

SKETCH OF SIR CHARLES WILLIAM SIEMENS. 551 



William went to England in 1843 to dispose of the invention. In his 

 lack of knowledge of the strange land, and his ignorance of our lan- 

 guage, he made his first visit to an undertaker, thinking that he must 

 be the proper person to take up, or " undertake," and push the new 

 application. A call upon Mr. Elkington, who then controlled the gild- 

 ing industry in England, was attended by a more satisfactory result, 

 and Siemens went home so well paid for his trouble that he came back 

 the next year with his chronometric regulator for steam-engines. This 

 invention was less successful, commercially, than the other had been, 

 but it made Siemens known to the engineering world, and it has been 

 applied to the regulation of the great transit instrument at the Green- 

 wich Observatory. The process of anastatic printing, another of the 

 earlier inventions of the brothers, was made the subject of a lecture 

 at the Royal Institution, by Faraday, in 1845. It is worthy of remark 

 that the last lecture by Faraday at this Institution was on the advan- 

 tages of the Siemens furnace. Another of the inventions of this pe- 

 riod 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 Will- 

 iam 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. 



Turning his attention to finding means for recovering the heat 

 which is allowed to go to waste in engineering and manufacturing 

 processes, William Siemens constructed a four horse -power steam- 

 engine with regenerative condensers, which he set up, in 1847, in the 

 factory of Mr. John Hicks at Bolton. This machine failed to become 

 commercially successful ; but Mr. Siemens, continuing his studies in 

 the same direction, and having become acquainted and impressed with 

 the dynamical theory of heat, read a paper before the Institution of 

 Civil Engineers in 1853, " On the Conversion of Heat into Mechanical 

 Effect," for which he obtained the Telford prize. In this paper he de- 

 fined a perfect engine as one in which all the heat applied to the elastic 

 medium is consumed in its expansion behind a working piston, leaving 

 no portion to be thrown into a condenser or into the atmosphere, and 

 advised that expansion should be carried to the utmost possible limit. 

 Two years afterward he exhibited two steam-engines, with regener- 

 ative condensers, at the Paris Exhibition. 



The greatest of the inventions with which the name of Siemens is 

 associated is that of the regenerative furnace for glass-making and 

 metallurgical operations, which he worked out in connection with his 

 brother Frederick, who was also his pupil. By its means the defects 

 of the discharge of the products of combustion at a very high tempera- 

 ture, and in an incompletely combined state, are remedied ; a nearer ap- 

 proach is made to saving and applying to the work all the heat which 

 the combustibles are capable of affording ; a very high temperature is 



