WILLIAM SIEMENS, F.R.S. 423 



Such arbitration would, he believed, greatly benefit inventors as a 

 class. Speaking for himself, he had often been a great deal 

 pressed by intending licensees to grant them exclusive licenses, 

 and if not for the whole country, at any rate for a county, but he 

 had always set his face against it, because it would be sure to 

 bring him to a place to which he had an insuperable objection, 

 viz., the Law Courts. He had, therefore, always refused to grant 

 exclusive licenses, and if there were such a clause as that under 

 certain circumstances the inventor would be obliged to grant 

 licenses, he would have a capital answer to give to the would-be 

 monopolists. In conclusion, he would say that objections were 

 naturally raised against the provisions of the Bill by the several 

 interests he had alluded to ; but in discussing this question, he 

 would submit that it should be looked upon from the point of 

 view of making the law acceptable all round, and for the greatest 

 benefit to the public at large. 



"ON THE CONSERVATION OF SOLAR ENERGY," 

 By C. WILLIAM SIEMENS, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S., Mem. Inst. C.E.* 



THE question of the maintenance of Solar Energy is one that has 

 been looked upon with deep interest by astronomers and physicists 

 from the time of La Place downward. 



The amount of heat radiated from the sun has been approximately 

 computed, by the aid of the pyrheliometer of Pouillet and by the 

 actinometers of Herschel and others, at 18,000,000 of heat units 

 from every square foot of his surface per hour, or, put popularly, as 

 equal to the heat that would be produced by the perfect com- 

 bustion every thirty-six hours of a mass of coal of specific gravity 

 = 1*5 as great as that of our earth. 



If the sun were surrounded by a solid sphere of a radius equal to 

 the mean distance of the sun from the earth (95,000,000 of miles), 

 the whole of this prodigious amount of heat would be intercepted ; 



* Excerpt Proceedings of the Royal Society, Vol. XXXIII. 1882, pp. 389-398 



