundred things to attend to in connection with them, visitors to see, and inquiries to answer. In the afternoon and evenings he was generally engaged at council meetings of the learned societies, or directory meetings of the companies in which he was interested. He was a man who took little or no leisure, and though he never appeared to over-exert himself, few men could have withstood the strain so long. ”

“ The use of superheated steam, however, still proved a drawback, and the Siemens engine has not been extensively used.
On the other hand, the Siemens water-meter, which he introduced in 1851, has been very widely used, not only in this country, but abroad. It acts equally well under all variations of pressure, and with a constant or an intermittent supply. ”

“ It is worthy of remark that the last lecture by Faraday at this Institution was on the advantages of the Siemens furnace. Another of the inventions of this period was the water-metre, which, according to Sir William Thomson, "exactly met an important practical requirement, and has had a splendid thirty years' success." The adoption of England as his home by William Siemens was determined by the fact that he found the patent laws of that country more favorable to the inventor than those of his own land. ”

“ E. W. Siemens, a distinguished German engineer and electrician, died in Berlin, December 6, 1892. He was born at Leuthe, in Hanover, in 1816, taught in the Lubeck gymnasium, joined the Prussian artillery in 1837, and withdrew from the service of the Government in 1850 and devoted himself to scientific studies and private enterprises. ”

“ Dr. Werner Siemens also made a self-excited machine, having series fields, a paper on which was read before the Academy of Sciences in Berlin on January 17, 1867. This paper was forwarded to the Royal Society in London and presented at the same meeting at which Wheatstone’s dynamo was described. Wheatstone probably preceded Siemens in this re-discovery of the principle of self-excitation, but both are given the merit of it. However, S. A. Varley on December 24, 1866, obtained a provisional English patent on this, which was not published until July, 1867.
28
Gramme’s Dynamo, 1871. ”

“ His faith in gaseous fuel led him to anticipate that it would in time supersede solid coal for domestic and industrial purposes, cheap gas being supplied either from special works or direct from the pit; and among his last inventions was a house grate to burn gas along with coke, which he regarded as a possible cure for city smoke.
In electricity Siemens's name is closely associated with the growth of land and submarine telegraphs, the invention and development of the dynamo, and the application of electricity to lighting and to locomotion. ”

“ Two years later he continued his experiments at the works of Messrs. Fox, Henderson, and Co., of Smethwick, near Birmingham, who had taken the matter in hand. The use of superheated steam was, however, attended with many practical difficulties, and the invention was not entirely successful, but it embraced the elements of success; and the Society of Arts, in 1850, acknowledged the value of the principle, by awarding Mr. Siemens a gold medal for his regenerative condenser. ”

“ Ernst Werner von Siemens was at that time, next to Helmholtz, the most admired scientist in the German Empire. He was the head of a great electrical plant in the heart of Berlin, and was known everywhere to possess a splendid combination of talents in abstract science and engineering. Men of that type were quite rare in those days, and they are very rare even to-day. I heard a great deal about him in a course of lectures on electrical engineering which I attended at the Polytechnic School of Berlin. ”

“ Young Siemens appears to have been determined to push his way forward. In 1841 his brother Werner obtained a patent in Prussia for electro-silvering and gilding; and in 1843 Charles William came to England to try and introduce the process here. In his address on 'Science and Industry,' delivered before the Birmingham and Midland Institute in 1881, while the Paris Electrical Exhibition was running, Sir William gave a most interesting account of his experiences during that first visit to the country of his adoption. ”

“ Steel making by the open hearth process is chiefly due to the late Sir William Siemens. In a gas producer he gave his fuel the gaseous form, in which it is more easily controlled and more efficient than when solid. Of more importance were his regenerators, chambers of brickwork, heated by the products of combustion, and then employed to warm incoming currents of air and gas on their way to the furnace. The Siemens furnace has been modified in many ways and much improved in its details. ”

“ The machine commonly used in England is the dynamo-electric exploder of the Messrs. Siemens. This machine, which is the best of its kind yet introduced for blasting purposes, is not more than half the size of Bornhardt’s frictional exploder; but it greatly exceeds the latter in weight, that of Siemens’ being about 55 lb. The apparatus, which is contained within the casing shown in Fig. 39, consists of an ordinary Siemens’ armature, which is made, by turning the handle, to revolve between the poles of an electro-magnet. ”

“ The revolutionary movements of 1848 brought the extension of telegraphic enterprises to a temporary halt. The Siemens-Halske establishment, nevertheless, went on with its work, though it had no orders. In a short time Siemens was commissioned to lay submarine electric batteries in the harbor of Kiel for protection against an apprehended attack by Danish vessels. ”

“ It is no exaggeration to say that the life of such a man as Siemens is spent in the public service; the advantages which he reaps for himself being as nothing in comparison with those which he confers upon the community at large. ”