NATURE 



\Nov. 29, 1885 



completing the circuits with the diftcrent portions of wire 

 laid over one another, and bent to one side or the other, 

 to avoid passing through the space occupied by the bear- 

 ing shaft. The principle of electro-magnetic augmenta- 

 tion and maintenance of a current without the aid of 

 steel or other permanent magnets, invented by Werner 

 Siemens, and also independently by Wheatstone and S. A. 

 Varley,\vas communicited to the Royal Society by William 

 Siemens on February 14, 1867, in his celebrated paper " On 

 the conversion of dynamical into electric force without the 

 aid of permanent magnets." This paper is peculiarly 

 interesting, as being the first scientific enunciation of that 

 wonderful electro-magnetic principle, on which are founded 

 the dynamo-electric machines of the present day. Soon 

 after came the Paccinotti-Gramme ring, from which 

 followed naturally the suggestion of the mode of connec- 

 tion between the coils of a multiple-coil Siemens arma- 

 ture, described in the Siemens-.'Mteneck patent of 1873, 

 and made the foundation of the Siemens dynamo as we 

 now have it, whether as given from the Siemens firm, or 

 with the modifications of details and proportions, valuable 

 for many practical purposes, which have been contributed 

 by Edison and Hopkinson. The evolution of the Siemens 

 armature, as we now have it, in this splendid machine, 

 from the rudimentary type which the writer saw a quarter 

 of a century ago, is one of the most beautiful products of 

 inventive genius, and is more like to the growth of 

 a flower than to almost anything else in the way of 

 mechanism made by man. 



Space prevents us from more than mentioning the 

 ■works of William Siemens and his brothers, Werner and 

 Carl, in land and sea telegraphic engineering, and their 

 great achievements in Atlantic cable-laving. "X^^^ Faraday 

 bore particularly the impressof William Sieanens's practical 

 genius. It is remarkable that a ship capable of doing what 

 no other ship afloat fan do in the way of manoeuvre, as has 

 been proved by her success in the difficult and delicate 

 operations of laying and lifting cables in depths of 2500 

 fathoms, and of cable repairing in all seasons and all 

 weathers, should have been the work of a landsman, born 

 in the middle of Europe, who early made himself a sailor 

 in cable-laying e.xpeditions in the Mediterranean and the 

 Black Sea, but whose life has been chiefly devoted to land 

 engineering and science. 



On the 19th of this November the writer of the present 

 article was accosted in a manner of which most persons 

 occupied with science have not infrequent experience : — 

 " Can you scientific people not save us from those black 

 and yellow city fogs?" The instant answer was— " Sir 

 WiUiam Siemens is going to do it ; and I hope if we live 

 a few years longer we shall have seen almost the last of 

 them." How little we thought that we were that very 

 evening to lose the valuable life from which we were 

 promising ourselves such great benefits. May we not 

 hope that, after all, the promise was not vain, and that, 

 although Sir William Siemens is gone from among us, 

 the gi-eat movement for smoke abatement, in which he 

 has so earnestly laboured during the last three years of 

 his life, may have full effect. 



Just nine days previously, the writer had received a 

 letter from Sir William Siemens, saying nothing of ill- 

 ness, but full of plans for the immediate future : chiefly 

 an address to the Society of Arts, and the realisation at 



Sherwood of hii method for the smokeless supply of heat 

 to a steam boiler, by the combustion of hydrogen, 

 carburetted hydrogen, and carbonic oxide, obtained from 

 the conversion into these gases of the whole combustible 

 material of the coal, together with some hydrogen and 

 oxygen from water, and oxygen from air, in his gas-pro- 

 ducing kiln. " The producer will be in full operational 

 Sherwood by that time " were almost the last words re- 

 ceived by the writer from his friend, kindly inviting him 

 to come and see the new method in operation at the end 

 of the present month. A short time before, in travelling 

 home from Vienna, where they had been associated in 

 the British Commission for the Electrical Exhibition, 

 Sir William Siemens had told the writer that without 

 waiting for a perfected gas-engine to use the products of 

 CO nbustion as direct motive agent, and so give the very 

 highest attainable economy, he expected by using the 

 gas from his producer as fuel for the fire of a steam- 

 boiler, even on a corhparatively small scale, like that of 

 his appliances at Sherwood for electric lighting and the 

 electric transmission of power, to be able to obtain better 

 economy of coal for motive power than by burning the 

 coal directly in the usual manner in a furnace under the 

 boiler. And further, what is specially interesting to 

 persons planning isolated installations for electric light, 

 he believed that the labour of tending the producer and 

 boiler and steam-engine would be on the whole consider- 

 ably less than that which is required on the ordinary 

 plan, with its incessant stoking of coal into the 

 furnace under the boiler, as long as steam is to 

 be kept up. There is something inexpressibly sad, 

 even in respect to a comparatively small matter like 

 this, to see the active prosecution of an experiment so full 

 of interest and so near to a practical solution, suddenl)- 

 cut short by death. But the great things done by Sie- 

 mens 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 

 connection with another great and exceedingly valuable 

 invention, 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. 



A most interesting article on the life and work of Sir 

 William Siemens in the Times of November 21 concludes 

 with the following words, in which we fully sympathise : — 

 "Those who knew him may mourn the kindly heart, the 

 generous noble nature, so tolerant of imperfect know- 

 ledge, so impatient only at charlatanism and dishonesty ; 

 the nation at large has lost a faithful servant, chief among 

 those who live only to better the life of their fellow-men 

 by subduing the forces of nature to their use. Looking 

 back along the line of England's scientific worthies, there 

 are few who have served the people better than this her 

 adopted son, few, if any, whose life's record will show so 

 long a list of useful labours." 



