552 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



attained, and steel is produced on the open hearth. Having matured 

 his process at his experimental works in Birmingham, he laid the foun- 

 dations of an industry which has attained a very great development 

 in England, and lies at the base of extensive factories all over the 

 world. The application of the principle of the regenerative furnace 

 has been extended to numerous industrial purposes in which great heat 

 is required ; for the powers of the furnace are limited in practice only 

 by the nature of the materials of which it is constructed. For the kind 

 of services exemplified in this invention the Society of Arts awarded 

 to Dr. Siemens, in 1874, its Albert medal " for his researches in con- 

 nection with the laws of heat, and the practical applications of them to 

 furnaces used in the arts, and for his improvements in the manufac- 

 ture of iron, and generally for the services rendered by him in connec- 

 tion with economization of fuel in its various applications to manu- 

 factures and the arts." Only a week before his death, the Council of 

 the Institution of Civil Engineers awarded him the Howard quinquen- 

 nial prize, which had been previously awarded only to Sir Henry Bes- 

 semer for a similar meritorious service. 



Sir William Siemens and his brother Werner have co-operated in 

 electrical invention, beginning with the Siemens armature, which they 

 introduced about twenty-five years ago. The brothers, with Mr. Halske, 

 of Berlin, established the Siemens telegraph-works in London, whence 

 the most important telegraph and cable lines in the world have been 

 supplied, and where valuable improvements have originated. The 

 house has constructed four transatlantic cables — the Indo-European 

 line, the North China Cable, the Platino-Brazilian Cable, and others. 

 The want of a suitable vessel had been a serious difficulty in laying 

 the long cables across the Atlantic, and Dr. Siemens had the Fara- 

 day constructed, with novel features that made it admirably adapted 

 for its work. In 1860, while experimenting with the Malta and Alex- 

 andria Cable, he devised a pyrometer for measuring temperature 

 through the amount of resistance developed in conductors by increas- 

 ing heat. In 1867 he read before the Royal Society a paper on the 

 conversion of dynamical into chemical force, at the same meeting at 

 which Sir Charles Wheatstone announced his simultaneous discovery 

 of the same principle, while Mr. Cromwell Varley had applied for a 

 patent embodying the idea. Subsequently the Siemens dynamo was 

 developed. We next find Dr. Siemens's name associated with the elec- 

 tric light, electric railways, and the electrical transmission of power. A 

 fine illustration of the latter application is given by the Portrush and 

 Bushmills Railway in the north of Ireland, opened last September, 

 where passengers are carried on a line six and a half miles long of 

 steep gradients and sharp curves " at a good ten miles an hour," solely 

 by the water-power of the river Bush, applied through turbines to a 

 dynamo at a distance of seven miles. At his own residence, near Tun- 

 bridge Wells, "not only did electricity perform a large part of the 



