.S7A' WILLIAM SIEMENS, F.R.S. 249 



flirt ricity to tlic propulsion of railways and the transmission of 

 power, of which the propulsion of carriages was only one branch. 

 ul other methods by which propulsion could be effected might 

 be mentioned. Only a few days ago he had been in Paris, and had 

 airranged for the construction of a short line of comparatively 

 broad gauge, which was to be carried out by the omnibus company 

 <>f Paris, in connection with the Electrical Exhibition. An ordi- 

 nary tram-car would be run from the Place de la Concorde to the 

 Exhibition, upon rails laid in the usual manner, having a sus- 

 pended conductor along the side of the railway. This conductor 

 would have a little carriage passing along it, in order to transmit 

 the electric current from the suspended wire to the machine, and 

 back through the rails themselves. That arrangement, which was 

 <le vised by Dr. "Werner Siemens, made them independent of partial 

 insulation of the rails upon which the carriage ran, and also inde- 

 pendent of the partial insulation of the wheels of one side from the 

 other, leaving the rolling stock very much the same as at present, 

 transferring the current to a separate conductor, something analo- 

 gous to a single wire telegraph, upon which the contact roller ran 

 and conveyed the current to the machine. Another arrangement 

 by which an ordinary omnibus might be run upon the street would 

 be to have a suspender thrown at intervals from one side of the 

 street to the other, and two wires hanging from these suspenders ; 

 allowing contact-rollers to run on these two wires, the current 

 could be conveyed to the tram-car, and back again to the dynamo 

 machine at the station, without the necessity of running upon 

 rails at all. He merely mentioned this to show that the system 

 was not one which must be carried out in one particular way only, 

 but was capable of very wide modification and extension according 

 to circumstances. The paper referred to certain applications 

 which he had made of electricity, near Tunbridge Wells, to horti- 

 culture, and on the table was a melon which had been produced 

 by the aid of the electric light. He hoped the Chairman would 

 take it home, and report upon it next week. 



In the, adjourned discussion of the above Paper, 



DR. SIEMENS, F.R.S., said Mr. Preece, with his well-known 

 ability, had just shown that the power to be obtained from the 



