256 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



by 1882 to pay for the American civil war, the Franco-Prussian war, the Austro- 

 Prussian war and the Italo-Franco-Austrian war of 1859. The inventor had been 

 made a knight of the Order of Francis Joseph, he has been given the Grand 

 Cross of the Legion of Honor, but the British Government declined to permit 

 him to accept it. Out of the enormous benefits of his invention there has come 

 to the inventor a fortune for himself. When his patent expired in 1870 he had 

 been paid in royalties ^1,057,748. Added to this, his Sheffield works divided 

 in profits during their fourteen years' existence fifty-seven times the original cap- 

 ital, and the works sold for twenty-four times the original capital. In 1879 Bes- 

 semer was knighted by the Queen ; honors were showered upon him. His ser- 

 vices to humanity were recognized at home and abroad. All of the great cities 

 of Europe conferred their freedom upon him, and, what caused the utmost pleas- 

 ure to the inventor, a town in Indiana whose chief industry was based upon his 

 invention was named for him, assuring him the only immortality that he desires 

 —the constant record of his memory among the men for whom he worked. 



Sir William Siemens. — Next to Sir Henry Bessemer among the creators 

 of the age of steel stands Sir Charles William Siemens, who was the philosopher 

 of the new era as Bessemer was the inventor. After becoming a thorough stu- 

 dent in electricity, Siemens' first exploit which attracted general attention was the 

 invention with his brother of the system of anastatic printing, a process by which 

 any old or new printed matter could be reproduced. This was rather a success (T 

 estime, than a money-making discovery, although it brought the young inventors, 

 into European notoriety. The method consists in applying caustic baryta to a 

 page of printed matter, changing the ink to a non soluble soap, and then apply, 

 ing sulphuric acid to precipitate the stearine. The paper was then pressed into 

 a slab of zinc, making an intaglio from which copies could be easily taken. 



Siemens next perfected a method for greatly increasing the heating power of 

 furnaces by compressed air, the results being of immense practical value to the 

 trade. The very high temperature which he was thus able to gain, at a small 

 cost of fuel, naturally was applied to the working of steel. His method is called 

 the "open hearth process." In this process the charge consists of pig iron, 

 which is placed on the bottom and around the sides of the furnace. Melting 

 requires four or five hours, then the pure ore is charged cold into a bath in quan- 

 tities of four and five hundred weight. Violent ebulition ensues, and when this 

 ceases more ore is put in, the object being to keep the boiling uniform. Spie- 

 geleisen or ferro-manganese is added and the charge is cast. The result is steel. 

 Siemens' first improvement was a rotating furnace, in which coal and iron are 

 put together, and mixed and heated so thoroughly that the result is all that could 

 be desired. So thorough is the process that the hitherto irreducible iron-sands 

 of New Zealand and Canada can be worked to a great profit. 



Coming into direct competition with the Bessemer product the open-hearth 

 steel has held its own, its consumption in the United Kingdom rising from 77,500 

 tons in 1873, to 436,000 in 1882. The Lindore-Siemens Company rolls the 

 armor-plate for the British Admiralty, and the steel has been found to be even 



