Werner von Siemens

“ The Siemens electric railway is destined to rule in cities and tunnels. The Siemens electric crucible, melting three pounds of platinum in twenty minutes, was a wonder of the Paris Exposition, which might well have been called an exposition of Siemens apparatus and productions, so prominent were they there. It is a rare phenomenon when a whole family becomes so distinguished by eminent talent in a particular field of activity as the four Siemens brothers have been. They all seem to share their peculiar talent in a nearly equal degree, and to use it for a common purpose ”

“ All the Siemens brothers have shown much ability. Charles William was born at Lenthe, Hanover, in 1823, and has received high scientific honors. The world recognizes the valuable services that Dr. Siemens has rendered to the iron and steel trade by his important investigations and inventions.
Dr. Siemens, like Mr. Bessemer, labored to make iron and steel direct from the ores. By the invention of his regenerative gas furnace, which makes the high grade and uniform steel so desirable in the construction of ships, boilers, and all kinds of machines, Dr. Siemens has rendered signal service. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 1875, 1876 and 1877, he investigated the action of light on crystalline selenium, and in 1878 he studied the action of the telephone.
The recent work of Dr. Siemens has been to improve the pneumatic railway, railway signalling, electric lamps, dynamos, electro-plating and electric railways. The electric railway at Berlin in 1880, and Paris in 1881, was the beginning of electric locomotion, a subject of great importance and destined in all probability, to very wide extension in the immediate future. Dr. Siemens has received many honours from learned societies at home and abroad ”

“ For a man of his temperament science is always holding out new problems to solve and fresh promises of triumph. All he did only revealed more work to be done; and many a scheme lies buried in his grave.
Though Siemens was a man of varied powers, and occasionally gave himself to pure speculation in matters of science, his mind was essentially practical; and it was rather as an engineer than a discoverer that he was great. Inventions are associated with his name, not laws or new phenomena. Standing on the borderland between pure and applied science, his sympathies were yet with the latter ”

“ There have been very few more active and inquiring minds in this generation: the keenness and swiftness of his intellectual processes were even more surprising than the extent and variety of his scientific attainments. But such powers and such acquirements have, alas! been sometimes in unworthy alliance with jealous dispositions and a low moral tone. What will endear to us the memory of William Siemens is that he was, while so able and skilful, also so modest, so upright, so generous, and so totally free from all narrowness and paltriness of spirit. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By the electric transmission of power we may hope some day to utilize at a distance such natural sources of energy as the Falls of Niagara, and to work our cranes, lifts, and machinery of every description by means of sources of power arranged at convenient centers. To these applications the brothers Siemens have more recently added the propulsion of trains by currents passing through the rails, the fusion in considerable quantities of highly refractory substances, and the use of electric centers of light in horticulture as proposed by Werner and William Siemens. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He explained that he was led to undertake experiments with this end in view by the consideration that a good steam-engine converts 15 per cent. of the energy of coal into mechanical effect, while a good dynamo-machine is capable of converting 80 per cent. of the mechanical into electrical energy. If the latter could be expended without loss in an electric furnace, it would doubtless far exceed in economy any known air furnace.
Moreover Sir William Siemens may fairly be described as the creator of electro-horticulture. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
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Gramme’s Dynamo, 1871. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Of late years the German Government has laid a great network of underground lines between the various towns and fortresses of the empire; preferring them to overhead lines as being less liable to interruption from mischief, accident, hostile soldiers, or stress of weather. The first of such lines was, however, laid as long ago as 1848, by Werner Siemens, who, in the autumn of that year, deposited a subterranean cable between Berlin and Frankfort-on-the-Main. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am about to endeavor to set forth the life and work of Sir William Siemens, who was not only an ardent scientific discoverer, but one whose work for the last five or six years has interested the general public to a degree that has perhaps never before been the case with any man so devoted to science as he was. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As may be readily perceived, the Recollections cover a considerable variety of subjects, the presentation of which might have been made very dry and uninteresting. Siemens, in his artless way of telling of them, makes them all as interesting as the story of his first heroic act—his discomfiture of the gander that threatened and frightened his sister. The facts are among the most important landmarks of the scientific advance of the times; the presentation of them gains immeasurably in value by being made attractive. ”

“ Imbued with the idea of regeneration, and seeking in nature for that thrift of power which he, as an inventor, had always aimed at, Siemens suggested a hypothesis on which the sun conserves its heat by a circulation of its fuel in space. The elements dissociated in the intense heat of the glowing orb rush into the cooler regions of space, and recombine to stream again towards the sun, where the self-same process is renewed. ”

“ Some charges of steel were produced; but here again the roof of the furnace melted down, and the company which had undertaken the trials gave them up. The temperature required for the manufacture of the steel was higher than the melting point of most fire-bricks. Further endeavours also led to disappointments; but in the end the inventor was successful. He erected experimental works at Birmingham, and gradually matured his process until it was so far advanced that it could be trusted to the hands of others. Siemens used a mixture of cast-steel and iron ore to make the steel ”

“ The regenerative furnace is the greatest single invention of Charles William Siemens. Owing to the large demand for steel for engineering operations, both at home and abroad, it proved exceedingly remunerative. Extensive works for the application of the process were erected at Landore, where Siemens prosecuted his experiments on the subject with unfailing ardour, and, among other things, succeeded in making a basic brick for the lining of his furnaces which withstood the intense heat fairly well. ”

“ In the engine itself further means were adopted for economising heat, but in spite of all the labour and ingenuity expended upon it during a space of twelve years (it was patented in 1847 and not finally abandoned until 1859) , it never realised the hopes of its inventor. That the merits of the invention were recognised is shown by the fact that a leading firm of Birmingham engineers, Messrs. Fox & Henderson, paid Siemens a considerable sum for a share in the patent, and also engaged his services at a salary which provided him with a sufficient means of livelihood. ”

“ In January 1850, a paper on telegraph lines and apparatus, in which the theory of the electro-static charge in insulated wires, as well as methods and formula: for the localising of faults in underground wires were first established. In 1851, the firm erected the first automatic fire telegraphs in Berlin, and in the same year, Werner Siemens wrote a treatise on the experience gained with the underground lines of the Prussian telegraph system. ”

“ 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. ”