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. Of him it may be said, without
fear of contradiction, that he has, beyond all his contemporaries,
promoted the practical application of scientific discovery to
industrial purposes. It has also been said by one who had the privilege
of his friendship, that “no one could know him without feeling how
lovely his character was. Wonderful as were the qualities of his mind,
they were equalled by the nobleness of his heart.”
These two sentences, then, will serve to indicate my purpose. In
telling, with necessary brevity, the story of the life of Sir
William Siemens, I shall try to keep in view the fact that even his
great powers, without his large heart, would never have produced
the impression which he did upon the national mind. Hence, after I
have given a sketch of some of the more important discoveries of
the inventor, and their consequences to the national life, I shall,
with the help of materials most kindly and liberally placed at my
disposal by his family, try to show what manner of man he was, and
what impression he made upon those who had the very great advantage of
personal communion with him.
Charles William Siemens was born at Lenthe in Hanover on April 4,
1823, and was one among many of a family eminent for their scientific
knowledge and practical skill. The possession of such unusual talents
by a whole family is rarer, perhaps, in the intellectual life of
England than in that of Germany; at any rate, in the absence of
definite statistics such as those compiled with so much care by Mr.
Francis Galton, the general impression is that such is the case. It
is not difficult to discern in the scientific career of the Brothers
Siemens some prominent characteristics of their race; and in the
life of Sir William, the sympathy of the German mind for general
principles, and the tenacity with which it clings to them, are well
illustrated, and stand out in strongly-marked contrast to the usual
indifference of the average English mind to theoretic conclusions, as
opposed to so-called practical ones. It would be well-nigh impossible
to find among Englishmen one instance in which an inventor has been so
confident of the possible utility of a few grand general principles,
that he has worked out from them several great inventions; and that
he felt himself justified in this confidence after years of hard work
is evidenced by his own saying that “the farther we advance, the more
thoroughly do we approach the indications of pure science in our
practical results.”
William Siemens received his early educational training at Lübeck, and
in the course of it the stimulus afforded to excellence of workmanship
by the German guild system made an early and lasting impression upon
his mind, for he repeatedly referred to it in after life. From Lübeck
he went to the Polytechnical School at Magdeburg, where he studied
physical science with apparatus of the most primitive kind, and under
great disadvantages, as compared with the facilities of our modern
laboratories. After this he studied at Göttingen University, where,
under Wöhler and Himly, he first got that insight into chemical laws
which laid the foundation of his metallurgical knowledge, and here
began to develop in him that wonderful thirst for discovery, which
abundant success never quenched. Here, also, occurred what he has
himself described as “the determining incident of his life.” Mr.
Elkington, of Birmingham, utilising the discoveries of Davy, Faraday,
and Jacobi, had devised the first practical application of that form
of energy which we now call the electric current, and in 1842 he
established a practical process of electro-plating. In the following
year, as the result of his own and his brother Werner’s work, William
Siemens presented himself before Mr. Elkington with an improvement
in his process, which was adopted. This is the first on the list of
inventions on the diagram behind me. Speaking of his first landing in
London he says:
“I expected to find some office in which inventions were examined, and
rewarded if found meritorious; but no one could direct me to such a
place. In walking along Finsbury Pavement, I saw written up in large
letters so-and-so (I forget the name) ‘undertaker,’ and the thought
struck me that this must be the place I was in quest of. At any rate
I thought that a person advertising himself as an undertaker would
not refuse to look into my invention, with a view of obtaining for me
the sought-for recognition or reward. On entering the place I soon
convinced myself, however, that I had come decidedly too soon for the
kind of enterprise there contemplated, and finding myself confronted
with the proprietor of the establishment, I covered my retreat by what
he must have thought a very inadequate excuse.”
Returning to Germany, he became a pupil in the engine works of Count
Stolberg, to study mechanical engineering. While there he worked out
a great improvement upon Watt’s centrifugal governor for regulating
the supply of steam to an engine, and in 1844 he returned to England
with his invention, and soon decided to stay here. His object in doing
so was to enjoy the security which the English patent law afforded
to inventors, for in his own country there were then no such laws.
This chronometric governor, though not very successful commercially,
introduced him to the engineering world; it was originally intended
for steam engines, but its chief application has been to regulate the
movement of the great transit instrument at Greenwich. Then followed
in quick succession several minor inventions which met with varying
practical success, such as the process of anastatic printing, which was
made the subject of a Royal Institution lecture in 1845 by Faraday; a
water meter, which has since been in general use; an air pump, &c., &c.
About this time the researches of Joule, Carnot, and Mayer upon
the relations between heat and mechanical work were attracting much
attention among scientific men, and at the age of twenty-three, William
Siemens adopted the hypothesis now known as the dynamical theory of
heat. More than once I have drawn attention to the exact numerical
relation between units of heat and units of work established by Joule,
viz., that 772 foot-pounds of work is required to generate heat enough
to raise the temperature of 1 lb. of water 1° Fah., and I have pointed
out here and elsewhere that this was the first well-authenticated
example of that grandest of modern generalisations, the doctrine of the
Conservation of Energy, the truth of which is constantly receiving new
illustrations.
With a mind thoroughly pervaded by this important principle, Siemens
applied himself to the study of steam and caloric engines, and saw at
once that there was an enormous difference between the theoretical
and the actual power gained from the heat developed by the combustion
of a given quantity of coal, and hence that there was a very large
margin for improvement. He at once determined to try to utilise some
of this wasted heat, and he conceived the idea (to which I invite your
particular attention) of making a regenerator, or an accumulator, which
should retain or store a limited quantity of heat, and be capable of
yielding it up again when required for the performance of any work.
In the factory of Mr. John Hicks, of Bolton, he first constructed an
engine on this plan; the saving in fuel was great, but it was attended
by mechanical difficulties which at that time he was unable to solve.
The Society of Arts, however, recognised the value of the principle
by awarding him a gold medal in 1850. Three years afterwards, his
paper “On the Conversion of Heat into Mechanical Effect,” before the
Institution of Civil Engineers, gained him the Telford premium (awarded
only once in five years) and the medal of the Institution. In 1856 he
gave a lecture upon his engine at the Royal Institution, considered as
the result of ten years’ experimental work, and as the first practical
application of the mechanical theory of heat; he then indicated the
economic considerations which encouraged him to persevere in his
experiments, pointing out that the total national expenditure for
steam-coal alone amounted to eight millions sterling per year, of which
at least two-thirds might be saved!
His efforts to improve the steam-engine, however, were speedily
followed by a still more important application of the mechanical
theory of heat to industrial purposes. In 1857 his younger brother,
and then pupil, Frederick (who, since the death of Sir William, has
undertaken the sole charge of the development of this branch of his
elder brother’s work), suggested to him the employment of regenerators
for the purpose of saving some of the heat wasted in metallurgical
operations, and for four years he labored to attain this result,
constructing several different forms of furnace. His chief practical
difficulties arose from the use of solid fuel—coal or coke—but when,
in 1859, he hit upon the plan of converting the solid fuel into
gaseous, which he did by the aid of his gas-producer, he found that
the results obtained with his regenerators exceeded his most sanguine
expectations. In 1861 the first practical regenerative gas furnace
was erected at the glass works of Messrs. Chance Bros. in Manchester,
and it was found to be very economical in its results. Early in 1862
the attention of Faraday was drawn to this matter, and on June 20 of
the same year, that prince of experimentalists appeared before the
Royal Institution audience for the last time to explain the wonderful
simplicity, economy, and power of the Siemens regenerative gas furnace.
Age and experience have not diminished the high estimation in which it
is held; after nearly twenty years of continuous working and extended
application, Sir Henry Bessemer described it in 1880 as an “invention
which was at once the most philosophic in principle, the most powerful
in action, and the most economic, of all the contrivances for producing
heat by the combustion of coal.”
The furnace consists essentially of three parts; (1) the gas producer,
which converts the solid coal into gaseous fuel; (2) the regenerators,
usually four in number, which are filled with fire-brick piled in
such a way as to break up into many parts a current of air or gas
passing through them; (3) the furnace proper, where the combustion
is actually accomplished. In using the furnace, the gaseous fuel and
air are conducted through one pair of regenerators to the combustion
chamber; the heated gases from this, on their way to the chimney, pass
through the other pair of regenerators, heating them in their passage.
In the course of, say, one hour, the currents are reversed, so that
the comparatively cold gas and air pass over these heated regenerators
before entering the furnace, and rob them of their heat. While this is
going on, the first pair of regenerators is being heated again, and
thus, by working them in alternate pairs, nearly all the heat, which
would otherwise have escaped unused into the chimney, is utilised.
By this process of accumulation the highest possible temperature (only
limited by the point at which its materials begin to melt), can be
obtained in the furnace chamber, without an intensified draft, and with
inferior fuel.
It has been found that this furnace is capable of making a ton of
crucible steel with _one-sixth_ of the fuel required without it, and
that while the temperature of the furnace chamber exceeded 4,000°
Fahrenheit, the waste products of combustion escaped into the chimney
at 240° Fahrenheit, or very little above the temperature at which water
boils in the open air.
At the locomotive works of the London and North Western Railway at
Crewe, where these furnaces have long been used, it was formerly the
practice to lock a piece of pitch pine into the flue leading to the
chimney, and if at the end of the week the wood was charred, it was
evidence that more heat had been wasted than ought to have been, and
the men in charge of the furnace were fined.
This all-important national question, the waste of fuel, which in
modern phraseology may be truly called the waste of energy, was
constantly before the mind of Sir William Siemens, who lost no
opportunity, in his public utterances, of impressing his hearers, and
that still wider circle which he reached through the medium of the
press, with a sense of the weighty consequences which it involved.
In an address at Liverpool in 1872, as President of the Institution
of Mechanical Engineers, he estimated the total coal consumption of
this country at one hundred and twenty million tons, which at 10s.
per ton amounted to sixty millions sterling. He strongly asserted
that one-half of this might be saved by the general adoption of
improved appliances which were within the range of actual knowledge;
and he went on to speak of outside speculations, which would lead to
the expectation of accomplishing these ends with one-eighth or even
one-tenth of the actual expenditure. In 1873 he delivered a famous
lecture on Fuel to the operative classes at Bradford, on behalf of
the British Association, in which he illustrated how fuel should
be used by three examples, typical of the three great branches of
consumption: _a_, the production of steam power; _b_, the domestic
hearth; _c_, the metallurgical furnace. In connection with the last
point he mentioned that the Sheffield pot steel-melting furnace only
utilised _one-seventieth_ part of the theoretical heat developed in the
combustion, and contrasted with it his own furnace for melting steel.
In discussing the question of the duration of our coal supply, he
indicated what should be our national aim in the following suggestive
and inspiring passage:
“In working through the statistical returns of the progressive increase
of population, of steam power employed, and of production of iron and
steel, &c., I find that our necessities increase at a rate of not less
than 8 per cent. per annum, whereas our coal consumption increases only
at the rate of 4 per cent., showing that the balance of 4 per cent. is
met by what may be called our ‘intellectual progress.’ Now, considering
the enormous margin for improvement before us, I contend that we should
not be satisfied with this rate of intellectual progress, involving as
it does an annual deficit of four million tons to be met by increased
coal production, but that we should bring our intellectual progress up
to the rate of our industrial progress, by which means we should make
the coal production nearly a constant quantity for several generations
to come.”
One of the direct results of this lecture, which was read and warmly
commended by some of the most eminent men of the time, was that Dr.
Siemens was consulted by Mr. Mundella in reference to parliamentary
action by the Board of Trade in regard to the coal question.
In 1874 he received the Albert Gold Medal from the Society of Arts
“for his researches in connection with the laws of heat, and for
services rendered by him in the economisation of fuel in its various
applications to manufactures and the arts,” and in 1877 he devoted
nearly the whole of his address to the Iron and Steel Institute, of
which he was then President, to the same subject, in which, as regards
the probable duration of our coal supply, he had been for some time
engaged in a controversy with the late Professor Jevons, maintaining
that “the ratio of increase of population and output of manufactured
goods would be nearly balanced for many years to come by the further
introduction of economical processes, and that our annual production
would remain substantially the same within that period, which would
probably be a period of comparatively cheap coal.”
One of the most important applications of the regenerative furnace has
been to the manufacture of steel, and he soon perceived that it was
necessary for himself to solve the various difficulties which others
regarded as practically insuperable. “Having,” he says, “been so often
disappointed by the indifference of manufacturers and the antagonism of
their workmen, I determined in 1865 to erect experimental or ‘sample
steel works’ of my own at Birmingham, for the purpose of maturing the
details of these processes, before inviting manufacturers to adopt
them.” The success of experiments in 1867-68, in making steel rails,
brought about the formation of the Landore Siemens Steel Co., whose
works were opened in 1874. When Dr. Siemens was knighted, the employés
of this company embodied their congratulations in an address, and had
prepared for him a very beautiful model of a steel furnace in ivory
and silver; the presentation of these was prevented by his premature
death, but the address stated that “the quantity of steel made here to
the end of last year on your process was upwards of 400,000 tons!” In
the ten years ending in 1882, the annual production of open-hearth
steel in the United Kingdom increased from 77,500 tons to 436,000 tons.
During an action in the Superior Courts of the United States, it was
stated that the inventor had received a million dollars in royalties,
the annual saving in that country by his process being 3¾ millions
of dollars! These statements refer mainly, I believe, to the conversion
of cast or wrought iron into steel, either by the “direct” process of
acting on pig-iron with iron ore in an open hearth, or by the “scrap
process” (Siemens-Martin) of melting wrought-iron and steel scrap in a
bath of pig-metal. Both of these require the preliminary treatment of
the blast furnace, and in speaking of them in 1873, Dr. Siemens said
that “however satisfactory these results might appear, I have never
considered them in the light of final achievements. On the contrary, I
have always looked upon the direct conversion of iron and steel from
the ore, without the intervention of blast furnaces and the refinery,
as the great object to be attained.” How far he succeeded in this may
be gathered from the fact that in a paper read on April 29, 1883,
before the Iron and Steel Institute, on the “Manufacture of Iron and
Steel by the Direct Process,” he showed how to produce 15 cwt. of
wrought iron direct from the ore in three hours, with a consumption
of 25 cwt. of coal per ton of metal, which is one-half the quantity
previously required for the production of a ton of pig-iron only, in
the blast furnace! The long and costly experiments which ended in the
realisation of his views extended over twenty-five years; and it is
worthy of note that he told the Parliamentary Committee on Patents that
he would not have continued them if the English patent law had not
insured such a period of protection as would repay him for his labor.
Great, however, as the economic results of the gas-producer have been,
its inventor looked forward to still more remarkable applications
of it. In 1882 he told the British Association, in his presidential
address, that he thought “the time is not far distant when both
rich and poor will largely resort to gas as the most convenient, the
cleanest, and the cheapest of heating agents, and when raw coal will
be seen only at the colliery or the gas-works. In all cases where the
town to be supplied is within, say, thirty miles of the colliery,
the gas-works may with advantage be planted at the mouth, or, still
better, at the bottom of the pit, whereby all haulage of fuel would be
avoided, and the gas, in its ascent from the bottom of the colliery,
would acquire an onward pressure sufficient probably to impel it to its
destination. The possibility of transporting combustible gas through
pipes for such a distance has been proved at Pittsburg, where natural
gas from the oil district is used in large quantities.” It may be
well to point out here that as a step towards this, it was a favorite
project of his—practically carried out in some places—to divide the
gaseous products of the ordinary distillation of coal into two, the
middle portions being illuminating gas of 18 to 20 candle power instead
of 16, and the first and last portions, which under this system may
be largely increased, being heating gas; such gas he expected to see
sold at 1_s._ per 1,000 cubic feet. The obvious and only practicable
objection to the plan is the necessity for doubling all the mains
and service-pipes. That we shall eventually burn gaseous fuel on the
domestic hearth, as we have lately learnt to do on the metallurgical,
I have not the smallest doubt; it is a mere question of the time
necessary for the education of the public mind upon the question; the
apter the pupil, the more speedy will be the desired result. Let it be
thoroughly understood by every one that the soot which hangs in a pall
over London in a single day is _equivalent to at least fifty tons of
coal_, and then there will be no difficulty in seeing that the true and
the only remedy for our London fogs, with all their attendant ills,
is—gaseous fuel. May we not hope that, though Sir William Siemens has
gone from among us, the great movement for smoke abatement, in which he
so earnestly labored during the last three years of his life, may have
full effect?
If I have dwelt thus long upon this particular branch of my subject, it
is because I know of no other which so well illustrates two points in
Sir William Siemens’ character which I have alluded to at the outset:
his unwavering devotion to general principles and their consequences,
and his ardent desire to promote the practical welfare of mankind.
There is, however, as the late Professor Rolleston remarked to him,
no subject which more impresses the minds even of persons who are
laymen as regards science, than the history of Telegraphy (and I may
perhaps be permitted to add, of Electrical Engineering generally), now
so inseparably connected with his name. The University of Göttingen,
at which he studied, was the cradle, if not the birthplace, of the
electric telegraph in 1833. Shortly after, Sir Charles Wheatstone
in England, and Mr. Morse in the United States, were simultaneously
working at the same problem, and each claimed the honor of having
solved it.
The telegraph, however, was still in a very undeveloped state when the
Brothers Siemens began to study it, and their series of inventions,
especially for long-distance telegraphy, largely aided in bringing
it to its present condition. One of their first was the Relay, an
electro-magnet so delicate that it will move with the weakest current.
By the use of five of Siemens’ polarised relays, a message can be sent
by the Indo-European Telegraph from London to Teherán, a distance of
3,800 miles, without any retransmission by hand, and during the Shah of
Persia’s visit in 1873, Dr. Siemens arranged for messages to be thus
regularly despatched from a room in Buckingham Palace. In 1858, Messrs.
Siemens Brothers established near London the well-known telegraph
works, and the construction by them in 1868 and following years of
the Indo-European Telegraph—the overland double line to India through
Prussia, Southern Russia, and Persia—was the first great undertaking
of the kind. Writing of it in August, 1882, during the first Egyptian
campaign, Dr. Siemens said, “At the present time our communication with
India, Australia, and the Cape depends, notwithstanding the nominal
existence of the line through Turkey, on the Indo-European Telegraph.”
The Messrs. Siemens were also pioneers in submarine telegraphy, the
first cable covered with gutta-percha having been laid across the
Rhine by Dr. Werner Siemens in 1847. The invention of the machine for
coating the conducting wire with the insulating material, gutta-percha,
or india rubber, is entirely due to Dr. William Siemens, who also
subsequently designed the steamship _Faraday_ for the special work of
laying and repairing submarine cables. This unique vessel was launched
on Feb. 16, 1874, and when she was completed, Dr. Siemens invited
all his scientific friends to inspect her, and challenged them to
suggest any improvements in her arrangements. She was first used in
laying the Direct United States Cable, which is above 3,000 miles in
length. In this connection I may perhaps be permitted to relate a very
characteristic anecdote. When Dr. Siemens took a contract for a cable,
the electrical tests of which were specified, it was his invariable
habit to give out to the works a considerably higher test, which every
section of the cable had to pass, or be rejected _in toto_. In the case
of this cable, probably during manipulation on board ship, a minute
piece of wire penetrated the insulating material, bringing down the
electrical test to a point below the “works” test, but still decidedly
above the contract test. The discovery was not made until so late
that to cut out the faulty piece involved a delay of some days in the
middle of the Atlantic, but Dr. Siemens insisted upon its being done;
after this, stormy weather came on, and the cable had to be cut and
buoyed, while the _Faraday_ had to winter on the American side, and
resume operations next spring. The money loss involved amounted, I am
told, to more than £30,000. Perhaps the most remarkable of the later
feats was the fulfilment of a contract with the Compagnie Française
du Telegraphe de Paris à New York, who ordered a cable 3,000 miles
long from the Messrs. Siemens in March, 1879, and it was handed over
to them in perfect working order in September of the same year! There
are now nearly 90,000 miles of submarine cable at work, costing about
£32,000,000, and a fleet of thirty-two ships are employed in laying,
watching, and repairing these cables, of which there are now eleven
across the Atlantic alone.
In connection with the subject of telegraphy, and as an instance of the
versatility of Dr. Siemens’s inventive powers, I may point out that in
1876 he brought out the pneumatic postal telegraph tube, by which, as
is pretty generally known, written messages are blown or sucked through
tubes on various metropolitan routes, instead of being transmitted
electrically. About the same time, also, he constructed his ingenious
bathometer, for ascertaining the depth of the sea at any given point,
without the tedious operation of sounding; and some years previously
he worked out his electrical thermometer or pyrometer, enabling the
observer to read the temperature (whenever he desired) at any distant
and inaccessible point, such as the top of a mountain, the bottom of
the sea, the air between the layers of a cable, or the interior of a
furnace.
Probably the most prominent idea associated in the public mind with
the name of Siemens is that of electric lighting, and perhaps electric
tram and railroads. As I have more than once pointed out in this
room, the dynamo-machine, by which mechanical energy is converted
into that form of energy known as electricity (which may be used both
for lighting and for the transmission of power), is derived from a
principle discovered by Faraday in 1831. Sir William Siemens’ devotion
to this, and the important practical consequences which he deduced from
it, constitute another example of that mental characteristic to which
I have already alluded. Faraday’s discovery, briefly described, was
that when a bar magnet was suddenly inserted into a coil of wire, or
when a wire was suddenly moved through a magnetic field, a momentary
current of electricity was developed in the wire. Although this
current is exceedingly small and brief, it is capable of unlimited
multiplication by mechanical arrangements of a simple kind. One means
for accomplishing this multiplication was the Siemens armature of 1857,
which consisted, at first, of a piece of iron with wire wound round
it longitudinally, not transversely, the whole to be rotated between
the poles of a powerful magnet; in its present form it is one of the
most powerful and perfect things of its kind, and the evolution of the
Siemens armature, as we now have it, from the rudimentary type of a
quarter of a century ago, has been characterised by Sir W. Thomson
as one of the most beautiful products of inventive genius, and more
like the growth of a flower than to almost anything else in the way of
mechanism made by man.
Ten years afterwards came his classical paper “On the Conversion
of Dynamical into Electrical Force, without the use of permanent
Magnetism,” which was read before the Royal Society on February 14,
1867. Strangely enough, the discovery of the same principle was
enunciated at the same meeting by Sir Charles Wheatstone, while there
is yet a third claimant in the person of Mr. Cromwell Varley, who had
previously applied for a patent in which the idea was embodied. It can
never be quite certain, therefore, who was the first discoverer of the
principle upon which modern dynamo-machines are constructed. I need
not describe here the way in which this principle is carried out in
all dynamo-machines. Suffice it to say that they differ from Faraday’s
magneto-electric machines in having electro-magnets in the place of
permanent steel magnets, and that these electro-magnets are, if I may
be allowed the expression, self-excited by the play of mutual give and
take between the armature and the magnet.
It was the invention of the dynamo-machine which made practicable
the application of electricity to industrial purposes. Experiments
have shown that it is capable of transforming into electrical work
90 per cent. of the mechanical energy employed as motive power. Its
practical application is still in its infancy. In 1785 Watt completed
his “improvements” in the steam-engine, and the century which has since
elapsed has not sufficed to demonstrate the full extent of its utility.
What may we not expect in the next hundred years from the extension of
the dynamo-machine to practical purposes?
In the development of appliances for the production of the electric
light Sir William Siemens took a leading part, and, as is well known,
his firm has been _facile princeps_ at all the important electrical
exhibitions. But while ever zealous to promote its progress, he never
took a partisan view of its utility, candidly admitting that gas must
continue to be the poor man’s friend. In 1882 he told the Society
of Arts that “Electricity must win the day _as the light of luxury_,
but gas will find an ever-increasing application for the more humble
purposes of diffusing light.”
In the hands of Dr. Siemens the enormous energy displayed in the
Electric Arc was applied to other purposes than mere lighting. In
June, 1880, he greatly astonished the Society of Telegraph Engineers
by exhibiting the power of an electrical furnace designed by him to
melt considerable quantities of such exceedingly refractory metals
as platinum, iridium, &c. 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. Some experiments which he made early in 1880
led him to the conclusion that the electric light could influence the
production of coloring matter in leaves, and promote the ripening of
fruit at all seasons of the year, and at all hours of the day and
night. In the following winter he put these conclusions to the test
of experience on a large scale at his country house, Sherwood, near
Tunbridge Wells, and the results obtained were communicated to the
British Association at York in 1881, in a paper, the value of which was
recognised by its receiving the rare distinction of being printed in
full in the annual report.
Some photographs, which he kindly allowed me to take, represent the
difference between three kinds of corn grown under ordinary conditions,
and the same corn, under the same conditions, with the added stimulus
of the electric light from sunset to sunrise. He came to the conclusion
that, although periodic darkness evidently favors growth in the sense
of elongating the stalks of plants, the _continuous_ stimulus of light
was favorable to a healthy development at a greatly accelerated pace,
through all the stages of the annual life of the plant, from the early
leaf to the ripened fruit.
I have left until the last any notice of a field of work which the
Messrs. 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.
In March, 1877, Dr. Siemens startled the world, in his address to
the Iron and Steel Institute, by his proposal to transmit to distant
points some of the energy of the Falls of Niagara. As I have before
explained in this room, the electrical transmission of energy depends
upon the fact that a dynamo-machine may be used either to convert
mechanical into electrical energy, _or to effect the reverse change_.
Hence to transmit power in this way, two dynamo-machines, connected by
a metallic conducting rod, or cable, are necessary; the first, at the
water-fall or other source of power, produces the electrical energy,
which, in its turn, is reconverted into mechanical power by the second
dynamo at the other end of the line. In his own grounds at Tunbridge
Wells he made numerous experiments in this subject, distributing the
power from a central steam-engine over various parts of his farm,
there to perform different functions. The most interesting practical
examples, as yet, are to be seen in the electric railroads erected
and worked by Siemens Brothers in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, &c., and in
the Electric Tramroad at Portrush. The special interest of this line
lies in the fact that it was the first real application to railroads
of “waste energy,” inasmuch as the cars are propelled by the power of
a water-fall eight miles off! The last occasion on which I had the
privilege of meeting Sir William Siemens was when, honored by his
invitation, I was present at the opening of this line in September
28, 1883. On that occasion, which, half-a-century hence, will be as
memorable as the opening of the Stockton and Darlington railroad,
the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland recognised the fact that this was an
entirely new departure in the development of the resources of Ireland,
and Sir William Siemens, in a most characteristic speech, admitted
that, had he known the difficulties before him, he should have thought
twice before he said “Yes” to Dr. Traill’s question as to whether the
proposed line could be worked electrically, but that, having said
“Yes,” he was determined to carry out the project. As illustrating
the character of the man, I may here quote the saying common in his
workshops, that as soon as any particular problem had been given up
by everybody as a bad job, it had only to be taken to Dr. Siemens for
him to suggest half-a-dozen ways of solving it, two of which would
be complicated and impracticable, two difficult, and two perfectly
satisfactory.
His extraordinary mental activity is shown in the fact that between
1845 and 1883 no less than 133 patents were granted in England to the
Messrs. Siemens, 1846 and 1851 being the only years in which none
were taken out. During the same period he contributed as many as 128
papers on scientific subjects to various journals, only three years
in this case also being without such evidences of work, and in 1882
the number of these papers reached seventeen, the average being about
seven patents and original scientific papers per year for more than the
third of a century, a truly wonderful record of untiring industry. To
show the impression his work made upon the world, I quote the following
passage from the many which appeared in the newspapers at the time of
his death. It is headed: