VI 



observed that amongst the very many licences which have been 

 granted by the patentee, several of them have comprised hundreds of 

 furnaces for various purposes. The total production of Siemens mild 

 steel was over 340,000 tons in 1881 for Great Britain alone, while the 

 Siemens furnaces in use here are approximately only one-third of 

 those already set up in America and on the Continent. 



The great things done by Siemens with gas produced in the manner 

 referred to above, first in the gas glass furnace, described with glowing 

 admiration by Faraday on Friday evening, June 20, 1862, in his last 

 Royal Institution lecture, and more recently in connexion with the 

 great and exceedingly valuable invention just referred to, the Siemens 

 process for making steel, by using the oxygen of iron ore to burn out 

 part of the carbon from cast iron, and still more recently in the 

 heating of the retorts for the production of ordinary lighting gas, by 

 which a large increase has been obtained in the yield of gas per ton 

 of coal used, are achieved results which live after the inventor has 

 gone, and which, it is to be hoped, will give encouragement to push 

 farther and farther on in practical realisation of the benefits to the 

 world from the legacy of his great inventions. 



For his contributions in this department, towards the better appli- 

 cation of science to the methods and processes of practice, William 

 Siemens received many rewards and honours. 



He received prize medals at the Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, and 

 a Grand Prix at the French Exhibition of 1867 for his regenera- 

 tive gas furnace and steel processes. In 1874 he was presented with 

 the " Royal Albert Medal," and in 1875 with the "Bessemer Medal" 

 on account of his scientific researches and his inventions relating to 

 heat and metallurgy, whilst only last week the Council of the Insti- 

 tution of Civil Engineers awarded him the Howard Quinquennial 

 Prize for the advances he had made in the manufacture of iron and 

 steel. 



William Siemens has designated electricity " the youngest form of 

 energy with which we are practically acquainted," and there is no 

 doubt that to himself is due, in considerable degree, the great progress 

 which has within recent years been made in its practical adaptation to 

 various purposes. 



It was in the early days of submarine telegraphy that Siemens 

 entered the field of electric engineering, when the possibilities of 

 ocean telegraphy were just coming into view, and it was therefore to 

 this particular adaptation of electricity that he first applied himself. 

 He took part in several of the early expeditions for cable laying in the 

 Mediterranean and the Black Sea, acquiring there the practical 

 experience, which helped him, in after years, in the arrangement ami 

 equipment of so many successful expeditions for a like purpose. 



In 1858 the extensive telegraph works at Woolwich, now known as 





