SKETCH OF WERNER VON SIEMENS. 837 



burg to Helsingfors. Then the Crimean War came on, and the 

 firm was kept busy with the special lines demanded for its prose- 

 cution. 



After two failures by an English firm in trying to lay a 

 telegraphic cable between the island of Sardinia and Bona in 

 Algeria, the third attempt was successfully carried out in Sep- 

 tember, 1857, with material furnished by Herr Siemens's house 

 and in a method prescribed by him. This was the first of the 

 deep-sea cables, or of those which were laid in water more than 

 one thousand fathoms deep, and was followed by the laying of 

 many longer lines, in most of which enterprises Herr Siemens 

 had a part. In 1859 he was shipwrecked on the Alma in the Red 

 Sea ; in 1863 he came very near losing his life while trying, with 

 his brother Wilhelm, to lay the cable between Oran and Carta- 

 gena. The brothers laid the line from Malta to Alexandria, 

 and, with the steamer Faraday, built especially for the purpose, 

 they laid six transatlantic lines. In its attempts to maintain 

 telegraphic communication with India the British Government 

 had found its lines through the Mediterranean Sea, Asia Minor, 

 and Persia too liable to interruption to be depended upon. To 

 take the lines through safer regions they would have to be car- 

 ried partly through Russian territory. Herr Siemens was applied 

 to, and he, through the good will he had won by his constructions 

 for the Russian Government, secured a concession from it for 

 building a line through Kiev, Odessa, Kertch, and the Black Sea 

 to Suchum Kale. The business of this line led him several times 

 into the country of the Caucasus, concerning which and the pre- 

 historic copper mines at Kedabeg and the German colony at An- 

 nenfeld in the same region he gives, in his Reminiscences, some 

 very pleasant accounts. 



As much as to his improvements in the electric telegraph, the 

 practical applications of electricity owe to Siemens's invention of 

 the dynamo-electric machine in the winter of 1866, which opened 

 to them entirely new fields in the development of power and light. 

 In claiming the credit due to himself in this field, he does not for- 

 get to acknowledge what he owes to the predecessors who laid the 

 foundations on which he built. 



While thus busy with the development and practical applica- 

 tion of electrotechnics, as he called it, Siemens observed and par- 

 ticipated in the advancement of other branches of science ; and 

 we find him now busy in investigating the geological structure of 

 the earth ; now engaged, with his brother "Wilhelm, in researches 

 concerning the cause of the sun's heat and the means by which it 

 is maintained, or studying with his brother Friedrich new prob- 

 lems of heat; now plunged in the most abstruse problems of 

 meteorology ; now sharply criticising the bacillus theories of Dr. 



