WILLIAM SIEMENS, F.R.S. 307 



the right. Upon the whole he considered it would be far better to 

 adopt the metre system in this country, in accordance with the 

 other nations who were already using it, than to decimalise a 

 separate unit which would never work afterwards in harmony with 

 the rest of the world. 



In the discussion of the Paper 



"ON THE MAINTENANCE AND RENEWAL OF 

 PERMANENT WAY," by R. PRICE WILLIAMS, 



MR. C. W. SIEMENS * said, it had been asked, what was to be 

 done with the Bessemer iron after it was worn out ? He replied, 

 melt it down, not in a blast furnace, but in a melting furnace, and 

 make cast steel of it He did not speak at hazard, for it was 

 actually done by means of his Regenerative Gas Furnaces. 

 M. Emile Martin was carrying out at Sireuil, in France, a process 

 of melting scrap steel, sometimes Bessemer metal, in an open re- 

 verberatory furnace, which had been built by Mr. Siemens as a 

 puddling furnace. This metal, when melted down, was used for 

 steel tires of railway wheels. 



With regard to the paper generally, it contained a mass of 

 valuable facts, which he thought would lead engineers to a 

 thorough knowledge of what they actually required, and that was 

 nearly as valuable knowledge as the mode of carrying the necessary 

 improvements into effect ; because the remedy for a mechanical 

 defect might, nowadays, be almost regarded as the necessary con- 

 sequence of its proved existence. His own interpretation of the 

 facts and experiments brought forward in the paper was, that 

 instead of using laminated metal, which might be regarded as a 

 bundle of iron wires soldered together by cinders, the metal used 

 for rails and tires should be homogeneous ; and that in order to 

 get it thoroughly homogeneous it ought to be cast. The Bessemer 



* Excerpt Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, VoL 

 XXV. Session 1865-1866, p. 378. 



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