144 ELECTRIC WELDING. 



Society, 1855 ; LL.D. of Trinity College, Dublin, 1857, in 

 which year he was also elected on the Council of the Royal 

 Society ; Hon. Member of the Inst of Engineers and Ship 

 Builders of Scotland, 1S59; and of the Philosophical 

 Societies of Glasgow and Basle, i860; also D.C.L. of 

 Oxford in the same year. 



In 1855 Joule also invented the now well-known process 

 of welding metals by means of the electric current, and 

 succeeded in proving its practicability early in 1856, the first 

 experiment being made M in the Laboratory of Professor 

 Thomson, in Glasgow." a More recently," he says, in the 

 paper read to this Society, March 4th, 1856, " I have made 

 several experiments in which the wires were placed in 

 glass tubes, surrounded with charcoal, &c. With a battery 

 of six Daniell's cells I have then succeeded in fusing several 

 steel wires into one, uniting steel with brass, platinum 

 with iron, &c. I have no doubt the process would 

 advantageously supersede that of soldering, &c.'' He then 

 proceeds to determine the consumption of zinc in a Daniell's 

 battery required for the process, and finds it to be as low as- 

 three-quarters of a pound of zinc to fuse one pound of iron. 



In the summer of 1855, at the kindly instance of Sir 

 William Thomson, Joule resumed his experimental work on 

 electro-magnets, with the immediate object of ascertaining 

 whether the results obtained by Jacobi and Lenz, as to the 

 relations between the magnetism developed, the dimensions 

 of the iron, the coil of wire, and the current, were not, with 

 the apparently discordant results which Joule had previously- 

 found, particular cases of the general law which had been 

 suggested by Sir William Thomson. 



In 1856 they again resumed their experiments on the 

 thermal effects of fluids in motion — this time directed to 



